Justin's Political Corner

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

A federal judge has blocked Arizona from implementing HB 2800, a measure that would have revoked Medicaid funding for family planning services at any health organization that also provides abortions, effectively defunding the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates. The ruling represents a victory for Planned Parenthood, who suedto prevent HB 2800 from going into effect after Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) signed the bill into law in May.

Judge Neil Wake rejected the argument that Arizona can cut off federal funding for family planning simply based on the state’s own determination that abortion providers aren’t qualified for Medicaid eligibility, pointing out that Medicaid recipients have the right to choose between the full range of qualified providers “without government interference.” Planned Parenthood officials told Reuters that they are pleased the judge’s decision will preserve health services for thousands of low-income women in Arizona. This doesn’t represent the only politicized battle over Planned Parenthood in Arizona, however. Anti-abortion groups are also opposing a proposed sales tax in the state because they worry that some of the funds will go to Planned Parenthood.

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

As Republicans continue their struggle to win over Latino voters, few party members have embodied the party’s image problem with the burgeoning voting bloc more than Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Her state’s controversial law, SB 1070, was criticized by many as a facilitator of racial profiling. During her 2010 campaign, Brewer sought to link crime with illegal immigration by alleging that law enforcement had found decapitated bodies in the Arizona desert, despite no such evidence for the claim.

But on Tuesday, Brewer chalked up the GOP’s low standing among Latino voters to pandering on the part of President Barack Obama. Appearing on “POLITICO LIVE” at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Brewer said Obama has ignored border security in favor of winning more Latino votes.

“He panders to them,” Brewer said. “Look what he’s done: he hasn’t secured the borders.”

“I think President [sic] Romney believes in the rule of law, and he knows and understands” Brewer said. “When he becomes president, I think we’re going to be able to solve a lot of these issues.”

She also contended that Democratic charges of racism directed at border hawks within the Republican Party are unfair.

Jan Brewer, it’s YOU that’s the fucking racist.

H/T: Tom Kludt at TPM

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) has requested that the Supreme Court overturn a ruling that allows state employees to keep their same-sex partners on their benefits, including health insurance.

Brewer filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on July 2, requesting that the high court overturn the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s September 2011 ruling in Diaz vs. Brewer. The pushback comes three months after the Ninth Circuit denied a request by Arizona state lawyers to re-hear the case with an 11-judge panel.

Last September, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling prevented Arizona from implementing a law that would have barred state employees’ same-sex partners from remaining on their health plans. The ruling affirmed a lower court’s decision to place a preliminary injunction on the law.

h/t: HuffPo

Across the country, Republican governors, many of them elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, have undermined women’s health, crushed workers’ right to negotiate collectively, made it tougher to vote and imposed ideologically informed slash-and-burn policies on their populations, often with little attention from the mainstream media. Where are they now? Culling voter rolls, beating up on unions, trying to sneakily ban abortion—but also, in some cases, having their power checked by a determined opposition and being forced to concede some defeats. And in a couple of cases, they’re under investigation. Here’s our 2012 list of the worst GOP governors.

10. Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania

Corbett didn’t make our list last time around, but this year, the Pennsylvania governor has made up for lost time. His attacks on public education alone make him worthy of our Hall of Shame, but coupled with a massive tax break for Shell Oil—$1.7 billion in subsidies for the oil giant—his comments about taking responsibility for future generations ring awfully hollow.

“The governor’s proposal violates his own belief that the free market, and not government, should pick winners and losers,” George Jugovic Jr., president of PennFuture, told The Morning Call. “

9. Nikki Haley, South Carolina

Fresh from campaigning in Wisconsin for her fellow union-buster Scott Walker, Nikki Haley is headed home, triumphant—to an ethics investigation.

Corey Hutchins at the Columbia Free Times writes:

Subpoenas could be fluttering all over Columbia this week as an ethics panel investigating whether Gov. Nikki Haley illegally lobbied as a lawmaker decides who to call as witnesses in the case.

