Category Archives: Borders
Rep. Quayle Wants Contempt Citation Slapped on Holder
Arizona Congressman Ben Quayle writes …
Nearly a year and a half after the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, the Obama Justice Department continues to defy a legitimate Congressional Investigation into what went wrong with the tragic “Operation Fast and Furious”. This ill-conceived operation “walked” high-powered weapons across the border into the hands of criminal cartels in Mexico—on purpose.
As you know, one of these weapons was later found at the scene of Agent Terry’s murder, and hundreds of Mexicans are believed to have lost their lives as a result of these weapons. Congress has used its proper investigative function to get to the bottom of this tragic scandal, but Attorney General Eric Holder has evaded every attempt to place accountability on those responsible.
I have been deeply angered by this foot-dragging. Earlier this year, I introduced a resolution in the House calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Fast and Furious and the Attorney General’s role in it. I have also joined with my House colleagues on numerous occasions to push for more action on this issue.
This week, I along with five of my Republican freshmen colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy urging them to immediately bring a resolution to the House floor to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.
The following day, House leadership sent a letter to Attorney General Holder urging him to immediately comply with the Congressional investigation. In my view, the time for more letters is over. Eric Holder has had numerous opportunities to do the right thing and comply with this investigation, and he has refused to do so. Through it all, he has continued to make contradictory and demonstrably false statements to Congress, and has blocked the release of thousands of subpoenaed documents. As you may be aware, I have called for Attorney General Holder to resign. Holder has shown clearly that he will not comply, no matter how many times we ask him nicely.
It’s time to hold him in contempt of Congress. Our founders gave Congress the responsibility of oversight of the federal government, and we would be shirking our responsibility if we allowed the Attorney General to defy investigations at will.
One more letter from House leadership is simply too little, too late, and I said as much upon its release this week. I will continue my efforts to restore accountability at the Department of Justice and seek Justice for Agent Terry and so many others who have been victims of this tragedy. I won’t stop until it’s accomplished.
Securing our southern border is vital. We won’t accomplish it until we stop trying horrible ideas like Fast and Furious, and focus on combating the cartels and using all resources to fight drug smuggling head on. We also need to ensure that law enforcement has the tools it needs to combat the efforts of the cartels.
To that end, I teamed up with Rep. Sylvestre Reyes last year to create a bill that cracks down on the construction and use of illegal cross-border smuggling tunnels. 74 of these tunnels have been found in Arizona alone. As the lead Republican Co-sponsor of this bill, I helped shepherd it to passage out of the House Judiciary Committee, and this week it passed the whole House by a resounding margin: 416-4. When this bill becomes law, it will have the effect of making it much more difficult to construct cross-border tunnels.
To strengthen our efforts to fight the cartels, I have also organized a field-hearing to take place in Phoenix on Monday to discuss ways to properly utilize state, federal and local authorities to combat the drug trade. Members of Congress will hear from a number of distinguished witnesses on how best to accomplish this. I hope these Members will gain a new appreciation for the challenges faced by border states like Arizona and will take that knowledge back to Washington with them in order to create more effective policy.
The Truth is in, and it Doesn’t Reside on the Left
The Department of Justice says it has “no choice” but to sue the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for racism.
The truth is … DOJ does have a choice. It is trying to shackle Sheriff Joe Arpaio because he represents a major obstacle to their goal of fast-tracking illegal aliens to voting status. And they’re trying to divert attention from AG Eric Holder’s Fast & Furious scandal.
The DOJ says they have turned over 7,600 documents to Cong. Darrell Issa to comply with his investigation of the Fast & Furious scandal.
The truth is … they have given up harmless documents, but they are stonewalling the American people and Congress by withholding the documents that incriminate them most.
Fox News anchor Shepherd Smith says the GOP is on the wrong side of history regarding same-sex “marriage.”
The truth is … the GOP and conservatives are on the correct side of history. No civilization has ever undermined its marriage culture and prospered. Too many in the media use “news reporting” to engage in “agenda journalism” – without bothering to check the facts. Facts like state marriage amendments passing by a 100-percent margin. Americans of all stripes and persuasions believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is backing out of his congressional run and instead focusing on getting re-elected to his current office.
The truth is … Pinal County deserves a sheriff who won’t make the poor decisions Babeu made, putting himself in a compromising situation with bad moral choices.
