The recall of Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce is not led by Latinos upset with SB 1070. Rather, it is aging white hippies who want to take out a popular conservative leader they see as a threat.
Some extremists are targeting my favorite Arizona legislator, Senate President Russell Pearce, because he sponsored Arizona’s illegal immigration bill SB 1070. Deep pockets on the left are funding a recall effort against him. A more liberal candidate, Jerry Lewis, has been found to run against Pearce in the recall election. A third candidate, Olivia Cortes, has also turned in enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The recall effort is not really surprising, considering Pearce has become one of the leading mainstream figures in the country opposing illegal immigration. The left sees him as a real threat because he is also personable and well-liked. Even some of his colleagues on the far left like him, such as Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who is so liberal she once received the Vladimir I. Lenin award from the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers.
The recall signatures were collected by a shadowy organization calling itself “Citizens for a Better Arizona.” Its website “About Us” page does not include a single real name, only a vague description. The recall organizer is Randy Parraz, a labor organizer who ran the Arizona AFL-CIO a few years ago and who also worked for the national AFL-CIO for eight years. According to the Huffington Post, “In the fall of 2007, Randy returned to Arizona and began work in the housing industry as a political organizer for the Laborers’ International Union of North America.” Parraz has also worked as a community organizer with Dallas Area Interfaith, an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) founded by none other than Saul Alinsky. Parraz started the Student Institute for Social Change, a left wing organization. He ran as a Democrat against Senator John McCain in 2010 and finished last in the race. He co-founded the innocuous sounding “Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability,” which appears to exist solely to bash Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Parraz was arrested in 2008 for disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing due to his conduct protesting Sheriff Arpaio. Afterwards, he turned around and sued the county for $500,000. He cites the Marxist book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” as one of his favorite books.
Since Pearce is Mormon and represents a heavily Mormon populated district, the left purposely sought out a Mormon candidate to run against him. Parraz brazenly admitted to the Arizona Republic that he wanted to find a Mormon who was a Republican to challenge Pearce. Parraz admits the recall isn’t motivated by Latinos angry about SB 1070, stating that most of his volunteers are “white people over the age of 50,” and that most of the people who signed the recall petitions were over age 50. This reveals what most conservatives have suspected all along; the opposition is mostly coming from white, aging hippies.
Read the rest of the article at Townhall.com
Rachel,
I have to begin with admission that I don’t know much about Arizona politics.
I followed the link to validate the provided quotation from the Jerry Lewis web site; “Certainly hard economic times demand that we all tighten our belts and eliminate non-essential spending in an informed manner. However we must not be hostile to local governments in doing so.”
Mr. Lewis may attempt to claim conservative credentials, but he is certainly no T.E.A. Party conservative as he obviously doesn’t believe that one of the organizations that should share in the economic sacrifice of tough times is government. In keeping with my original statement; I’ll move on more firm ground and a topic suggested by your essay.
I’m not entirely certain why the progressive left is so focused on ‘local’ political activism. Progressives are, by definition, fans of centralized government.
We begin with the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913. Once the power to appoint Senators to the Upper House of the US Congress was usurped by this amendment; the ability of the states to influence the expansion of centralized federal government was effectively curtailed.
Multiply this by the frightening expansion of the definition of the Commerce Clause which took flight during the late 1930’s under the auspices of Roosevelt’s win in 1937 in the SCOTUS decision in National Labor Relations Board vs. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. This relentless expansion of the Commerce Clause has us now on the cusp of SCOTUS deciding if the federal government has the power to mandate that every citizen purchase a government ‘approved’ product from designated private corporations in the form of health insurance.
Raise all this to the exponent of the Patriot Act, and it is clear that the rights and concerns of individual citizens and their duly elected state legislatures amount to little more than constitutional ‘window dressing’ any longer.
We see another manifestation of this in the derisive treatment any mention of the Tenth Amendment receives by the progressive pundits of the MSM.
Today’s state legislatures function as little more than ‘farm’ clubs to prepare politicians for the ‘big show’ of the major leagues: The Congress and the Senate. They perfect their thieving ways by throttling individuals’ rights at the state level. Once they’ve accumulated the knowledge of stealing millions of dollars and curtailing the freedoms of hundreds of thousands of people, they move to Washington where they become complicit in stealing billions and curtailing the rights of tens of millions of people.
Proof that such a system exists stems from the fact that America has the only federal legislative branch on the planet that now routinely tosses around the ‘trillion’ number. To my knowledge there’s not another national legislative body in the developed world that speaks in terms of trillions of dollars in such a cavalier manner.
Secession anyone?
The author's detail and analysis are excellent. Union thug Parrez was out campaigning against SB 1070 before it had ever passed. His "co-chairman" of the recall is Chad Snow of Snow and Carpio. Snow's firm files workers' compensation claims on behalf of "undocumented" workers, putting him directly in the line of profit fire from the continuing invasion from Mexico. Local television stations refuse to air these disclosures at any cost. FOX 10 even told me that occupations of the recall principles are not relavent to the story.
The narrative must be pristine. It’s never about the occupations of the parties; unless one of the participants is conservative. Then, and only then, can you raise the spectre of a persons’ pocket being lined