On May 30, the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to reopen an investigation into the governor. The six-member panel had previously voted that there was probable cause to investigate, but then immediately dismissed the charges. After further consideration, and new information from GOP activist John Rainey, who filed the complaint, they’re giving it a deeper look. 

She’s also been rebuked by her state’s Supreme Court chief justice over a plan, approved by her appointees at the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, to dredge the Savannah River to make it bigger for bigger ships.

8. Jan Brewer, Arizona

Jan Brewer made her name attacking immigrants, but she’s got plenty of other moves under her belt. In recent months, she cheerfully signed a bill cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood, and topped that off with possibly the worst anti-abortion bill in the country. Opponents call it the “Life Begins at Menstruation” bill because it bans abortions after 20 weeks, but claims that those 20 weeks start at the woman’s last menstrual period.

Brewer also joined the club of GOP governors who like kicking around public employees. She moved to offer public workers their first raise in years—but only if they agreed to trade in all their job security and let her fire them on a whim. She also signed a bill expanding school vouchers for Arizona students, giving public funds to parents to pay for private schools.

In a bit of good news, a judge did reject Brewer’s bid to dismiss legal challenges to the state’s infamous anti-immigrant law.

Oh, and she wants a third term.

7. Paul LePage, Maine

“To all you able-bodied people out there: Get off the couch and get yourself a job,” Maine Governor Paul LePage told the Republican State Convention in May.

The governor wants to impose his own form of welfare “reform” on the state in the middle of an ongoing jobs crisis—and he’s even willing to make up stories and fudge numbers to get his way. And what does he consider “welfare”? Everything from disability benefits to MaineCare (the state’s version of Medicaid — healthcare for low-income people). His Medicaid cuts alone could hit 65,000 people.

6. Chris Christie, New Jersey

Chris Christie likes to bluster and swagger – it’s sort of his calling card. He’s frequently caught saying awful things—like a comment he made this winter on a marriage equality referendum. Christie said, “The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.”

But what’s he really up to? Well, he’s getting sued, for one thing, for unilaterally pulling New Jersey out of a 10-state initiative aimed at curbing air pollution from power plants. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Environment New Jersey filed a lawsuit, claiming the move violates a state law that required Christie to notify the public of his intent to pull out and allow for a public comment period

And teachers, who Christie famously called “political thugs,” are still on his hit list, though so far, his education agenda has been stalled. He’s trying to get rid of teacher tenure, making it easier to fire teachers and cut down on state aid for public schools, as well as push charter schools.

One teacher, however, has taken her fight to another level—Marie Corfield, the teacher in the famous YouTube video sparring with Christie over his education policies, just won a Democratic primary for a state assembly seat. Should she win, she’ll have a lot more opportunities to fight Christie’s attacks on teachers.

5. Rick Perry, Texas

Everyone knows where Rick Perry was for most of the last year, right? Failing in his attempt to capture the GOP presidential nomination. At least he provided us with some much-needed comic relief.

But a few things he got up to– when he wasn’t making headlines with ridiculous statements – flew somewhat under the national media’s radar.

Last year, Perry slashed $4 billion from schools, and protests against continued education cuts are ongoing. A Texas schoolteacher told AlterNet that after budget cuts, more kids are being squeezed into classrooms: “Pre-K is up to 26 now that they can have in a classroom, it went up from 22. It’s a different ratio for different grade levels. It’s 30-something for high school, it’s approaching 30 at the elementary level, which is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous to be expected to teach that many little people.”

4. John Kasich, Ohio

Governor Kasich took a big hit when voters decisively overturned his signature piece of legislation, an anti-public-union bill even nastier than Scott Walker’s, by 313,000 more votes than the governor himself had gotten the year before. And now there are investigations underway into whether he’s misused his power to consolidate control over his state’s Republican party.

But what else has Kasich been up to?

He also backed down on a contentious voter suppression law that would have narrowed early voting and made it harder for voters to get absentee ballots, signing a repeal of the law in an attempt to prevent it becoming a ballot measure that could drive progressive voters in November.

