Justin's Political Corner

In a fundraising email to supporters, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he “could lose” if faced with a recall election.

“The fight to recall me in Arizona is gaining steam and I’m afraid if we don’t fight back hard right now… I could lose,” Arpaio wrote in an email Sunday.

The AP reports that recall organizers say they’ve gathered 150,000 of the 335,000 signatures required by May 30 to bring on a recall election, despite facing fundraising difficulties.

h/t: Huffington Post

Last month, the City Council of Phoenix, Arizona passed sweeping nondiscrimination protections, ensuring that people have equal access to employment, housing, and public accommodations regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. One state lawmaker, Rep. John Kavanagh (R) is not pleased that transgender people will be protected when using the correct bathroom, and so he has introduced a new bill to ban them from doing just that.

Kavanagh gutted a Senate Bill about a Massage Therapy Board to use as a shell for his new amendment, which prohibits a person from entering a “public restroom, bathroom, shower, bath, dressing room, or locker room” if the sex designation of that facility does not match the individual’s birth certificate. He defended his “show your papers to pee” bill in an interview with 12 News Phoenix:

KAVANAGH: The city of Phoenix has crafted a bill that allows people to define their sex by what they think in their head. If you’re a male, you don’t go into a female shower or locker room, or vice versa. It also raises the specter of people who want to go into those opposite sex facilities not because they’re transgender, but because they’re weird.

Violating this law would constitute “disorderly conduct” and could be prosecuted as a class 1 misdemeanor. The bill describes itself as “an emergency measure that is necessary to preserve the public peace, health or safety and is operative immediately as provided by law.” 

h/t: Zack Ford at Think Progress LGBT

A group behind the effort to recall infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio says it has gathered roughly one-third of the signatures required for a recall election.

So far, Respect Arizona has collected 120,000 of the 335,000 signatures needed by the May 30 cut-off date. The petition reads:

“We believe Sheriff Arpaio has failed to fulfill his duties as Maricopa County’s top law enforcement official. We believe Sheriff Arpaio has violated our trust and dignity as citizens because too many people have suffered as a result of Sheriff Arpaio’s abusive practices and policies. We believe business owners should not be unfairly harassed, workers unlawfully detained and families unjustly torn apart. We believe too many lawsuits have been filed and too many lives have been lost. We believe our children deserve a Sheriff that respects families, immigrants and Latinos. We believe Sheriff Arpaio should respect, defend and protect the rights guaranteed under the US Constitution because no one — not even a Sheriff — is above the law. No election victory can excuse or make right the unlawful acts that have occurred under Sheriff Arpaio’s leadership.”

Arpaio is best known as an anti-Latino, anti-immigration sheriff. Some of his antics include arming deputies with automatic weapons to prevent so-called “illegals” from escaping and recruiting Steven Segal to train vigilantes. 

h/t: Rebecca Leber at Think Progress

PHOENIX — A citizen’s group called Respect Arizona filed paperwork at the Maricopa County Elections Department on Wednesday to initiate a recall effort against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The group would need to gather 335,317 signatures by May 30 of this year in order for the county to call a special election for the sheriff’s office.

Several Republican figures are at the center of the effort to recall Arpaio, who has been re-elected to his post six times since 1993. Williams James Fisher, the chairman of Respect Arizona and a Republican attorney, is expected to announce the recall effort at press conference Thursday morning.

Arpaio narrowly won re-election last November with 50.7 percent of the vote, after a strong voter registration campaign lead by Latinos took place countywide to oust him from office. His campaign war chest had over $8 million dollars, most of it coming from out of state. 

Over the last five years, the self-proclaimed “America’s toughest” sheriff rose to notoriety due to his immigration sweeps in Latino neighborhoods and his raids in businesses that hire undocumented laborers.

Those actions put him at the crosshairs of civil rights lawsuits alleging racial profiling – one brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, and another filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which is awaiting a federal judge ruling.

Arpaio has also been criticized for his role in misspending $100 million in taxpayer dollars from a jail tax fund that was used to conduct investigations on political enemies and on immigration enforcement, rather than on jails. 

Another scandal, one that drove many Republican voters away from Arpaio during the last election, involved the mishandling of investigations of over 400 sexual crimes against children.

h/t: AlterNet

Since President Obama issued an administrative directive allowing some undocumented young immigrants to temporarily remain in the country, states have adopted policies to ensure they have equal work opportunity. But on Thursday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) reiterated her opposition to granting driver licenses to the eligible immigrants and compared them to children or people with a record of driving under the influence.

BREWER: The state is the one who licenses the people to be able to drive, it’s not the federal government. And we don’t license kids under 16. We don’t license DUI drivers. And our laws are very clear and I took an oath to uphold that.

