Scorpions for Breakfast Read online

  Scorpions for Breakfast

  My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border

  Governor Jan Brewer

  Dedication

  To those who’ve shared this journey with me:

  John, Ronald, John, and Michael

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Foreword, by Governor Sarah Palin

  Introduction:

  Waterboarded

  One

  Crisis

  Two

  Janbo

  Three

  Senate Bill 1070

  Four

  Nazis in the Desert

  Five

  Sued for Enforcing the Law

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  by Governor Sarah Palin

  For weeks, April 24, 2010, had been circled on my calendar. With my Alaska home still surrounded by snow, I looked forward to traveling “outside” America’s forty-ninth state to the forty-eighth, where spring had already sprung.

  I was scheduled to give a speech about “challenges and overcoming adversity” in Glendale, while the eyes of the nation were fixed on the rough-and-tumble debate over the Grand Canyon State’s immigration policy. It was on April 23, the day before my speech, that Arizona governor Jan Brewer put pen to paper and sent a ringing wake-up call to the White House and the federal government with a legislative message that would change the country.

  She had signed SB 1070 into law.

  It was during this breathless political drama that I met Jan for the first time. I was immediately struck by her determination, her kindness and concern, and her good spirit, and sensed that in the face of an international media firestorm, Jan Brewer was still a down-to-earth mom committed to public service and principled leadership.

  In my speech in Glendale I publicly thanked Jan for her courage, and have followed her progress and success carefully since then. As we’ve experienced the uniqueness of each other’s states together, I’ve gotten to know her better.

  Like many of us, she was called to public life after first getting involved with the education of her children. I’m never surprised when I hear that a stint with the PTA or local school board helped bring someone into even more robust public service. School boards just seem to get the political blood pumping in mama grizzlies.

  Jan has risen from local government to the governor’s office. And she’s done it by bringing people together—by building up, instead of tearing down. Her strong conservative values are matched by a driving optimism that seems to know no end. Above all else, Jan Brewer is an authentic leader. She talks straight and does what she believes is right for the people she serves—even when it’s the hard thing to do.

  As you’ll see in this book, Jan doesn’t back down from tough challenges. She doesn’t turn away in the face of attacks. She leans into problems and works toward meaningful, achievable solutions.

  Arizonans are lucky to have Jan Brewer on their side. And our country is a better place because of her honest, humble commitment to everlasting American freedom.

  I’m thankful she’s leading and I’m proud to call her a friend.

  —Sarah Palin, summer 2011

  Introduction: Waterboarded

  The best comparison I could think of was: This must be what it’s like to be waterboarded.

  There I was, in my office at the Arizona Capitol, with a bill about which everyone in America seemed to have an opinion—and a strong one at that. Advice, objections, encouragement, discouragement, fan letters, and death threats were coming at me so fast I could barely breathe. And not just me but my staff, the Arizona legislators who had worked on the bill—all of us felt as if we were strapped to a board with torrents of accusations raining down on our heads. Manning the buckets were the national media, the unions, civil rights groups, business groups, and political operatives all the way up to the president himself. Was it torture? I never did ask Dick Cheney, but I’ll tell you this: It was not an experience I want to repeat.

  It was a surreal time to be the governor of the Grand Canyon State. For weeks, protesters had been massing outside my windows on the ninth floor of the executive tower of the Capitol. They were there every day, marching, chanting, and beating drums. Always beating drums. Some of them flew Mexican flags. Some of them desecrated American flags. Our supporters were there, too, of course, but they were a lower-key bunch. They tended to sing the national anthem rather than chant, and to quote the U.S. Constitution rather than Che Guevara. Things eventually got so testy between the two sides that the peace officers had to form a human chain between the supporters and the protesters. It was an amazing scene. The chanting. The drumming. The Constitution quoting. Only in America.

  The reason for all this passion was Senate Bill 1070, the now famous law that I signed as a tool to help secure our southern border. You may think you know something about what was quickly dubbed America’s “toughest immigration law,” but chances are, if you’re a devoted consumer of MSNBC and the New York Times, you don’t know much at all about our law. Its opponents call it racist. The Obama administration calls it unconstitutional. Supporters call it necessary. I call it a wake-up call. I signed it to send a clear, unequivocal message to Washington. It’s a message that I’ve repeated more times than I care to count during my three years as Arizona’s governor. It’s a message that’s long past due. And it’s a message that Washington very clearly doesn’t want to hear:

  Mr. President: Do your job. Secure our border!

  That’s it—simple and direct. Kind of like me. Kind of like Arizona.