And he’s looking forward to a new law that would allow fracking in Ohio—one that might be the nation’s worst.

3. Rick Snyder, Michigan

Rick Snyder may be facing his own recall election—or at least, a group of determined voters who’d like to challenge the Michigan governor. Perhaps that’s why he’s allowed a tiny increase in the state’s education budget this year. But there’s a catch: those budget increases are tied to performance.

Snyder is best known for his state’s “emergency manager” law, which grants him the power to appoint a manager over towns he deems in need of an overhaul. Revamped under Snyder, the law gives the managers unilateral authority to fire officials, close schools, void union contracts (an apparent violation of the Constitution’s Contracts Clause), and hand schools over to private charter companies.

He’s still defending the law—and almost brought it to bear on Detroit. (The city’s public school system has been under emergency management for a while, but not the city itself.)

2. Scott Walker, Wisconsin

We know you’re sick of hearing about Scott Walker. Yes, he won his recall election and gets to stay in power—though it appears he won’t have the state senate to do his bidding anymore, if election results in Racine hold.

1. Rick Scott, Florida

Governor Scott, who reigns over the state synonymous with voter suppression and rigged elections in the minds of many Americans, is doing his best to live up to Florida tradition.

AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld explained:

Progressive voting rights groups and even county election supervisors from Scott’s own party are saying the businessman-turned-governor’s latest gambit—claiming there are as many as 182,000 non-citizens among the state’s 11.2 million registered voters and having his appointed Secretary of State send out an initial list of 2,600 names to be purged—has crossed a line in the Florida sand, topping previous voter suppression efforts, and may violate two federal voting right laws.

The Justice Department told Scott to stop purging voters, and several voters have been reinstated, but the GOP has no plans to actually give up its purge — Steve Rosenfeld reports that Florida is making all sorts of bizarre accusations against DoJ officials who are simply trying to uphold the law.

h/t: Sarah Jaffe at AlterNet

The man in charge of running Arizona’s elections has gone to the birthers. Secretary of State Ken Bennett now says he’s not convinced Barack Obama was really born in the United States and so he is threatening to keep the president off the ballot in November.

Bennett’s comments came in an interview late Thursday with conservative radio talk show host Mike Broomhead on Phoenix station KFYI.

Bennett said he was following the lead of the state’s eccentric Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fellow Republican who ordered an investigation into the president’s birth certificate last year and concluded the document released by the White House is a forgery. Bennett said he is now trying to get verification from state officials in Hawaii that the certificate is authentic.

In doing so, Bennett caved to a fringe group of activists and writers who believe in a conspiracy theory that just never seems to die no matter how much proof they get. Hawaiian officials have said time and again that Obama was born there in 1961, yet the theory persists.

Bennett, the state’s No. 2 elected official just below Gov. Jan Brewer (R), said his investigation isn’t personal. He said the reason he started looking into it is because he got more than 1,200 emails asking him to do so after Arpaio’s investigation came out.

“I’m not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was,” Bennett said on the show. “But my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking.”

h/t: Nick R. Martin at TPM

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the federal government’s challenge to the Grand Canyon state’s controversial anti-immigration law, S.B. 1070.

The case, Arizona v. United States, will not only be the Court’s second politically-charged blockbuster in as many months, but also a rematch between the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and D.C. superlawyer Paul Clement. Over three days in late March, they faced off over the limits of federal power in the health care cases. This time, they will have a single hour debate over whether states may invade fields of immigration policy the federal government claims to occupy. It will be the justices’ final oral argument of the term.

Specifically at issue are four provisions of the law that the lower courts blocked, finding them likely to conflict with federal immigration laws. Two of the blocked sections make it a crime under state law for an undocumented immigrant to be present in the state, fail to register with the federal government and attempt to obtain work or hold a job without governmental authorization. Another section requires state and local police officers to check the immigration status of anyone who has been arrested, stopped or detained and who the police reasonably suspect to be in the country undocumented. The fourth provision at issue allows police to arrest individuals without a warrant if they have probable cause those individuals have committed deportable offenses.

