Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  The president’s ill-judged comments had lit a fire that would soon consume the state of Arizona. Prominent figures began calling for a boycott of the entire state in retaliation for having exercised our constitutional and God-given rights to defend life, liberty, and property. Believe it or not, one of the first to call for a boycott was one of our own congressmen. Even before the bill was signed, Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva went on Keith Olbermann’s show and called on private businesses to hold their conventions elsewhere. It was a move he would come to regret.

  The union for Major League Baseball players was another of the first to jump on the bandwagon. A statement issued by the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) on April 30 reflected all the disinformation and propaganda about the law that was being spread by its critics. The statement expressed concern about the law’s effect on foreign-born athletes playing on Arizona teams. Any international player, it read, “must be ready to prove, at any time, his identity and the legality of his being in Arizona to any state or local official with suspicion of his immigration status. This law also may affect players who are U.S. citizens but are suspected by law enforcement of being of foreign descent.” It was the same old inaccurate tune: Racial profiling would somehow inevitably be the result of a law that explicitly banned racial profiling. Why? Because Arizona law enforcement could not be trusted to carry it out fairly. This baseless and insulting allegation was rarely stated but was plainly the hidden subtext of the debate.

  The MLBPA’s statement led directly to an attempt by liberals to move the All-Star Game from Arizona. Mike Lupica, a renowned sports columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote that if SB 1070 was allowed to go into effect, “Major League Baseball ought to announce that a sport in which 30% of the players are Hispanic will not hold the 2011 All-Star Game at Chase Field in Phoenix.” Mike Freeman, a columnist for CBSSports.com, suggested that under the new law the following scenario could take place: “It’s 2011 and the All-Star Game is just a few days away in Arizona. Albert Pujols decides to take a stroll in downtown Phoenix. A police officer drives by and doesn’t realize that Pujols is a baseball icon. To the officer, he looks potentially like an illegal alien. He is, after all, brown skinned. Pujols is stopped by the police. ‘Papers please,’ the officer says. If Pujols somehow forgot to bring proof he’s an American citizen on his walk, then potentially off to jail he’d go.” This guy had clearly seen too many movies in which menacing Gestapo agents demand to see a terrified refugee’s papers. What’s more, it was the president’s own doing, the thrust of his own arguments, channeled through the mouths of sportswriters all over the country.

  Professional basketball, too, cranked up the liberal propaganda machine. And what made it even worse was that my favorite basketball team, the Phoenix Suns, hastened to jump on the bandwagon. Managing partner Robert Sarver decided the team would wear their “Los Suns” jerseys on Cinco de Mayo for Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinals as a gesture of solidarity with Arizona’s Hispanic population, which was purportedly under attack. General Manager Steve Kerr even played the Hitler card, saying, “It’s hard to imagine in this country that we have to produce papers. It brings up images of Nazi Germany.” The media loved this stunt and broadcast images of the defiant players in their Los Suns jerseys far and wide.

  What they didn’t report was that the jerseys had been created as part of the NBA’s “Noche Latina” marketing campaign, aimed at attracting more Latino fans. The team had worn the jerseys back in March, before anyone outside of Arizona had ever heard of SB 1070. So when Sarver and Kerr saw the opportunity to strike a fashionable political pose and promote their marketing campaign, they passed it off as a bold stand on moral principle. Some two-fer!

  A few weeks later, the boycott movement gained more steam when the Los Angeles City Council, which can’t even handle issues in L.A., voted 13–1 to boycott Arizona businesses. I appreciated Councilman Greig Smith’s lone “no” vote. But many council members used the opportunity to pander to their Hispanic constituents, who they assumed would be strongly opposed to the enforcement of our borders. “An immigrant city, an international city, [Los Angeles] needs to have its voice heard,” intoned Councilman Ed Reyes. “It is crucial this great city take a stand.” San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco joined Los Angeles in voting for boycott resolutions or condemning the law.

  When I heard about the L.A. council vote, I couldn’t help but be slightly bemused. “I find it really interesting that we have people out there that are attempting a boycott in favor of illegal actions in Arizona,” I told the press. “That to me is just unbelievable.” Meanwhile, Al Sharpton showed up right on schedule—always eager to find a camera and microphone willing to follow him around. “The Civil War is over,” Sharpton said. “Let’s not start it again with states’ rights.”

  This is another of the left’s favorite ploys, along with the race and Hitler cards. Because southern segregationists invoked states’ rights to resist desegregration, the left has claimed ever since that any appeal to the principle of federalism is code for racism. Linking SB 1070 with slavery and segregation in this way wasn’t just insulting, it was disgusting.

  Some people may have canceled their vacation plans in Arizona as a result of this campaign. (Jerry Brown initially made some noises about doing so, but after his election as California governor, he came to Arizona anyway.) In the end, the state wasn’t greatly affected by the movement. Moreover, it never did seem to dawn on the boycott’s supporters that the people who would be most hurt by it were precisely the less well off, Spanish-speaking Arizonans they were allegedly trying to help.

