Christine Jones puts the goober into gubernatorial.
Indeed, the former GoDaddy pimp-ess and GOP candidate for governor's rhetoric on the issue of "border security" is proving increasingly delusional.
Jones has zero experience in politics, and it shows. Anyone proud to have the endorsement of Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, aka, "studboi1,"should have their itty-bitty red head examined.
Particularly after this last stunt, where he ginned up a fake Murrietta-type situation in Oracle, and had rednecks harassing busloads of American children. You know, instead of the migrant kids they wanted to terrorize.
See also: -Suffer the Children? They Certainly Would if Certain Idiot Arizona Politicians Had Their Druthers -Casting Millstones: Ugliness and Hysteria Has Been the Response of Too Many Americans to the Plight of Migrant Kids
Even without the Oracle debacle, Babeu had already disgraced himself and his office by posting nearly nude pics of himself on a gay pickup site ("7" cut") and threatening his visa-overstaying Mexican ex-boyfriend with deportation.
But Babeu, whose county is not on the border (duh), is as close to a border-expert as Jones is gonna get. No wonder her so-called border security plan is a bunch of hooey.
In a letter published in Thursday's Arizona Republic, Jones defends herself from the obvious criticism of her plan to send National Guard troops to the border and spend a bunch of other money the state does not have and, as she stupidly states in her campaign commercials, "send Obama the bill."
Her letter reads, in part:
Let's be clear about what I, as governor, can and will do.Deploying 1,200 armed Arizona National Guard troops is permitted under state law as a deterrent near smuggling routes along the border. Civilian law enforcement will then search, apprehend, detain, arrest and, if required, strike to halt any incursion threatening the United States. In addition to troops, there are fencing and technology solutions.
Sure, the governor can call up the National Guard, but who is going to pay for it?
Arizona National Guard spokesman Major Gabe Johnson recently answered this question for me when I asked him about it.
"The Governor may activate the Guard for state missions such as disaster response through the Adjutant General. Governors have access to their state's National Guard 24/7, 365 days a year, using state funds," he explained via e-mail. "They may request funding from the federal government for national emergencies, federal operations, or National Special Security Events."
So, if a governor calls up the guard on her own, with zero coordination with the feds, the state likely will be stuck with the bill.
The price tag? Well, for comparison, let's look at how much it cost the feds to send the guard to four border states from July 2010 to June 30, 2011 during Operation Phalanx.
According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the deployment of 1,200 troops for that one year cost $110 million.
Unless Jones is going to cut us off a chunk of her personal wealth, the state of Arizona does not have $110 million, or anything like it. The state budget already faces massive shortfalls for the next couple of years, and a court-mandated increase in education spending.
In other words, Jones' "plan," which she has said would cost a total of $270 million (presumably including the "fencing and technology solutions"), ain't gonna happen.
Send Obama the bill all you want. That sounds good on TV, maybe. But it is essentially meaningless.
Jones also pretends that the U.S. Supreme Court's 2012 ruling on Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 never happened, when she says that, after the Guard is deployed,
"Civilian law enforcement will then search, apprehend, detain, arrest and, if required, strike to halt any incursion threatening the United States."
Um, "strike"? Does she think she's in Zero Dark Thirty or something?
If she's talking about law enforcement's opening up fire on a group of people, um, that's what they call "murder."
How about cops searching, apprehending, detaining and arresting anyone they think is in the country illegally?
Well, that's pretty much what the Supreme Court's decision said that state law enforcement cannot do.
This is from the high court's majority decision:
As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States. The federal scheme instructs when it is appropriate to arrest an alien during the removal process. The Attorney General in some circumstances will issue a warrant for trained federal immigration officers to execute. If no federal warrant has been issued, these officers have more limited authority. They may arrest an alien for being "in the United States in violation of any [immigration] law or regulation," for example, but only where the alien "is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained." §1357(a)(2). Section 6 attempts to provide state officers with even greater arrest authority, which they could exercise with no instruction from the Federal Government. This is not the system Congress created. Federal law specifies limited circumstances in which state officers may perform an immigration officer's functions. This includes instances where the Attorney General has granted that authority in a formal agreement with a state or local government. See, e.g., §1357(g)(1). Although federal law permits state officers to "cooperate with the Attorney General in the identification, apprehension, detention, or removal of aliens not lawfully present in the UnitedStates," §1357(g)(10)(B), this does not encompass the unilateral decision to detain...
The court's 1070 ruling reaffirmed the federal government's "broad, undoubted power over immigration and alien status."
The court said that local cops can call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and inquire after someone they've already detained, but only if doesn't take too long.
To this point, the majority wrote that, "If the [1070] only requires state officers to conduct a status check during the course of an authorized, lawful detention or after a detainee has been released, the provision would likely survive preemption..."
Maybe in Christine's Fantasyland she can order cops en masse to do stuff that is illegal. But back here on planet Earth, she's restricted to reality.
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