Clement, who represents Arizona and its governor, Jan Brewer, is trying to unblock these provisions by framing them as “Arizona’s efforts at cooperative law enforcement” with the United States. “President [Barack Obama] fairly describes our Nation’s system of immigration regulation and enforcement as ‘broken,’” Clement wrote in Arizona’s brief. He spends several pages describing the health, safety and economic difficulties Arizona has faced as a result of that “broken” system, citing the state of emergency declared in 2005 by then-Gov. Janet Napolitano, who currently serves as President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security.

The United States, however, sees Arizona’s efforts in a less complimentary — and complementary — light. “The framework that the Constitution and Congress have created does not permit the States to adopt their own immigration programs and policies or to set themselves up as rival decisionmakers based on disagreement with the focus and scope of federal enforcement,” Verrilli told the justices in the federal government’s brief.

Utah, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have already passed Arizona-style legislation. Eight other state legislatures pose a “serious threat” to do the same and sixteen more have “flirted” with such laws, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank.

The parties submitting friend-of-the-court briefs to the Court largely break down along ideological lines. Conservative organizations and Republican-elected officials at all levels of government have sided with Arizona, and progressive organizations and Democratic-elected officials have lined up behind the United States.

There are, however, a couple of notable bipartisan briefs, and both support the federal government. Former officials in foreign policy from the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush eras, including Madeleine Albright and John Negroponte, joined together toadvise the Court that S.B. 1070 “inherently undermines the exclusivity and uniformity of federal foreign relations power, threatens negative consequences for U.S. relations with other countries, and risks retaliation to U.S. citizens abroad.”

h/t: Mike Sacks at Huffington Post

Forget The French Connection, Bullitt, or The Italian Job. The best chase scene in modern cinema—bring it on, boo boys—appears in Joel and Ethan Coen’s bizarre, pitch-perfect 1987 classic, “Raising Arizona.” (It also features the best chase scene one-liner. Mustachioed truck driver to Nicholas Cage with the cops hot on his trail: “Son, you got a pantie on yer head.”)

Why the clip? One of the nation’s largest labor unions has drawn on the Coen brothers oeuvre as it wages the latest battle over workers’ rights in America.

In Arizona, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and state GOP lawmakers have taken a cue from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by taking aim at the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions. Except Arizona’s assault on workers’ rights is more extreme than Wisconsin’s. The bills introduced in the state senate there would eliminate all collective bargaining for public employees at the state, city, and county levels.

To fight back, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees launched “Razing Arizona.” The new campaign rips Brewer and calls Arizona’s anti-union legislation “the latest orchestrated attack from extreme right-wing lawmakers, think tanks, and their corporate cronies who are hell-bent on wiping out what’s left of the middle class.” AFSCME also released an ad bashing Brewer in the style of VH1’s Pop-Up Video.

The Brewer video has been viewed 2,100 times on YouTube.

h/t: Andy Kroll at Mother Jones

Not content to let Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich get all the fame (and recall elections, and ballot referenda) for their attempts to curtail union workers’ rights, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators have jumped into the fray and proposed their own anti-union bills in recent weeks.

Along with South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, not content with making her state the least friendly to immigrants and people of color, has decided to get in on the union-busting action as well, introducing a bill that makes Walker’s and Kasich’s attacks on public workers look mild.

Brewer, the Republican left in charge of the state after President Obama tapped Janet Napolitano to be his Secretary of Homeland Security, has been planninganti-union moves since last spring with the backing of the Goldwater Institute. (Named for Barry Goldwater, the think tank pushes for “freedom” and “prosperity”—as long as it’s not the freedom or prosperity of state workers.)

It’s not just Arizona’s right-wingers who are pushing Brewer to beat up on unions—John Nichols at The Nationnotes that Walker may have had a hand in helping push an anti-labor agenda, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is involved. In a speech to the right-wing policy shop behind many of these anti-union bills last year, Brewer complained about her inability to fire government employees and supervisors’ difficulty “disciplining” workers.

