Freedom Line Blog

The Arizona legislature recently made national news by passing a tough immigration enforcement bill aimed at addressing the increasing violence along its border with Mexico and the state’s growing illegal immigration problem.  Unhappy with the legislation, two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, including one from Arizona, are now calling for tough “economic sanctions” against the state.

According to The Hill newspaper, Representatives Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) have asked President Obama to lean on Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican who reportedly has not taken a formal position on the bill, to veto the immigration enforcement measure, “either by warning of federal pre-emption of the law itself or by threatening Arizona’s federal funding.”

In addition to wanting the president to withhold federal funds, Grijalva is threatening to take matters into his own hands should the bill become state law.  (Did we mention that he represents a district in Arizona?) 

The Hill reports:

Grijalva warned Brewer that the law, if enacted, could lead to other negative consequences for the state — in the form of what he called ‘economic sanctions.’

‘We are going to be urging national organizations — religious, civic, labor, Latino, of color — to refrain from spending their dollars on conventions and in national activities in the state of Arizona,’ Grijalva said. ‘There have to be hard economic sanctions for this.’

Both Representatives Gutierrez and Grijalva are strong proponents of “comprehensive immigration reform” (aka Amnesty for Illegal Aliens) and appear to be using the immigration enforcement measure passed by the Arizona legislature as a means to that end. 

Regardless, in our two-and-a-half-minute Google search, we couldn’t find one other example of a Member of Congress working to inflict economic hardship on his own state, for any reason.  Is this guy serious?

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got herself into hot water with conservatives last year by proposing tax increases to address state budget shortfalls soon after replacing Democrat Janet Napolitano.  Thankfully for Arizona residents hit particularly hard by the real estate downturn, however, Governor Brewer has corrected course by withdrawing from the regional Western Climate Initiative’s (WCI) plan to impose a carbon cap-and-tax scheme in 2012. The WCI’s misguided system would place arbitrary limits on the amount of carbon that businesses could produce in seven western states and four Canadian provinces, and allow sale and purchase of emission credits among businesses.

Former Governor Napolitano agreed to the plan in 2007 before joining the Obama Administration as Secretary of Homeland Security, where she embarrassed herself by claiming that the “system worked” after an al Qaeda terrorist nearly destroyed an airliner in the skies above Detroit.

Noting the economic basket case that next-door California has become by implementing precisely these sorts of regulations, Governor Brewer wisely said, “no, thanks.”  She stated in her executive order that Arizona simply would not participate in a plan that would raise costs for employers and consumers in this period of economic difficulty.  Among other things, the scheme would have increased costs for automobiles and other struggling industries.

The Sierra Club was predictably dismayed, but what’s bad for the environmental activist agenda tends to be good for everyday citizens.