In Defense of SB 1070
By Russell Pearce, Maricopa County GOP Committee Member
In 2010, I introduced SB1070 to the Arizona Senate with two goals: To alleviate the problems that the federal government’s failure to secure our border and enforce our immigration laws inflicted on the citizens of Arizona, and to spark a national conversation about this issue that would eventually lead the federal government to act.
Despite parts of the bill being blocked by activist lower court judges, it has already succeeded on both counts. In 2009, illegal immigrants comprised 9.8 percent of Arizona’s workforce (Pew Hispanic Center) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform found that illegals cost Arizona taxpayers $2.6 billion a year. At the same time, failure to enforce our laws led to rampant crime, Phoenix had the highest kidnapping rate in the country, and dozens of police officers and citizens were killed or maimed by illegals.
The purpose of this bill is not to indiscriminately go through Hispanic neighborhoods and ask everyone to prove they are citizens. Rather, SB1070 is part of Arizona’s attrition through enforcement strategy that began with 2004′s Prop 200 and 2007′s Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), which I also authored.
If you prevent illegal aliens from getting jobs or receiving taxpayer-subsidized benefits, and you routinely enforce the law, illegal aliens will, as Mitt Romney and others have said, “self-deport.” Even without full-implementation, illegal aliens know that they are not welcome in Arizona and the strategy is working.
According to the latest Department of Homeland Security estimates, Arizona’s illegal population fell by 110,000 in 2010, or 23 percent. In contrast, the nationwide illegal population declined by less than 1 percent. Since LAWA’s enactment in 2008, 200,000 illegal aliens, 35 percent of the illegal population, have left the state. The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association released a statement noting, “Since SB1070, Phoenix has experienced a 30-year low crime rate.” Dozens of states have introduced legislation modeled after SB1070 and it has become law in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Legislators in other states tell me that the inevitable litigation is a major obstacle to getting it passed, but if the Supreme Court upholds SB1070, you can be sure many more states will follow Arizona’s lead.
Ultimately, the federal government must do its job by securing the border, cracking down on employers of those here illegally and vigorously enforcing the laws already on the books in cooperation with local law enforcement. The 360,000 illegal aliens remaining in Arizona are a constant reminder that the problem has not been entirely solved and that the courts need to take the handcuffs off of law enforcement and allow them to enforce SB1070.
Even President Obama has acknowledged that SB1070 was a result of “our failure to act responsibly at the federal level.” The issue before court is not whether the law is effective but whether it is constitutional. I view the issue simply. The 10th Amendment states that all powers not prohibited to the states are reserved to the states, and I cannot see any word of text in the Constitution denying states the right to use their police power to inquire into the status of illegal aliens.
However, I recognize that the courts do not view the issue as straightforward. For that reason, I worked with former Justice Department official and Yale Law Journal editor Kris Kobach to craft the bill in line with recent court precedent on immigration. In 2002, the DOJ issued a memo that states had “inherent power” to enforce federal immigration law. The memo cited numerous cases, such as Gonzales v. Peoria, which said states may arrest individuals when there is “probable cause to believe [they committed] illegal entry.”
While much is made of the fact that SB1070 requires police to look into the immigration status of those it has a “reasonable suspicion” will be here illegally, the Supreme Court ruled in Muehler v. Mena, that police can do so even without reasonable suspicion. Despite the claims of racial profiling, the law specifically bars law enforcement considering “race, color or national origin.”
Last year the Supreme Court upheld LAWA 5-3 in Whiting v. Arizona. While LAWA was not as well known as SB1070, in some ways it is further reaching. SB1070 mirrors federal regulations, while LAWA requires businesses to use E-Verify, which they were not already required to do nationally.
Based on this decision, along with the fact that the Constitution, precedent, and the American people are on our side, I am cautiously optimistic that the court will uphold SB1070.
Supreme Court Argument on 1070 Goes Well for Arizona, Badly for Obama
You know President Obama’s on shaky ground when the left-stream media’s champion, the New York Times, says Supreme Court justices seem sympathetic toArizona’s border enforcement law, SB 1070.
NYT’s Adam Liptak wrote after today’s oral arguments on SB 1070 at the U.S. Supreme Court: “Justices across the ideological spectrum appeared inclined to uphold a controversial part of Arizona’s aggressive 2010 immigration law, based on their questions on Wednesday at a Supreme Court argument.
To arrive at that conclusion, Liptak only had to listen to one of Obama’s left-wing Court appointees:
“You can see it’s not selling very well,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said of a central part of the argument made by Obama’s Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. ““Why don’t you try to come up with something else?”