This week, the Republicans in the state legislature introduced moves that would make collective bargaining for public workers completely illegal. Here, we break down what you need to know about Brewer and the GOP’s anti-worker agenda.

1. The bill would go further than Wisconsin’s, making collective bargaining completely illegal for government workers.

SB 1485, the first of the bills to take on union rights, declares that no state agency can recognize any union as a bargaining agent for any public officer or worker, collectively bargain with any union, or meet and confer with any union for the purpose of discussing bargaining.

While Wisconsin’s law bans public employees from bargaining over everything but very small wage increases, Arizona’s bill bans collective bargaining outright and refuses to recognize any union as a bargaining unit. Existing contracts with unions will be honored, but not be renewed if this bill passes.

2. Arizona includes police and firefighters in its ban.

Scott Walker famously exempted public safety workers—police officers and firefighters—from his attacks on union workers, but many of them joined the protests anyway. In Ohio, John Kasich’s bill, overturned by his constituents this past November, included the police and firefighters in its elimination of bargaining rights. Now Brewer and her legislative compatriots have decided that police and firefighters should lose their bargaining rights as well.

Arizona, as Dave Dayen at FireDogLake noted, “is changing to a purple state because of an extreme legislature which first demonized immigrants, in what could start a backlash among the Hispanic community. Now, flush with that success, the legislature will demonize police and firefighters. It’s not exactly a textbook strategy for a lasting majority.”

Walker’s attempt to divide and conquer public sector unions by attacking some and not others didn’t work; perhaps that’s why later attempts at similar bills didn’t bother giving special treatment to public safety workers. But as we saw in Ohio, the support of the traditionally conservative police and firefighters’ unions helped unite the state’s voters and bring out record numbers to vote down the bill. Arizona seems to be asking for trouble by targeting police and firefighters with this bill.

3. The state would ban government employers from deducting union dues automatically from a worker’s paycheck.

Not content with banning bargaining, the Arizona legislature is also out to make sure unions can’t collect any money for the work they do. SB 1487 inserts language into existing law that says “This state and any county, municipality, school district or other political subdivision of this state may not withhold or divert any portion of an employee’s wages to pay for labor organization dues.”

This move obviously is aimed to hit unions right in their wallets—taking away the funding they need in order to do more organizing, and carry out political activity.

5. Brewer also wants to eliminate any job protections for workers, buying them off with pay raises.

Brewer plans to offer public workers their first pay raise in years, a 5 percent increase. The tradeoff? They have to opt out of job protections some of them currently enjoy, including the right to appeal demotions and protection from being fired without cause – they have to become at-will employees.

Like most “merit pay” arrangements, this one sounds good at first—hard-working people will get raises!—but workers see right through it. Odalys Hinds, who works in the state health lab, told the Arizona Republic, “No way will I do it. I won’t take it — it basically would take away our rights. My retirement’s gone up. My insurance has gone up. There’s going to come a day when I’m going to have to pay the state to work.”

6. Arizona is already a “right-to-work” state

The kicker to all this? Arizona workers already enjoy fewer protections than those in Ohio and Wisconsin. Arizona is a so-called “right-to-work” state, where unions cannot collect a fair share of the direct costs of representation from workers who opt out of joining the union—even though the union is compelled to represent all workers.

This means that unlike the midwestern states, Arizona has few union members already and that means there are fewer people who are likely to be outraged and moved to protest by attacks on collective bargaining. Yet Brewer, the Goldwater Institute and the Republicans in the legislature aren’t content with what they have and are moving to make public sector unions all but irrelevant, by making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.