  The story of the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, or SB 1070, is a story of a state in crisis. That state is my state, Arizona. We’re dealing with a crisis caused by drug dealers, human smugglers, generic criminals, and the sheer volume of people pouring over our unsecured border. Innocents are being victimized. People are living in fear. Our beautiful desert is being ruined. The story of SB 1070 is a story of leadership—and its opposite. It’s the story of how the people of the state of Arizona took charge of their own future after decades of benign neglect and not-so-benign indifference from Washington. It’s the story of how Arizonans stepped up to lead when their representatives in Washington failed to do so. The citizens of Arizona didn’t want this fight. They didn’t cause this crisis. But they’re not going to sit still anymore. Not when they can do something about it.

  The story of SB 1070 is also the story of a country—a great country—whose ending is yet to be written. Immigration has made America great. Illegal immigration threatens to fundamentally change our country, and not in a way that the Norwegians, Poles, Italians, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Kenyans, Cubans, Mexicans, and others who waited their turn in line to come here legally would approve of. They all came because here the law was supreme. Here the law meant something. It ensured a level playing field. It made sure that everyone got an equal chance—and if they didn’t, the law had something to say about it. They came here and embraced a set of values that made them Americans.

  But in the end, the story of SB 1070 is the story of an arrogant, out-of-control federal government. The people of Arizona watched for years as our border went unenforced, as our schools and hospitals became overwhelmed with poor, desperate illegal aliens, and, finally, as violent crime invaded our cities when the Mexican drug car
tels took over the border crossings. We saw all this happening and we appealed to our federal government for help. We asked them to do their job. And when they refused, we acted. We passed a law to protect ourselves because the federal government wouldn’t. And what did we get for our effort? We were demonized and called racists. We were sued and treated like subjects instead of citizens. We were told that the federal government will enforce the law how it chooses and when it chooses. We were slapped down like wayward children.

  The level of illegal immigration across the southwestern border is not what it was in the years and months leading up to my signing of SB 1070. The recession has eliminated many of the jobs that illegal aliens once came to this country to take. But there is no reason to believe that once the economy improves, we won’t return to the 1,000-a-day illegal crossings that we saw at the height of the crisis. There has been no fundamental change in Mexico that would cause Mexican citizens to want to stay. Mexican economic policy is still broken, many of their officials are still corrupt, and cartel violence is still at an all-time high.

  Another reason I believe that border crossings are down is because we’ve proved that enforcing the law works. Speaking for Arizona, the tough laws we’ve implemented (or tried to implement in the case of SB 1070) have had an effect. As we’ll see, SB 1070 was just the latest in a string of Arizona actions—actions like enforcing the law against employing illegal aliens, ensuring the integrity of our elections by requiring proof of citizenship, and limiting most state services to legal residents. These efforts, I believe, are beginning to have the damping effect on illegal immigration that they were intended to have. Fewer people are willing to take the risk of coming to a state that takes its laws seriously.

  We don’t really know the cause—or the causes—of the reported decrease in illegal border crossings. But this we do know: The reports of the death of the crisis of illegal immigration are, to borrow a phrase, greatly exaggerated. Even though the apprehensions of illegals at the border have declined, the number of illegal aliens in the United States was unchanged between 2009 and 2010. That’s because 45 percent of illegal aliens in the United States are people who have overstayed their visas. The federal government reports that about 200,000 people overstayed their visas in 2009. Of these, fewer than 2,000—or less than 1 percent—were tracked down and deported. And yet, while visa overstaying accounts for almost half of the illegal aliens in the United States, the rejection rates for Mexicans seeking tourist visas have reportedly fallen from 32 percent to 11 percent under the Obama administration. Who knew all the people sneaking across our border just wanted to visit the Grand Canyon and see the sights! While the Obama administration seems determined to make the problem worse, laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 are designed to address visa overstayers by enforcing the law against people being here illegally once they have already crossed the border.

  While the politicians who fly over the border occasionally in helicopters may think the immigration crisis is over, those who live and work down on the border know otherwise. We live this issue every day. Arizonans who live next door to a drop house, whose homes have been broken into, who’ve hiked through the desert and seen the mountains of trash left by illegal crossers . . . well, their view is different from the one in Washington, D.C.

  Illegal immigration in America today mocks the law, much the same way our president mocks those he disagrees with on the issue. President Obama has repeatedly made fun of those of us who want to see the law enforced, saying we want a “moat” with “alligators” in it around our country. The reason he has resorted to these failed attempts at humor, I think, is that he supports a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic, and he knows it. Whether it’s a so-called sanctuary city or the federal government suing Arizona for trying to enforce federal law, by selectively choosing which laws to enforce, the federal government damages all of our laws. It thereby damages democracy itself. If our representatives pass laws that can then be ignored by our government, what control do we have over our destinies? How can we call ourselves a free and self-governing people?

