August 10, 2008

Divisions on immigration dominate District 18 debate
by Mary Jo Pitzl - Aug

Russell Pearce says the attacks on him as he campaigns for a state Senate seat are all about illegal immigration.

The man running an independent committee targeting Pearce says they're about the future of the Republican Party in Arizona.

In reality, they're about both issues. Tremors in the Republican Party over how to address illegal immigration have broken out into a full-scale earthquake in the race for the Republican nomination for a state Senate seat in District 18 in west Mesa.
Pearce, a four-term state representative, is seeking an open Senate seat. He is being challenged by Kevin Gibbons, a Mesa immigration attorney who is making his first run for public office.

Gibbons said he decided to get into the race to bring a civil tone to the Legislature. He argues that Pearce, with his steadfast opposition to illegal immigration, has poisoned the atmosphere at the Statehouse.

"I'm the breath of fresh air in the Legislature," Gibbons said.

He's fashioned himself as the anti-Pearce, saying that voters - and Arizona - are suffering from "Russell fatigue" after eight years in office.

Gibbons has received a helping hand - several, in fact - from at least three independent-expenditure committees that he insists have no coordination with his campaign. In the past two weeks, the groups have peppered Mesa mailboxes, as well as Web sites and YouTube frames, with a barrage of messages portraying Pearce as racist, misogynist and divisive.


A high profile

That Pearce is often referred to as "Russell" attests to his high-profile status, a reputation he has earned through years of leading campaigns to clamp down on illegal immigration. Those efforts, which included a successful ballot measure in 2004 to deny state benefits to illegal residents, didn't hamper his easy path to re-election. Until now.

"Employer sanctions is the one that pushed them over the top," Pearce said of his opponents, whom he described as business interests that put "profits over patriotism."

As a state representative, Pearce in 2007 won approval for a law that threatens a business' state-issued licenses if the company is found to have hired illegal workers. It won with unanimous Republican support as well as a healthy batch of Democratic votes, but it was almost immediately challenged in federal court by business and civil-rights groups. The law was upheld in District Court and is on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

When businesspeople, organized as Wake Up Arizona!, announced the lawsuit, leaders such as Mac Magruder, who owns various McDonald's restaurants, vowed to work for the defeat of politicians who promoted the law. The heated tone of the Senate race is that promise coming to fruition, Pearce said.

But Nathan Sproul, a political consultant who has unleashed two bare-knuckles attacks on Pearce's character, said the issue extends beyond immigration policy.

"There is a growing sense among people who are mainstream, pro-business Republicans, who believe Russell Pearce is leading our party into a permanent wilderness if we don't act," said Sproul, a former executive director of the state Republican Party and chairman of the Mesa Deserves Better committee.

Sproul is also running a ballot campaign this fall that would loosen some of the state's employer sanctions, but he says the critique of Pearce goes far beyond illegal immigration. Sproul said Pearce leads an extremist faction of the party that, if not called out, will take over the state GOP.

He promises more bomb blasts. Although he wouldn't name them, one is widely expected to deal with Pearce's being fired from his job as head of the state Motor Vehicle Division for allowing subordinates to tamper with records.

Against this backdrop, Gibbons is trying to make his name known among Republicans and independents who can vote in next month's primary. He's received more than $62,000 in campaign contributions, according to the latest campaign report. But judging by a rash of mailers he is sending to district voters, he's raised more than that.

Critics immediately pounced on Gibbons' donors, criticizing him for taking contributions from people outside the district, including $390 from Jim Pederson, former chairman of the state Democratic Party.

Gibbons returned that money, but instead of refunding it to Pederson, he donated it to a domestic-violence shelter and to the Anti-Defamation League. He was making a point, Gibbons said last week: Trying to weave between-the-lines messages into his actions. The shelter donation is a nod to Pearce's domestic woes as outlined in a divorce petition LuAnne Pearce filed 28 years ago. The ADL contribution is a reference to Pearce's ties with a known White supremacist. Those two topics were the subjects of Sproul's inflammatory mailers last week.

Many of Gibbons' talking points are echoed in the messages of groups such as Sproul's Mesa Deserves Better and Judgment Matters, another independent-expenditure committee headed by Farrell Quinlan. Quinlan is a former state Chamber of Commerce official and now a lobbyist whose clients include people opposed to the sanctions law. But Gibbons says his campaign has no ties to the groups and last week denounced the mailer accusing Pearce of domestic violence.


Matt Tolman said the contribution from the Democrat Pederson was enough to persuade him, as chairman of the District 18 Republicans, to drop his neutrality and endorse Pearce. Tolman said he's also bothered by the amount of out-of-district money that Gibbons has accepted, saying the heavy support from agriculture and fast-food interests is from people who simply want cheap labor.


Difference in financing

Gibbons is running a campaign financed by private donations; Pearce has opted to run with public financing.

Gibbons marvels at the criticism: "I'm being endorsed by farmers, and they're villains now." Some farmers, feeling the effects of the sanctions law, have started to move their operations to Mexico. Gibbons said it's important to have food locally grown instead of outsourced.

Gibbons notes that Pearce, by running under the state's Clean Elections public-financing system, is getting his money from across the state. Theoretically, close to half of that money - collected from surcharges on court fines - is from Democrats.

Tolman, the district chairman, has questioned Gibbons' newfound interest in his community, pointing to records that show he didn't vote in three recent city elections, including a 2006 vote on whether to establish a property tax and last fall's election for incentives for the Waveyard, a multiuse development.

Gibbons was at a loss to explain why.

"I don't recall not having voted," he said. "I don't know."

Gibbons said he was urged to run for office by his uncle, the late Sen. Jake Flake, R-Snowflake. And with the District 18 Senate seat opening up with the retirement of Sen. Karen Johnson, Gibbons said he saw an opportunity.


Gibbons brings a different perspective on the contentious illegal-immigration issue.

The employer-sanctions law is bad legislation, he said, because it imposes new regulations on businesses without giving them a legal route to find workers who might evaporate due to the law's restrictions. He supports the idea of a guest-worker program.

Comprehensive immigration reform?

"Let's do reform we can comprehend," he said, adding that to call the current immigration system broken is to acknowledge that it worked at one point.

Gibbons estimates that 90 percent of his law practice deals with immigration issues, and for 12 years, he has hosted programs on Spanish-language radio to deal with callers' questions about immigration law.

He supports the Stop Illegal Hiring initiative that Sproul and business interests have put on the Nov. 4 ballot and says that he doubts a secure-the-border-first approach to national immigration policy can work, although he says that is what voters want.

Pearce makes no apologies for his strident support of laws to crack down on illegal immigration.


States adopt law

The employer-sanctions law is being copied in numerous states. Other Pearce-sponsored bills on illegal immigration have been adopted as model legislation by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the leading conservative voice for statehouses nationwide.

He disputes arguments that his positions have divided the GOP and given the party a racist label. Both the state and county Republican parties have endorsed employer sanctions unanimously - hardly a division, he said.

Yes, he helped lead the charge against Republican politicians who last year were leaning toward a comprehensive immigration bill, including Arizona's two U.S. senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl. But they were pushing "employer amnesty," and that was wrong, Pearce said.


There is more work to be done on immigration. Pearce will renew his push for a law that will require local police agencies to check the legal status of people they stop. The employer-sanctions law needs an amendment to give prosecutors subpoena power, so they can get at a business' employment records.

But first there's an election.

Voters will decide Sept. 2 whether Gibbons or Pearce will carry the GOP standard. The winner will face Democrat Judah Nativio on Nov. 4.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...ist180810.html