Arizona now has a strong Republican majority in the legislature, and so barring a change of heart by a handful of GOPers, the anti-union measures are likely to pass. But if Brewer continues to antagonize working people in her state, John Nichols notes, Arizona does have something else in common with Wisconsin—provisions that allow for the recall of the governor and state legislators, provisions that were used just last year to remove Russell Pearce, the state senator responsible for the state’s hideous anti-immigrant law, from office. 

h/t: Sarah Jaffe at Alternet

With a sweeping series of bills introduced Monday night in the state Senate, Republicans in Arizona hoped to make Wisconsin’s battle against public unions last year look like a lightweight sparring match.

The bills include a total ban on collective bargaining for Arizona’s public employees, including at the city and county levels. The move would outpace even the tough bargaining restrictions enacted in Wisconsin in 2011 that led to massive union protests and a Democratic effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

“At first glance, it looks like an all out assault on the right of workers to organize,” Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D) told TPM on Tuesday. “And to me, that’s a serious problem.”

The bills were crafted with the help of the Goldwater Institute, a powerful conservative think tank in Phoenix that flew Walker to the state for an event in November. Nick Dranias, director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Government, told TPM he sees Walker as a “hero” but that Wisconsin’s laws were “modest” compared to Arizona’s measures.

“In Arizona, we believe that the political will exists to do even more comprehensive reform,” Dranias said. “The environment, the climate that we face in Arizona is much more receptive to these kinds of reforms than Wisconsin is.”

Beyond a ban on collective bargaining, the bills would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money from their paychecks to pay union dues.

They would ban state and local governments from paying anyone to spend time doing union work, a practice known as “release time.”

And in another break from the Wisconsin model, the restrictions would affect every type of public union, including police and firefighters.

Arizona is a right-to-work state, which gives unions a much smaller role there than in states like Wisconsin. But laws still currently give labor groups a place at the bargaining table to negotiate pay and other benefits for their members. All of that would change under the proposed rules.

Schapira, who is also running for Congress this year, said he expects the laws to easily pass unless something major happens. Democrats in the Senate are outnumbered 21-9, so he said there isn’t much they can do to stop the bills on their own.

“I think it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck thing,” Schapira said. “We’ve got to get people down here at the Capitol to talk to their legislators, to contact them by phone or email and if need be to actually spend a significant amount of time here protesting these bills.”

The restrictions are on top of a proposal that Gov. Jan Brewer made earlier this month, saying she would offer state employees their first pay raise in years in exchange for giving up certain protections.

He said the institute has told Arizona’s legislators the state will save as much as $550 million a year if they put an end to collective bargaining.

Jan Brewer is proposing a bill that makes Scott Walker’s, Mitch Daniels’s, and John Kasich’s bills look rational in comparison. Remember that Arizona was ALREADY a RTWFL state.

H/T:  Nick R. Martin at TPM Muckracker

Back in 2010 as she defended her state’s harsh immigration law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) told a newspaper reporter that she was deeply hurt by the terrible names people were calling her. The worst, she said, were the comparisons to the Nazis.

“They are awful,” she said. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”

The problem, as many discovered after the quote went viral, was that it wasn’t true. Brewer’s father had in fact died of lung disease in California in 1955, a decade after WWII ended.

As Brewer now faces the fact that another one of her stories is coming under question, this one involving an encounter she had with President Obama, a pattern appears to emerging in her career: The popular conservative bomb thrower often has trouble with the truth.

The governor made the rounds on the cable news networks last week, talking about her run-in with the president on an airport tarmac near Phoenix.

Brewer called it a “tense” encounter in which Obama criticized her book and then walked away from her while she was in mid-sentence. But two other officials who witnessed the encounter said Obama was nothing but calm and described the event as little more than an “awkward moment.”

Still, the governor has used her version of the encounter to get plenty of air time, seeing an increase in sales of her book which she has called a “truth telling” tome. Amazon ranked “Scorpions for Breakfast” at No. 7 on its best sellers list on Friday. The day of the event, the book had been at No. 343,222.

On Friday, her spokesman told TPM the governor is standing by her version of events. But that spokesman, Matthew Benson, also acknowledged the governor has stumbled on certain facts in the past.

