In remembrance of Russell Pearce and the fate of the “Republic”

Although it is not our policy to post articles we did not write or something of this length, this is the worthy exception. Read it and you’ll understand.

A Celebration of the Life of Russell Pearce took place Monday, January 16 in the town he always called home…Mesa. Friends, family, and a crowd of admirers assembled to celebrate the life of this conservative stalwart and thoroughly decent man.

Former Congressman JD Hayworth was in attendance, and could not help but notice the difference between Monday’s service and the “send-off” provided by the daily newspaper. It prompted Hayworth to pen this column, reprinted below.

Russell Pearce and the fate of the “Republic”

You need not look very far to find the latest evidence reaffirming the well-earned nickname of The Arizona Republic.

A reading of the Jan. 5 article on the death of former State Senator Russell Pearce brings to mind the single word that serves both as an accurate description of that sickly publication’s open borders bias…as well as its oft-employed sobriquet: Repugnant.

The trio of creative writers tasked with putting Pearce’s passing “in perspective” certainly didn’t disappoint their editorial overlords; they deliberately mischaracterized the intent of his carefully crafted, ultimately passed, and signed-into-law Senate Bill 1070.

Actually, headline writers began the barrage by calling the legislation “controversial.” That word serves as the “tell sign” when a publication disapproves of the subject of its coverage. Reporters Andrew Oxford, Mary Jo Pitzl, and Daniel Gonzalez weren’t far behind; by the article’s third paragraph, they included predictable leftist doggerel, peddled as fact: “Arizona’s ‘show me your papers’ law,” they wrote.

Had the trio of scribes been interested in objectivity instead of smearing the departed, a simple bit of research into SB 1070 and its fate in the courts would have been highlighted.

The “Fair and Legal Employment Act,” as Pearce named the legislation, drafted in consultation with then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who now serves as that state’s Attorney General, was formulated with the intent of defining Arizona’s right to identify and detain illegal immigrants, based on existing federal law.

As Senator Pearce said in 2010, in response to the inevitable court challenges from the Obama Administration and other advocates for open borders, “SB 1070 makes no new immigration law. It simply enforces the laws already on the books…I refuse to apologize for standing up for America and the rule of law.”

In fact, no less a liberal tribunal than the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made clear in 1983 that nothing in federal law precludes a city from enforcing the criminal provisions of immigration law, and SB 1070, its supporters maintained, simply advanced that same practice for the entire state of Arizona.

But the intervening 27 years brought forth an activism intent on defining “open borders” as noble, and any effort to enforce existing immigration law as wrongheaded, or on “the wrong side of history,” to use the favorite buzz-phrase of the left.

Such a dubious cause sought to wrap itself in legitimacy, and exploit the growing realization that many jurists on the federal bench were more than willing to usurp legislative authority if such a drastic action were in tune with their own political goals. Instead of “equal justice under law,” our nation has witnessed the advent of “unequal application of the law, based upon political preference.”

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of SB 1070, and the high court, while finding some portions of the legislation in conflict with federal law, upheld the provision that the left and its media lackeys still mischaracterize.

Far from radical, the “Supremes” found that seeking documentation for a person’s immigration status was entirely reasonable. The ruling stated that if law enforcement officers have stopped a subject for a legitimate reason, those officers must “reasonably attempt” to determine that subject’s immigration status when there is a “reasonable suspicion” that the person may be in the country illegally.

But reasonableness means nothing to the rabid, and the reporting of the “Repugnant” focuses on pleasing a particular point of view typified by those whose hatred of Russell Pearce has not abated…even after his earthly departure.

How else to describe the featured comments of one “community activist,” who compared Pearce to a terrorist? Said this “activist,” whose name is omitted from this column since she is undeserving of any additional notoriety: “I’m sad for all the terror that he caused our community, [and] all the people who were deported because of his political grandstanding.”

For good measure, the “Repugnant” reporters felt the need to include one more example of this self-appointed “humanitarian’s” inhumanity: her desire to see the deceased lampooned for laughs. “She would love to see one last political cartoon showing Pearce standing at the gates of Heaven, and being asked to ‘show his papers.’”

What does The Arizona Republic have to show for its desired editorial goal of open borders and its eager embrace of amnesty for illegal aliens? Fewer readers, for one thing. A budget awash in red ink, for another.

Russell Pearce met the fate that awaits us all. Now he belongs to history.

The smug and self-assured, so eager to bid him farewell will soon find the publication for which they toil facing its own demise. Maybe then, the staff of The Arizona Republic will realize that they are on “the wrong side of history.”

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