Even if Brewer is right about what the law says, laws can be changed — in fact, two states have passed legislation allowing all undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses, with Illinois set to be a third. These laws have been passed for reasons of public safety; lawmakers believe that unlicensed adult immigrants are likely to drive anyway because they need to get to work, risking increased accidents and higher insurance costs. Public safety concerns, of course, run the opposite direction with children and serial drunk drivers, who cannot ever be trusted to drive safely and hence must be kept off the road.

h/t: Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress

The Arizona Republic has declared Rep. Ron Barber (D-AZ) won a full term in Congress, defeating his Republican opponent Martha McSally. An analysis by the Republic “determined that McSally would not be able to muster enough votes from the remaining uncounted ballots to surpass the thin lead Barber had held in recent days.” 

h/t: TPM

Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian woman living in Ireland, went to the hospital when she first began to miscarry — but thanks to Ireland’s stringent abortion ban, medical professionals denied her repeated requests to quickly terminate the pregnancy because they could still detect a fetal heartbeat. The Irish hospital required her to extend her miscarriage over three days until the fetus’ heartbeat officially stopped, and by that time, Halappanavar had developed serious blood poisoning. She passed away just a few days later.

Halappanavar’s death helps highlight the tragic effect of Ireland’s stringent abortion ban, but the impact of that type of restrictive legislation isn’t just limited to that country. In fact, lawmakers in Ohio are quietly pushing extreme anti-abortion legislation that would subject the women in that state to a situation incredibly similar to the one in Ireland.

During this year’s lame duck session, Ohio legislators are planning to revive HB 125, a so-called “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can first occur as early as five or six weeks, before many women may even know they’re pregnant. The proposed legislation represents the most restrictive abortion ban in the United States. If HB 125 is passed, it would criminalize all abortions after the emergence of a fetal heartbeat without allowing even the narrowest exceptions in potential cases of rape, incest, or the mental health of the woman.

A 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Ireland amended the country’s abortion ban to include an exception in cases where the woman’s life is in danger, but Irish hospitals don’t always know how far that medical exception can stretch. They are often reluctant to provide women with abortion services unless the situation is very clearly life-threatening — and for women like Halappanavar, that can already be too late.

h/t: Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress Health

The Arizona Senate race has already been called by networks for Republican Jeff Flake, but with many votes still to be counted, Democrat Richard Carmona isn’t ready to give up yet.

“We’re watching it very closely, and we’re going to make sure every vote is counted,” Carmona’s spokesman Andy Barr told TPM on Monday.

He said the campaign has not ruled out taking action if the race tightens.

The latest figures show Carmona trailing by some 78,000 votes with nearly half a million ballots still uncounted. Victory for the Democrat would be uphill climb by any reckoning, but it’s mathematically possible. His campaign notes that there are up to hundreds of thousands of uncounted provisional ballots that could also affect the race.

h/t: Sahil Kapur at TPM

PHOENIX — Arizona voters have chosen former Democratic state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to represent a new Phoenix-area congressional district.

Sinema had a narrow lead on election night, but slowly gained ground as more ballots were tallied in the last week. She now has a nearly 6,000-vote edge over Republican Vernon Parker.

Sinema becomes the first openly bisexual member of Congress, winning a race that featured millions of dollars in attack ads.

Parker was criticized by Democrats as a tea party radical who would hurt children by cutting the federal education department.

Republicans countered saying Sinema was too liberal for the newly created district and doesn’t understand stay-at-home moms.

h/t: Huffington Post

TUCSON, Ariz. — The man who pleaded guilty to a deadly Arizona shooting rampage that wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has been sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. District Judge Larry Burns sentenced 24-year-old Jared Lee Loughner on Thursday for the January 2011 attack that left six people dead and Giffords and others wounded.

Loughner pleaded guilty to federal charges under an agreement that guarantees he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The hearing marked the first time victims — including Giffords — could confront Loughner in court. Her husband spoke on her behalf, saying Loughner changed his wife’s life forever but couldn’t dent her spirit.

Kelly also lambasted elected officials for their positions on gun control, naming Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer as one of many “feckless” state elected leaders who ”look at gun violence,not as a problem to solve, but as the white elephant in the room to ignore.”

The 24-year-old Loughner pleaded guilty three months ago to 19 federal charges under an agreement that guarantees he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. The deal calls for the dismissal of 30 other charges and a sentence of seven consecutive life terms, followed by 140 years in prison.

Both sides reached the deal after a judge declared that Loughner was able to understand the charges against him. After the shooting, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and underwent forcible psychotropic drug treatments.

Some victims, including Giffords, welcomed the deal as a way to move on. It spared victims and their families from having to go through a potentially lengthy and traumatic trial and locks up the defendant for life.

Christina Pietz, the court-appointed psychologist who treated Loughner, had warned that although Loughner was competent to plead guilty, he remained severely mentally ill and his condition could deteriorate under the stress of a trial.

When Loughner first arrived at a Missouri prison facility for treatment, he was convinced Giffords was dead, even though he was shown a video of the shooting. He eventually realized she was alive after he was forcibly medicated.

It’s unknown whether Pima County prosecutors, who have discretion on whether to seek the death penalty against Loughner, will file state charges against him. Stephanie Coronado, a spokeswoman for Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall, said Wednesday that no decision had been made.

h/t: NBCNews.com