AT LONG LAST, ARIZONA STATE SENATOR RUSSELL PEARCE IS OUT!

This week has been one with some major transitions, most of them bad, be it the notable deaths we have seen or the ouster of Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno behind the child rape scandal (it sucks that his 61-year career has to end this way, but it sucks even more that things have gotten that damned bad that college football dollars was more important than the welfare of a 10-year-old boy). But Election Day saw some more positive ones with conservatives getting their teeth kicked in from Ohio to Mississippi to Arizona where FINALLY we don’t have to deal with that hatemongering clown Russell Pearce anymore. A few months ago, folks in Arizona looked at a lot of the problems they were having, saw their State Senate President in the middle of much of them and decided they had to get rid of him – now. On Tuesday, Russell Pearce’s comeuppance has arrived. His boy Sheriff Joe Arpaio thinks he may come back, but there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that, given the fact that he might be the second most hated person in Arizona (Arpaio is #1). We hope this means Arizona is getting tired of their reputation as a bigoted state. We met a lot of good people down there and they deserve better. They should do everything they can to make sure they get better, and Pearce’s ouster is a mighty fine start.

One People’s Project

With conservatives suffering a handful of defeats on Election Day Tuesday, one of the less-talked about ones was the historic recall of controversial Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce, the man responsible for the Arizona anti-immigration “Papers, Please” SB1070 bill that sparked controversy during the summer of 2010. It makes him the only State Senate President in American history to be recalled by his own constituents.

By 8:43 PM Tuesday night, Pearce (R-Mesa) was trailing charter school executive Jerry Lewis by a 53 to 46 percent margin, and by 9 PM Lewis claimed victory.  “Our opponent was the most powerful politician in Arizona and one who had deep-pocketed and powerful interests from outside our district backing him, as well as the entire muscle from our state Republican Party,” Lewis said. In his defeat, Pearce was not wavering from what brought him to this point. “If being recalled is the price for keeping one’s promises, so be it,” he said on Election night.

His friend Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was even less conciliatory, even suggesting that Pearce may try to return to public office. “(K)nowing Russell, he’s not gonna go away and hide,” he said. “He may have other plans. If he does [run for office], no matter what he runs for, I’m gonna support him.”

Pearce tenure as senator was a controversial one as he drew his support from not only the worst circles of conservatism, but politics in general. In 2006, he called for the renewal of a 1950’s immigration enforcement program, Operation Wetback, that deported or encouraged to deport 1.3 million illegal immigrants in less than a year. He made things worse for him in October of that year when in the email to supporters, he sent the text of “Who Rules America” and essay published by the white supremacist National Alliance, which maintains that Jews run the media and created the promotion of multiculturalism as an anti-White conspiracy. He later apologized for the email, but soon questions also began to arise about his association for white supremacist and Republican committeeman JT Ready, whom Pearce ordained as a priest in the Mormon church.

Pearce was the lead sponsor in Arizona’s SB1070 bill, which made it a crime for any immigrant to be without any legal documentation of their status on their person and allowed officers to check for such status during a “lawful stop”, which could range from a traffic stop to simply approaching a person on the street. Many opposed the bill on the grounds that it encourages racial profiling, pointing to the fact that Pearce received assistance from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to draft the legislation. FAIR has regarded by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, Pearce’s doubling down on such support was not received well, not even from other Republicans. “Instead of locking down the border, and using the undivided attention of Arizonians to help push policy solutions that balanced the rule of law with free market solutions, Pearce doubled down on the mass deportation by attrition agenda,” the Texas GOP Vote blog wrote. “His supporters realized that proponents of SB 1070, such as Pearce, weren’t honestly trying to repair the fed’s mess, instead they saw a group of loud opportunists hiding under the label of “conservatives” carrying out someone else’s hidden agenda, not solving the real problem, and hurting our Republican party in the process.”

Opposition to SB1070 led to protests and boycotts of Arizona.