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By John Cheney-Lippold
Truthdig
Posted on Apr 23, 2010
Even before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the racist, anti-immigrant SB 1070 into law Friday, the climate around the debate on immigration in that border state had been saturated by politics.
Plain old politics, the refuge of self-involved scoundrels who vote and act not for the greater good but for the greater length of their terms in office. Plain old politics, the world of white men and corruption and corporate pillow talk.Plain old politics, the ideological place from which we should expect a bill like SB 1070—one which legalizes the profiling of brown people, with or without documents and with or without cause—to spring, and to which it should be summarily thrown back. The public discourse surrounding the legislation has pointed out beyond a doubt its unconstitutionality, its waste of resources and its ultimately immoral standing.
Political opportunism has made a bad law a reality, as in so many of the critical political decisions that we have seen go awry in this country. “Everybody was afraid to vote no on immigration,” declared Republican state Sen. Bill Konopnicki in the most honest quotation I have heard from a politician in the past decade. The climate in Arizona proved terrifying enough to make every Republican legislator—even Konopnicki, who said he doesn’t even believe the bill will work—vote for it, as politicians prepare for re-election in the coming months. As far-right challengers attack Republican Party conservatives, more and more politicians are following in the footsteps of state senator and SB 1070 author Russell Pearce, darling of the discredited Minuteman movement and, until a couple of months ago, outlier of Republican ideology. The New York Times reports that while surveys show immigration to be less an issue than it was half a decade ago, many Republicans still wave their anti-immigrant banner and 82 percent of self-identified tea party advocates believe illegal immigration to be a “very serious” problem.
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