  Based on some often-repeated stories of convention cancellations, the mainstream media and liberals continue to push the idea that SB 1070 has devastated Arizona tourism. While there was some impact on the convention side of tourism, annual visitations to Arizona were up by an estimated 4.5 percent from 2009 to 2010. And the boycott didn’t only work one way. People began traveling to Arizona just to show their support.

  People who are unfamiliar with the Arizona desert tend to think of it as something out of Lawrence of Arabia: hot and lifeless. In fact, there’s a lot of life in the desert. And the temperature can swing wildly, falling from over 100 degrees in the daytime to the 50s at night. The desert is an unpredictable place.

  So is Arizona politics, as President Obama soon found out.

  It began at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, that see-and-be-seen Washington social event that attracts self-important Hollywood celebrities to a rubber-chicken dinner with journalists and politicos. On May 1, President Obama spoke at the event, which is traditionally supposed to be a laughfest, with some self-effacing humor and good-natured political banter. That’s the idea anyway. But about halfway through his speech, the president turned his shtick into an attack on Arizona. “Unfortunately,” he said to the chuckling crowd, “John McCain couldn’t make it. Recently he claimed that he had never identified himself as a maverick. And we all know what happens in Arizona when you don’t have ID.” He paused and added, his voice dripping with scorn, “Adios, amigos!”

  I don’t know about people in the rest of the country, but Arizonans found the president’s joke offensive and not funny. He and the rest of the Washington crowd didn’t seem to take illegal immigration seriously—except when they were fishing for votes. We thought they should know that we didn’t appreciate this lame attempt at humor. So we made a YouTube video to put his comments in their proper context.

  To a background of ominous music, the video recites the grim facts of illegal immigration in Arizona: organized criminal drug gangs, rampant kidnappings, prosecutors unable to keep up with a crushing load of drug cases. Funny stuff!

  “So what does President Obama have to say about Arizona doing the job Washington won’t?” the video asks. It then cuts to President Obama’s joke at the Correspondents’ Dinner, with liberal champion Alec Baldwin grinn
ing ear to ear in the audience. “President Obama,” it concludes, “broken borders are not a laughing matter.”

  The final frame: “No one in Arizona is laughing. Do your job and secure the border.”

  The video was a real morale booster. More than a million people have viewed it—thousands in the first days alone. It was at that point, as I recall, that we felt the tide begin to turn. Slowly, bit by bit, truth and reason staged a comeback against the organized disinformation campaign that had been waged against SB 1070.

  Another positive sign was the backlash that had built against the Los Suns basketball jersey stunt. The mainstream media loved the story, but the fans didn’t. Many were outraged that the team would take such a political stand, and they let the owners know on talk radio and online. A group of season ticket holders made their own statement by showing up at a game sporting T-shirts that read VIVA LOS 1070. They were told by the management that they had to turn their shirts inside out. When they refused, security guards tried to throw them out of the arena. But they were able to return to their seats after appealing to the Suns’ security director. The shirts became so popular that one of the original guys told me he had to spend all of his time shipping them out to meet the demand. He sent me one.

  Then, on May 13, baseball commissioner Bud Selig did the right thing by ignoring the calls for a boycott. He met with team owners and purposefully steered clear of the issue. Instead he focused on baseball’s efforts to reach out to minorities. “We’re a social institution,” Selig averred. “We’ve done everything we should do. It’s our responsibility. We’re privileged to do it. And we’ll continue to do it. That’s the issue and that’s the answer.” If he had still owned the Milwaukee Brewers, they would have become my second-favorite team on the spot.

  Hearts and minds were being changed—if they had ever really believed the lies they were told to begin with. But the real game changer came from an unlikely source: the Obama administration.

  Someone once said that what’s called a gaffe in Washington is really just a politician inadvertently telling the truth. Attorney General Eric Holder had been bad-mouthing SB 1070 from the beginning. In a high-profile appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on May 9, Holder pronounced that SB 1070 “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling” and said that the Justice Department was thinking of filing a lawsuit. Then, just four days later, came the attorney general’s moment of inadvertent truth. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Holder admitted that he hadn’t even read the bill he’d been bashing for almost a month. Here’s how the truth came out in Holder’s remarkable exchange with Congressman Ted Poe of Texas:

  Representative Poe: So Arizona, since the federal government totally fails to secure the border, desperately then passed laws to protect its own people. The law is supported by 70 percent of the people in Arizona, 60 percent of all Americans, and 50 percent of all Hispanics, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll done just this week. And I understand that you may file a lawsuit against the law. Seems to me the administration ought to be enforcing border security and immigration laws and not challenge them, and that the administration is on the wrong side of the American people. Have you read the Arizona law?

  Attorney General Holder: I have not had a chance to; I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.

  Poe: It’s ten pages. It’s a lot shorter than the health-care bill, which was 2,000 pages long. I’ll give you my copy of it if you would like to have a copy. Even though you haven’t read the law, do you have an opinion as to whether it’s constitutional?

  Holder: I have not really, I have not been briefed yet.

  That hadn’t stopped him from roundly condemning it, though.

