Millions spent in legal fees. Hundreds of millions (at least) lost in revenue from convention and hotel booking cancellations due to boycotts. The immeasurable cost of being branded a state led by bigots, much less the assured infamy when judged by history.
Tim Gabor
Social Eye Media
Governor Jan Brewer signing SB 1070
on April 23, 2010, starting a fight she will never win.
Related Content
More About
Weigh all these outcomes together and, on the other side of a scale, place a 5-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reaffirms the federal government's "broad, undoubted power" over immigration and shuts down any notion of allowing the states to experiment with immigration enforcement.
Now, would you label that a "victory"?
That's what our genius governor, Jan Brewer, declared in a press release e-mailed to all and sundry a matter of minutes after the high court had ruled Monday in the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 case Arizona v. United States.
Maybe her advisers scanned Justice Anthony Kennedy's 25-page decision. Perhaps they even read through the four-page summary that preceded it. But rather than the sober, measured response Brewer should have copped, they had her doing a fist pump for the press.
Granted, that likely was a matter of public relations strategy: tell the biggest lie and tell it before your enemies have time to get their message out. Since you're out in front, it's your spin that prevails. Or so goes the theory.
But in this case, screaming first and loudest and longest just made Brewer look that much more ridiculous once people took the time to read what the majority had decided.
As if her "victory" speech wasn't bad enough, Brewer donned a red nose and Ronald McDonald shoes in a hysterical overreaction to the news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had axed all 287(g) agreements it had with Arizona law enforcement agencies.
The DHS was playing its own public relations game, making it seem as though the feds would not stand for racial profiling or indiscriminate roundups of brown folks, now that the Supremes had okayed SB 1070's "papers please" provision, section 2(b).
Arizona was on notice. We want only the really bad criminal aliens, the feds seemed to be saying. And just to be certain, we're going to tear up the 287(g) agreements, which allow local cops to be cross-trained as immigration agents.
(Those 287(g) officers in participating Arizona jails were spared, natch.)
If you know absolutely nothing about the 287(g) program, you might see a certain strained logic to the move, even if you disagree with it.
But those who follow the twists and turns of federal immigration policy are aware that the DHS signaled earlier this year it would begin phasing out the 287(g) program in favor of its Secure Communities initiative, which identifies undocumented aliens only after they get booked into local jails.
And guess what: Each of Arizona's 15 counties already uses Secure Communities. So, the gesture was an empty one on DHS' part, but the feds did score, in terms of public relations. Brewer turned on a dime and began raising holy hell, claiming that the Obama administration had "abandoned" Arizona to the not-so-tender mercies of the Mexican cartels.
Even worse, President Obama — that evil black man — had declared "war" on the state of Arizona. Before you could blink twice, Brewer's JanPAC was hustling for donations with this line, using a picture showing a glaring, grinning president looking like he's about to eat the governor for breakfast.
In just a matter of hours, Brewer had gone from warrior queen to damsel in distress, without the benefit of a costume change. But the real role Brewer had assumed was the one the Obama administration had planned for her all along: chump.
Or in this case, chump-ess.
By the yardstick of SB 1070's primary pimp, recalled state Senate President Russell Pearce, the Supreme Court decision was a major letdown for nativists — if not an outright loss.
Pearce had predicted a win more than once, envisioning a majority decision that allowed all four of the provisions enjoined by District Court Judge Susan R. Bolton, and later upheld by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to go into effect.
A great believer in the concept of "states' rights," Pearce often has asserted that the states have an "obligation" to enforce immigration law and "defend" their territory from "invasion."
Pearce even believes that states should have the power to determine the requirements of U.S. citizenship. Remember, this is the same man who pushed for a bill that would have denied certain citizenship rights to first-generation Americans born to undocumented parents.
"We'll win this one at the Supreme Court," Pearce said of SB 1070 in April, when Attorney General Tom Horne was a guest on Pearce's KFNX radio program.
"And it'll be a 5-4 decision," he added. "I can guarantee you at least five of the Supreme Court justices care about states' rights and the Constitution."
Pearce seemed to have forgotten that Justice Elena Kagan had recused herself from the case. A 5-4 ruling in his favor would have been impossible.
This slip aside, Pearce's states' rights view of immigration was in the distinct minority in Arizona v. United States. You don't have to take my word for it. Just check out the opinion of the justice who was the most hostile to the federal government's case during oral arguments, Antonin Scalia.