  My own role in this story has been dictated by something my mother once told me: Doing the right thing almost always means doing the hard thing. This battle has been hard, but it has also been right. At the time I signed SB 1070, I didn’t realize the overwhelming impact it would have on the national level. I saw a problem, and I saw a solution. I didn’t appreciate how threatening that solution would be to some people. I’ve always been idealistic about Americans, and especially Arizonans. That idealism has never failed me. I live in the best state in the greatest country in the world. I thought that if I was conscientious and had the people with me, I could expect those who call themselves our leaders to give me a fair hearing. I thought that by doing the right thing, I could avoid being called a bad person. I thought that by proposing practical solutions, I could cut through the politics.

  I was wrong.

  I am not the first governor to find herself in a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners battle with Washington and the liberal media. But in Arizona, our fight is different, and all the more frustrating for it. While most reform-minded governors fight Washington for the freedom to do their jobs without federal micromanagement, I am fighting Washington to make it get off its keister and do what it’s supposed to do.

  The Constitution is very clear on this point. We looked it up. Article IV, Section 4 imposes on the federal government the duty to “protect each [state] against Invasion and . . . . domestic Violence.” I don’t want anything more controversial than for Barack Obama to honor these words. I don’t want anything more radical than for the law to be enforced.

  And yet there I was, being called names you would never want your children and grandchildren to hear. I was called “Hitler’s daughter.” I was called “Satan’s whore.” Mostly, I was called things I can’t repeat here. Why? When did enforcing the law become controversial? The sheer volume and hysteria of the reaction we had provoked made me think that we were on to something. During World War II, my father worked at the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot in Hawthorne, Nevada, the biggest ammunition depot in the world at that time. He supervised the men who packed the explosives into the casings to make the bombs used in Germany and Japan. The pilots who delivered these bombs had a saying: “If you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target.” I thought of that as the howls of protest rose over Arizona’s immigration law. We must have been over a very important target, because we were catching a heck of a lot of flak.

  My fellow governor over in New Jersey, the incomparable Chris Christie, has made himself a YouTube sensation by turning the flak coming at him into bunker-busting rhetorical missiles aimed back at his opponents. And Scott Walker, my Republican colleague up in Wisconsin, has taken his share of incoming and not only survived but lived to claim victory. There are other examples of leaders more visionary and more courageous than me who have found themselves receiving the wrath of the Washington establishment.

  Christie felt the heat for taking on the powerful, too often corrupt, status quo in New Jersey that had driven his state off a fiscal cliff. Walker felt it for challenging the powerful, arrogant public sector unions that had done the same. In Arizona, we were punished for taking on the granddaddy of them all, the all-powerful federal government. We had the gumption—call it the audacity—to demand that Washington do its job and secure our national border. That in itself isn’t very audacious, of course, unless it turns out that the federal government isn’t interested in doing its job—that it has no intention of doing its job.

  That, in a nutshell, is what is happening in Arizona today: The people have risen up and demanded that Washington do a job it has no intention of doing. Call us yokels, call us rednecks, but we take our laws seriously in Arizona. One would think Congress would do the same.

  To be fair, the failure to secure our border has been a bipartisan problem in America for decades now. Both Republicans and De
mocrats can be faulted for not taking our border security seriously and leaving the states, also headed by Republicans and Democrats, feeling the pain. But today we have a government that has taken non-enforcement to the level of policy.

  Politics, ideology, and special interests are some of the reasons why Washington doesn’t want to secure the border. I’ll go into all of them in this book. But in the end, the real obstacle is arrogance. It takes a pretty arrogant government to take a law that Congress has passed and simply refuse to enforce it—and to seek to prevent others from doing so. And this arrogance about illegal immigration is part and parcel of government arrogance in general. Government that wants to spend beyond its means and take over our health care decisions is government that has a different vision from what most Arizonans and, I would argue, most Americans would agree with. In Arizona, we fought back against that kind of arrogance. We haven’t been willing to give up on our vision of America as a people that has a government, as Ronald Reagan used to say, not a government that has a people. We fought back and we got hammered for it. But in the end, the people have always been with us. They’ve always understood. I am more grateful for their support and encouragement than I can say.

  Amid all the chaos, a group of people I don’t even know started a Web site to defend me against all the obnoxious, hurtful accusations being recklessly thrown around. It was a tongue-in-cheek site in which people could post colorful descriptions of me. The actor and activist Chuck Norris alerted me to one of his favorites: Jan Brewer eats scorpions for breakfast.

  I guess it was meant to be flattering. I guess it was meant to portray me as tough. But even if you’re tough enough to start your day with a meal of deadly poisonous insects, it’s not something you particularly want to do. You don’t seek it out. You do it because there’s no other honorable option.