The Drudge Report posted a huge headline Mr. Verrilli will not be saving for his scrapbook. It declared Obama’s lawyer had laid another egg in the Supreme Court, as he did last month arguing for Obamacare: “Obama’s Lawyer Chokes Again.”
The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan reported: “Supreme Cour” justices took a dim view of the Obama Administration’s claim that it can stopArizona from enforcing immigration laws, telling government lawyers during oral argument Wednesday that the state appears to want to push federal officials, not conflict with them.”
The bias showed in the reporting by left-stream media Associated Press: “Verrilli did not mention Wednesday that the administration has deported nearly 400,000 people a year, far more than previous administrations, although the information was included in written submissions to the court.” Perhaps the AP regrets not assisting Verrilli prepare for orals.
Chief Justice John Roberts joined with colleagues who took issue with Verrilli’s remarks on theArizonalaw, noting the state only wants to inform federal authorities when it apprehends illegal aliens. “It seems to me that the federal government just doesn’t want to know who’s here illegally and who’s not,” Roberts said.
Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law, released this statement today:
“Today, more than two years after I signed SB 1070 into law, the State of Arizona had its opportunity to defend this measure before the United States Supreme Court. Many people never gave us a chance to get this far, and it is only due to the continuing support and encouragement of the American people that it was possible.
“Of course, we likely will not know the Court’s decision for weeks. But I am filled with optimism – the kind that comes with knowing thatArizona’s cause is just and its course is true.
“On the day I signed SB 1070, I called it ‘another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix.’ Those words still hold true – as I was reminded last week when I returned to the border to visit law enforcement and ranchers who live and work in southeasternArizona.
”Their message: The job of securing the border is not done, not so long as drugs and humans continue to be smuggled north in large numbers at the direction of violent cartels and armed gangs. As Governor, I have a duty to uphold the Constitution and a responsibility to protect the people ofArizona. With SB 1070, I am confident we can do both.”
Unbelievably, left-wing JusticeElena Kagan recused herself from the case. She refused to demonstrate the same integrity last month in the Obamacare oral arguments.
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Flake: Career Politician We Can’t Trust
National Journal: “Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona… has one of the most liberal records on immigration of any Republican member”
Career politician Jeff Flake says he has the courage to be Arizona’s next U.S. Senator, but the Congressman is lacking straight talk and honesty with voters. Congressman Flake broke his term limit pledge and has been dishonest about his record on illegal immigration. For over a decade, Congressman Flake has been the Washington poster boy for a pro-amnesty liberal immigration policy instead of fighting to secure our borders. While Congressman Flake has been advocating for comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he has also been pushing legislation with liberal Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) to force Arizona taxpayers to pay for “in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants.”
Congressional Republicans strongly opposed Congressman Flake’s bill and his pro-amnesty record that he shares with Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. So, when career politician Jeff Flake realized Arizona Republicans also did not trust his position on illegal immigration, he changed his ten-year pro-amnesty position right before announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
No one really believes career politician Jeff Flake or trusts his liberal views on illegal immigration.
Congressman Jeff Flake is a career politician we can’t trust.
Pearce Responds to Worsley’s Harsh Attack
By Russell Pearce, Mesa Candidate for Arizona Legislature
On Tuesday, Bob Worsley’s campaign attacked me and like-minded Arizonans for our efforts to draw attention to–and business away from–the Phoenix New Times and its corporate owner, The Village Voice. While hypocritically attacking me for some imagined ³divisive rhetoric,² Worsley’s campaign offered a strangely disconnected defense of the Phoenix New Times while asking voters to draw a connection between Congressman Raul Grijalva and me.
Worsley’s rhetoric was obviously meant to be divisive, but he could not pick a more ill fitting pair than Grijalva and me.
“What do Russell Pearce and Raul Grijalva have in common?” asked his press release. The answer is nothing. I’m a proven conservative, Raul is a committed liberal. I have a 100% pro-life, pro-family, pro-Second Amendment voting record; Raul’s is the opposite. I helped to write and pass Arizona’s Jobs Bill and led the passage of the first truly balanced state budget in years, while Grijalva passed ObamaCare and voted for trillion dollar budget deficits. My actions led to job creation and economic growth, while Grijalva’s led to recession and depression. I wrote and passed SB1070 to enforce our nation¹s immigration laws, while Grijalva opposed our efforts and wrote that the bill was bad for Arizona.
