Thread: 2 challenges mounted to immigration law

2 challenges mounted to immigration law
May 26, 2010 5:17 pm | Updated: 5:31 pm, Wed May 26, 2010.

Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 2 comments

Two new political challenges have been mounted to the state’s tough new immigration law.

Phoenix resident Brandon Slayton began a drive to refer SB 1070 to the November ballot.

Slayton needs to gather more than 76,000 signatures by July 28 to stop the new law from taking effect until voters get a chance to weigh in. If the petition drive is successful, the law would have to be ratified by a majority of those voting on the question.

Slayton did not return calls seeking comment. And it appears he has no political organization to get the signatures.

His effort also flies in the face of decisions by two other groups to cancel their own referendum drives.

Backers of those pointed out the Arizona Constitution says any measure which has been enacted by voters can be repealed or substantially amended only by voters. And the referendum essentially asks Arizonans to vote on SB 1070.

The Rev. John Auther said that is why he is taking a different approach.

His initiative proposes an entirely new state law — but one devoid of anything that was added by SB 1070. That gets around the possibility that failure of the initiative would forever cement the immigration bill into law.

But the trade-off is that Auther, pastor of St. Francis Xavier church in Phoenix, needs to collect more than 153,000 signatures. And he needs them by July 1.

He acknowledged the difficulty of that chore. But Auther said he had to take the first step.

“Until the initiative was submitted to the secretary of state, it’s hard to get people to sign on to something that might happen,â€

The other two groups who canceled their decision to put this as a referandum ballot for November realized that they would find that an overwhelming number of voters would turn out to the polls on that item and vote it down and since the voters were already there voting on that issue they would go ahead and vote on other issues such as who to elect for Senators and congressman.

The final thing they realized is that by putting it on a ballot that it would be immune to future Arizona legislatve amendments or repeal as it would require voter action to repeal the law if approved by the voters.

So they looked at their poker hand and decided it was not in their best interest to put it on the November ballot and instead seek challenges in court and hopes that they can get more pro-alien representatives into state office and promote a change to the Arizona 1070 law in future legislative action.