You know what beer is the best-selling in the USA, right?
It’s Modelo Especial — a Mexican beer, brewed south of the border and brought across the international line to sate our growing appetite.
That’s good news. It means we can blame our alcoholism, weight problems, liver disease, bar fights and other ills on the border, not on our behavior.
Just like we do with everything else.
This November, Arizona voters will be asked to vote in the general election on a referendum that supporters call the Border Security Act. Among other things, it would:
Tell Arizona’s police to arrest people who cross the Mexican border into the state between ports of entry.
Require public welfare agencies to use the E-verify employment system to check for ineligible applicants
Make it a crime to file a false document for employment or public benefits
Increase penalties for those who sell fentanyl that kills somebody, but only if that fentanyl is not domestically sourced.
The legality of the referendum is being challenged on the basis that it doesn’t deal with a “single issue” as required by Arizona’s constitution. But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Minder ruled late Friday that it does address a single issue because these and other parts of the proposal are all “responses to harms related to an unsecured border.”
Of course he did. Name a problem this country has — crime, housing prices, drugs, environmental degradation, traffic — and people will blame it on that supposed single issue — the U.S.-Mexico border. Americans will do anything not to look at our own faults.
When the single-issue challenge to the referendum was first filed, Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma dismissed its relevance.
“I think all of these items are clearly related to the border,’’ the Peoria Republican said.
Attorneys for groups opposed to the law argued in court last week that even broad umbrella categories such as illegal immigration don’t cover this whole proposal. They noted, for example, that U.S. citizens may well be (and often have been) the people who sell fatal doses of fentanyl.
Attorney Kory Langhofer, representing Legislative Republicans, said there is a logical single issue that unites all that these proposals deal with: Smuggling. Drugs are smuggled, and people are smuggled. It’s all about smuggling over the border.
But the judge at the time seemed skeptical of that — rightly so. All you have to do is look at the twisted language of the provision that would add five years to sentences for selling fentanyl if that sale leads to a death.
That provision attempts to retain its connection to the border, incredibly, by exempting cases in which the fatal fentanyl is from the United States.
The referendum’s language says: “It is an affirmative defense to a charge brought under this section that the fentanyl and its precursor chemicals were either manufactured in the United States or were lawfully imported into the United States.”
In other words, under this proposal, it’s only an exceptionally bad thing to kill somebody with fentanyl you sell if you get it from across the border, rather than, say, a hospital’s supply or an illicit domestic supply. This really gives away the game, doesn’t it?
This proposal only makes sense as a single issue when your political fortunes depend on blaming our ills on the U.S.-Mexico border This is a tried-and-true approach, used mostly by Republicans, that long preceded Donald Trump. Remember John McCain’s “complete the dang fence” ad from the 2010 campaign?
The politics of border alarm has been adopted nationwide since Trump’s 2016 win and matters most of all in the GOP’s primary elections. We should view the Border Security Act in this context.
House Speaker Toma is one of six Republicans running for the party’s nomination in Congressional District 8. He helped pass an earlier version of the measure, which made it a felony to cross into Arizona between ports of entry and carried the provocative name “Arizona Border Invasion Act.”
This was an imitation of the law, known as SB 4, that Texas’ Legislature recently passed. That law also makes immigration violations a state crime, but it’s been enjoined by a federal court.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the original Arizona bill. So, Toma was forced to reconfigure the measure as a referendum to the voters — something the governor can’t veto and the voters must pass. But winning a referral to the voters required legislative horse-trading. That’s what brought the fentanyl sentencing provision into the proposal, and the false-document and E-Verify provisions.
They might as well have thrown in a ban on Modelo Especial, that intoxicating Mexican substance with its deleterious social effects. In today’s political climate, every American problem is considered part of this “single issue” now — the border.