Come to think of it, so did Bob Worsley. You wouldn’t know that he wrote about it because he deleted part of his writings just after he announced for office, but the same Bob Worsley who wants to attack me for non-existent commonalities with Raul Grijalva wants voters to ignore (or better still never find out) that he shares his illegal immigration ideology with Raul.
In his desperate attempt to try to connect me to Grijalva, Worsley jumped the shark and decided that attempts to change the business practices associated with the New Times and its owner were morally equivalent to Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of the entire State of Arizona because he disagreed with SB1070 and enforcing the law.
It is worth revisiting the Phoenix New Times and The Village Voice to learn more about the people that Bob Worsley is defending.
According to media reports, The Village Voice and its family of newspapers account for 70% of all prostitution advertising in the United States. 48 State Attorney Generals and 19 U.S. Senators–Republicans and Democrats alike–have called on them to stop running sex ads which have been tied to child sex trafficking, and which collectively finance a national operation of hate campaigns against conservative individuals and organizations, elected officials and public servants, law enforcement and others.
Investigations into these crimes have led to more than 50 arrests in 22 states. Millions of tainted dollars flow into the coffers of these
publications and those paying the price are too often themselves victims of the most horrible crimes imaginable. Human trafficking and child and adult prostitution are horrific, and it is right and justifiable that decent people here in Arizona and across the country draw attention to these crimes and act to hold businesses that profit from them responsible.
While our effort to let advertisers know the truth about these publications is brand new, we have already been rewarded because the great people at Harkins Theaters and Buddy Stubbs Harley Davidson have pulled their advertising. Bob Worsley accused me of threatening Harkins Theaters, but his accusations were wildly off the mark. The good folks at Harkins run a decent, family-oriented business, and they are much better off today knowing the truth about where their advertising dollars were going. And the people of Arizona will reward Harkins with even more business for being a responsible and family-friendly corporate citizen.
SB1070 was about enforcing laws to keep people safe. Liberals like Raul Grijalva and Bob Worsley opposed SB1070 and Grijalva went so far as to call for a boycott of his own state because he was mad that it was going to enforce the law.
Exposing the New Times and its corporate model is about exposing human exploitation, indecency, and alleged illegality. Bob Worsley, Sean Noble, and the rest of his political team oppose our efforts because they are desperate to attack me with a ludicrous comparison to Raul Grijalva. In so doing they take the side of an entity that profits off of some of the worst crimes imaginable.
I am disappointed in Bob and his campaign, both for the position they are taking, the negativity with which they are beginning this campaign, and the very same divisive rhetoric they would accuse me of.
I hope that Bob will change his mind and join those of us who are working to expose these practices. Decent Arizonans from all over this great state are rallying to the effort and we certainly have room for Bob, Sean and the rest of his team. We can and ought to be able to agree on the need to end the exploitation of children, and I hope that political ambition does not prevent Team Worsley from getting on the right side of this very important issue.
The citizens of our district deserve an honest and decent debate on the issues facing our state. I hope Mr. Worsley will drop his attacks and join me in that effort.
Governor Brewer: Invite Schumer down here for a debate on border invasion
Radical left-winger Chuck Schumer, Democrat senator from New York is trying to bait Arizona Gov. Jan Brewerget to testify on why our state passed Senate Bill 1070. He claims Congress has already acted sufficiently. Here’s our response.
Gov. Brewer, don’t go! Don’t take the bait!
Invite him down here on our turf to explain why Congress has done next to nothing protecting our border and our citizens from the border invasion and easy influx of harmful drugs. Senator Schumer’s baiting you for a public roasting. He and his friends will pile on and try to make you look bad. They will interrupt you and not give you a fair hearing. It’s a set-up. Don’t fall for it!
Turn it around on him and invite him to Arizona. Put him on the hot seat for doing NOTHING the entire time he’s been in Congress. Take him down to the border he’s never seen. And if he won’t come down here, gov, call a press conference and give a state of the border invasion speech. Expose Congress’s failure to act!
Please take our advice.
Babeu: AG Holder Guilty of Perjury on Fast & Furious Scandal
The Daily Caller reports…
Pinal County, Ariz. Sheriff Paul Babeu, a Republican congressional candidate, told The Daily Caller he thinks Attorney General Eric Holder “perjured himself” before Congress when testifying about Operation Fast and Furious.
“I believe that [Holder], and many sheriffs in Arizona believe that, he has perjured himself,” Babeu said during an interview with TheDC at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “His story has changed. After there was evidence produced that he did know — he was given briefings, he was given emails — he then started to walk back his statements to say that, ‘well, I misunderstood the question.’”