  In the attorney general’s defense, he did say later in the hearing that he was basing his opinion of SB 1070 on “things I’ve been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts” and “obviously, looking at television.” Given the amount of disinformation that had been “reported” about the law in the mainstream media, it’s perhaps understandable that the attorney general formed the opinion he did. I just think the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should consult something other than The Rachel Maddow Show before pronouncing judgment on a statute duly passed by the elected representatives of the people of Arizona. Maybe I’m being picky.

  But that wasn’t all. It was about to get worse for the Obama administration.

  A few days later, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley, after equating the Arizona law with the tyranny of the Communist Chinese, admitted on national television that he hadn’t read the bill, either.

  Then, just a few days after that, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano admitted that even she hadn’t read the bill—even though she had until quite recently been governor of the state of Arizona. She had called the bill “misguided” virtually hours after it was passed. But when she was questioned by a congressional committee, she had to admit, “I have not reviewed it in detail. I certainly know of it,” she added lamely, trying to get herself off the hook. Then she stated, “That’s not the kind of law I would have signed. . . . It’s a bad law enforcement law.”

  Watching it all from Phoenix, where the Capitol was still under siege, I was dumbfounded. Here were the two most important law enforcement officials in the country and the spokesperson for the State Department, all criticizing the law in public forums while admitting that they had not bothered to read it!

  Despite the grief and aggravation all of this caused for us, Paul Benz, from my very creative campaign staff, found a way to somehow make us all laugh. He shot an ad featuring a Kermit-like frog puppet conducting a sing-along for kids. Over a bouncy sound track, he sings: “Reading is really super swell. Reading’s great so let’s all shout out loud! Reading helps you know what you’re talking about. Let’s see what these folks have to say about reading.” Then the video cuts to Holder, Crowley, and Napolitano, all admitting that they hadn’t read the law.

  “Kermit” looks flummoxed. “Seriously?” he says, before walking offstage in disgust. It’s an amazingly lighthearted take on the tragedy of the Obama White House’s response to the immigration crisis. It’s well worth Googling “Arizona Sing-a-Long.”

  The ad made us laugh, but we had to laugh to keep from crying. We had a raging brush fire in Arizona—one that was starting to leap across state lines and ignite the entire country—and instead of trying to contain and put it out, our leaders in Washington were throwing gas on it.

  “A nation without borders is like a house without walls,” I said solemnly. “It collapses. And that is what is going to happen to our wonderful America. And we can start the turnaround here in Arizona. That’s what we intend to do. We are not going to stop. Mr. President and Secretary Napolitano, it is your responsibility to secure our borders, and I plead with you and I ask you respectfully: Do your job.”

  I was on Fox News again with Greta, giving my pitch for what felt like the millionth time. The president and his administration weren’t hearing me. But the American public was. My state, our law, and I personally had been subject to an incredible onslaught of criticism and vicious attacks. Individuals who, for whatever reason, didn’t know or care how my state was suffering from unrestricted illegal immigration or how the crisis was spreading elsewhere had attacked us with fervor, but Americans still stood with me. A Fox News poll taken after the law was passed found that 61 percent of American voters thought that Arizona had been right to take action rather than wait for the federal government. What’s more, 64 percent of people believed that the Obama administration should wait and see how the law worked rather than take action to stop it before it was implemented.

  President Obama could read polls too, and he clearly didn’t like what he was seeing. He never called me. We never talked. But we soon found out—on the radio, just like everybody else—that he was deploying 1,200 more National Guard troops to the border to protect us against the
Mexican cartels. He was also asking Congress to okay $500 million for more border protection and law enforcement. I gave credit where credit was due. “My signing of Senate Bill 1070 has clearly ignited the talk of action in Washington for the people of Arizona and other border states,” I said in a statement. “I am pleased that President Obama has now, apparently, agreed that our nation must secure the border to address rampant border violence and illegal immigration without other preconditions, such as passage of ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ ”

  I then asked President Obama to do more. “Success will be determined by facts on the ground, not by the size of unfulfilled promises of rhetorical flurries. I am anxious to hear of the details that have not yet been disclosed of where, how, and for how long additional forces will be deployed.” Words were great, I was saying, but now it was time for action, and this action just wasn’t enough. The 1,200 additional guardsmen were less than half of what we needed. The month before President Obama’s announcement, Senators Kyl and McCain had asked for 3,000 more National Guard troops.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I was glad that the president was at least making a gesture toward stronger enforcement. But our needs were much greater than that, and a token gesture of this kind wouldn’t really begin to address them. Not only that, but President Obama had several times now singled out a state law—our law, a law I had signed—as a threat to American civil liberties. And he and I had never discussed the issue. My letters had gone unanswered, my requests for a meeting ignored. Maybe he didn’t want to talk to me. Maybe I was more useful to him as a bogeyman than as a public policy partner. I didn’t really care. I believed that the people of my state deserved the attention of the world’s most powerful man, if only for a few minutes. What was happening to us was too important. What was coming for the rest of the country was too serious. I was determined to take my case directly to the president.