“She’s also been in political life for nearly three decades,” Benson said. “Has she ever said things that she wish she’d said more precisely? Of course.”

“I imagine President Obama would say the same thing,” he added.

In the past, when Brewer has been confronted about inaccurate statements, her first move has been to maintain she was right no matter how clear the matter was.

When a journalist for the Arizona Guardian first pointed out the discrepancy between how Brewer’s father actually died and what she had told another news organization, the governor got angry.

“There is no way I have ever misled anybody,” she said. “You’re trying to make a liar out of me.”

Later that same year, the governor went on Fox News to decry the effect illegal immigration was having on her state. Among the problems, she said, were that people were getting their heads cut off.

“We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings,” she told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren.

h/t: Nick R. Martin at TPM

Jan Brewer, as expected, is already back at it again:

Gov. Jan Brewer late Monday asked the state Supreme Court to reconsider its decision overturning her removal of the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission and to reverse Colleen Mathis’ reinstatement until such time.

The action comes four days after the court rebuffed Brewer’s attempt to block the commission’s work on drawing new political boundaries, citing “gross misconduct” and “serious neglect of duty” by Mathis in her leadership of the independent panel.

The court’s original order (PDF) was very terse, so Brewer and her Republican cronies are complaining that it doesn’t give them enough guidance. Guidance to do what? To re-impeach Colleen Mathis! And yes, they have every intention of plowing full steam ahead with that move:

Senate President-elect Steve Pierce, R-Prescott, last week said he believes a more specific removal letter from the governor to Mathis could allay the court’s concerns. He said he could muster the two-thirds vote in the Senate needed to ratify any removal.

The court promised a detailed ruling, but when you’re a bunch of thugs scrambling to blast through a second lawless impeachment, that’s not soon enough:

The court last week said it will issue that opinion in “due course.” But [Brewer attorney Lisa] Hauser said “due course” could be up to two months away, suggesting that is too long to wait.

But Brewer’s opponents aren’t just fighting back in court. Talk is now heating up about a serious recall effort:

The group that successfully forced a recall against Russell Pearce is now turning its sights on Gov. Jan Brewer.

Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, began taking names Monday from those who are willing to do some of the hard work he said it will take to force the governor to defend her office.

Parraz specifically wants commitments from 5,000 people who each promise to get at least 100 signatures on recall petitions. He said that’s the bare minimum of what it will take to put Brewer’s tenure before voters.

Make no mistake, though: A Brewer recall would be a massive amount of work. Some 432,000 signatures are legally necessary, but Parraz says that his experience with the Pearce recall indicates that organizers would need at least 700,000 to survive inevitable challenges—and they’d only have four months to gather them. And, as in Wisconsin, a candidate would then have to emerge willing to take on Brewer in a recall election.

There is a good reason to believe it’s possible, though, to force Brewer into a recall. In 1998, Republican Gov. Evan Mecham was successfully placed on the ballot for a recall election, but he was impeached by the legislature before the election could be held. With Brewer’s allies firmly in charge of the state Senate, there’s no hope of the latter. But the Mecham story should give us some hope that the former could indeed happen.

RECALL JAN BREWER!

H/T: David Nir at Daily Kos Elections

The Arizona Supreme Court has overturned Gov. Jan Brewer’s politically charged removal of the chair of the state redistricting commission and ordering the official’s reinstatement.

The court’s order issued late Thursday says Brewer’s removal letter failed to demonstrate that Colleen Mathis engaged in conduct that gave Brewer constitutional grounds for removal.

Mathis and the Independent Redistricting Commission had challenged her removal, which interrupted the commission’s once-a-decade drawing of new congressional and redistricting maps.

This is a massively humiliating turn of events for Brewer—and an awesome win for the rule of law. (For the complete background, click here and here.) I’m somewhat surprised that the court decided to get involved in this matter at all, seeing as they could have regarded the entire issue as a “political question” unfit for the legal system, but I’m delighted that they made the right call here.

h/t: David Nir at Daily Kos Elections