“As a police officer before I was a sheriff, when somebody I’m talking to starts to change their story — that’s a clue they’re not telling the truth,” Babeu continued. “So, this guy is in charge of the Department of Justice, still — to this day — from Dec. 15, 2010, so it’s been over a year and there’s still been no accountability, we still don’t know who’s approved this program. How can that be? In the Department of What?”
Babeu went on to say that he thinks Holder should have resigned long ago and that President Barack Obama should fire him. “I believe that whoever made these decisions to facilitate [the sale of] 2,000 high-powered weapons into the hands of the drug cartels that we’re fighting in Arizona — they should face criminal charges,” Babeu added.
Babeu said that as a candidate for Congress, he hears about Fast and Furious from voters across Arizona on a regular basis.
“Time and time again, we see our Constitution trampled upon by this government — by Eric Holder, by Janet Napolitano [the Secretary of Homeland Security], by Barack Obama — they’re suing my state and they need to stop suing my state, we’re trying to enforce the law,” Babeu said. “So it’s those issues in combination with the most important issues facing our country which is our economy. It’s the same assault against our free market, capitalist society that we’re trying to turn our back from the greatness of our country, which has made us strong.”
There are currently 103 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who think Holder should resign or be fired, have signed an official resolution expressing “no confidence” in him, or both, as the two lists don’t perfectly overlap. In addition, three U.S. senators, two sitting governors and all major Republican presidential candidates have demanded Holder’s resignation or firing too.
Pearce Set for Legislative Race against RINO Crandall
KFYI Radio’s Ted Houston reports …
Former state Senate President Russell Pearce, who was defeated in a recall election in November, isn’t retiring from politics. He’s not even retiring from the state legislature, if things go according to his plan. Pearce, who previously represented Legislative District 18 (LD-18), has filed papers with the Arizona Secretary of State’s office to run as a candidate in the newly-redrawn LD-25, in which his Mesa home is now located. Pearce would challenge current Rep. Rich Crandall, a moderate Republican who has often been critical of, and disagreed with, Pearce’s stand on some issues. His filing for the seat comes just days after he was elected to a leadership post with the Arizona Republican Party.
Crandall was one of a handful of Republicans who participated with Democrats in a fundraiser two years ago and is seen as soft on the border invasion.
Arizona House Speaker Tobin to Put Some Light on Obama’s Fast & Furious Scandal
AWR Hawkins writing in Big Government on Speaker Andy Tobin’s efforts to investigate the Fast & Furious scandal of the Obama Administration …
As I wrote in a post for Big Government this past Sunday, January 22, the Arizona’s legislature has decided once more to do the job the feds won’t do, and has launched its own investigation into Fast and Furious. And during an appearance on FOX NEWS this morning, Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin explained why they’ve taken this step. He said that constituents were flooding their offices with questions about the gun-running operation, and he said one recurring question was, “You’re not waiting for the feds [to do something] are you?” He then said the answer to that question was “No.”
Said Tobin:
This is an incident that occurred on Arizona soil, with Arizona business owners, [where we lost] an Arizona agent (Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry), and quite frankly we felt it needed a lot more attention. We felt our citizens needed a place to go to share their stories. Maybe there’s more there. This was a failed program right from the start and I think the idea is to put more light on it.
Tobin explained that as he’s watched this story unfold, and learned about the tactics used in Fast and Furious, it just hasn’t made sense: “I’m from the family of a law enforcement officer and I don’t think that the process by which they were going was the direction in which we fight back on border security and drug infiltration.”
He went on to explain that the Arizona House has been disappointed in the way Eric Holder has handled things up till now, and added:
It doesn’t appear he had a grasp on it right from the beginning when the inquiries started coming in. And forgive me for being concerned when I hear that the federal government’s here and they’re here to help. [We’re] the state that had to pass S.B. 1070 so we could help secure our borders, and the fed sued us…we’ve lost millions of acres of forest land [to fires] because the feds won’t let us clean them, we’ve got a Navajo power plant that the EPA may close…I meant the list goes on and on.
Without ambiguity Tobin added:
The public deserves some answers and we can’t wait for the fed to give us some of those answers. So let’s put some light on it, let’s have some transparency in government. Let’s go ahead and bring some Arizona citizens in to testify and see where this leads us.
I’m all for what Tobin and the rest of his colleagues in the Arizona legislature are doing. It’s time to put some heat on the feds and see if Holder changes his story (again).
