Rogue Columnist

'I can't wait for this to end'

I've heard this expression from so many people over the past two weeks, including some who are politically savvy. What world are you living in?

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, it's not going to end. Donald Trump might refuse to accept the results of the election. Although this might lack any foundation in law — unless the Republican Party had ground to challenge specific state results — it would embolden his hardcore, alt-right supporters. To do...well, they have the guns, don't they?

If she wins but Democrats fail to gain a majority in the Senate, it's not going to end. Republicans have stated explicitly that they will refuse to approve any Supreme Court nominee she puts before the upper house. President Obama's highly qualified, centrist-to-a-fault nominee Merrick Garland has not even been granted a hearing before the Senate.

This is only the beginning. The scorched-earth nihilism shown by a disciplined Republican Congress will only intensify if the party loses the White House yet again. Clinton's cabinet and agency nominees could conceivable be blocked for the next four years. The GOP will stop at nothing, because its members believe only they have the right to rule. This was the party willing to default on U.S. debt and bring on world depression to stick it to That (Black) Man in the White House. Its austerity has prolonged the suffering of millions.

In the elevator, a veteran politician said that Hillary had the ability to get things done LBJ-style. With all due respect, LBJ had solid Democratic majorities in Congress, a mass Republican party with plenty of liberals and centrists, the American liberal consensus still intact, and the nation's sympathy for the martyred John F. Kennedy. None of those things appertain today.

Brewer tells the truth

The national progressive echo chamber had quite a fit last week when former Gov. Jan Brewer brushed off the suggestion that Hispanics would cause Hillary Clinton to win Arizona. "Nah," she told the Boston Globe, "They don't get out and vote. They don't vote." The thought police pounced, condemnations flooded Facebook, and a Twitter lynch mob gathered at such a racist statement.

But she told the truth. Rare for her, perhaps unprecedented, but accurate for once.

Hispanics made up 30 percent of the population of Maricopa County in 2014, compared with only 16 percent in 1990. Yet in that critical election, their voter participation rate was in the single digits. And it can't be explained away by saying that low-income people vote less. The low-income Anglos vote religiously and conservatively.

Brewer, an accidental governor when St. Janet read the future and decamped for D.C. and then California, did much to help ensure this. As Secretary of State, charged with overseeing elections, she was also chair of the state Bush re-election committee in 2004. I'm sure polling locations were abundant and well handled in majority Latino precincts. Then, running on her own, she defeated the eminently better-qualified Terry Goddard on the strength of her backing the anti-immigrant SB 1070.

As I have written before, SB 1070 had little to do with illegal immigration and everything to do with ginning up the old Midwestern-immigrant Anglo GOP base and intimidating Mexican-American citizens. And one of the dirty secrets was that not a few older Mexican-Americans, who had seen their neighborhoods, schools, and culture most destabilized by the wave of illegals in the 2000s, quietly supported the bill, too.

But the problem of low Hispanic turnout predates the embarrassing, finger-in-the-face-of-the-president Jan Brewer, a woman who would drive down the class level of the trashiest trailer park.

A looming constitutional crisis

In an interview today with a Philadelphia radio station, wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III said, "I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up. I promise you. This is where we need the majority."

Any nominee.

Later, according to Talking Points Memo, McCain's office appeared to back slightly away from the statement, saying, "Sen. McCain believes you can only judge people by their record and Hillary Clinton has a clear record of supporting liberal judicial nominees. That being said, Sen. McCain will, of course, thoroughly examine the record of any Supreme Court nominee put before the Senate and vote for or against that individual based on their qualifications as he has done throughout his career."

Trust the original blurt as the truth. Trust it, too, because of the unprecedented refusal of the Republican-controlled Senate to even give a hearing to President Obama's nominee, the distinguished federal Judge Merrick Garland, as moderate as they get and recipient of the highest rating from the American Bar Association. It's 215 days and counting  

Before we examine the implications of McCain's statement and the behavior of the Republican Senate, it's worth reminding Arizonans exactly who John McCain is.

Now the action is downticket

A confession: Almost all my close friends as an adult have been women. I haven't spent much time in locker rooms, much less engaged in "locker-room talk," as the Republican presidential nominee excused his language about grabbing pussies. On the ambulance, contrary to the dialogue on the television series Emergency, we talked about only two things: calls and sex. This was even true of the female paramedics. Get two guys as partners and the talk could turn quite bawdy in assessing our lusts-of-the-moment. But it was never what Trump was saying, which was about sexual assault. It gives a sinister meaning to "binders full of women."

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Donald Trump knows he's a pig. If it takes the now infamous tape to bring him down, so be it. So many other statements, actions, and positions should have already done this, including his pledge to imprison his opponent if elected. Like so much else, it is unprecedented in American presidential politics. We're way beyond the need for a Godwin's Law warning when discussing Trump — he is on a Hitlerian path.

It's important to understand that little of the recent Republican abandonment of Trump is based on principle. Wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III was apparently fine with draft-dodger Trump calling him a coward for being imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese. With the primary behind him and Hillary Clinton potentially winning Arizona, suddenly it's OK for McCain to denounce him. And so it goes. They are acting strategically, to prevent losing control of the Senate or even the House.

Another critical fact is that Trump now embodies the GOP after decades of drift into extremism, slaughter of RINOs, and flight from reality ("We create our own reality."). With or without Trump, the party denies mainstream science on climate change, wants to privatize or give to the states our public lands, privatize Social Security and destroy the social safety net, pursue ruinous austerity, appoint activist judges and Supreme Court justices, suppress voting rights, carry on a war against cities, deny women reproductive choice, cut taxes on the richest, "starve the beast" to show "gub'ment is the problem," turn us into a fascist theocracy. Behold the Party of Lincoln. The basic policies would have been the same under nominees Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, Fiorina, Carson, Bush, Jindal, Graham, Perry, Walker, or the strangely still respected Paul Ryan. Remember this. Burn it in your brain.

The park Phoenix almost lost

Today's Papago Park is full of delights and history, from the Desert Botanical Garden to the Phoenix Zoo, Hole-in-the-Rock, hiking, baseball, and Hunt's Tomb. As the official website says, "Its massive, otherworldly sandstone buttes set Papago Park apart, even in a city and state filled with world-class natural attractions."

But Papago Park almost didn't happen.

For those of you who don't venture south of Bell, north of "south Chandler," or are out-of-town readers, I'm writing about land that sits in east Phoenix and north Tempe. Technically, the boundaries run from McDowell on the north to Tempe Town Lake on the south, and 52nd Street and the Crosscut Canal/College Avenue to the west and east respectively. The park could have been much larger.

These magical uplands were five-and-a-half miles from the original Phoenix townsite when they were included in the reservation for the Pima and Maricopa tribes by President Rutherford B. Hayes. This was 1879, when the biggest concerns of the hardscrabble settlements of Phoenix and Tempe were reclaiming the Hohokam canals for agriculture. The National Park Service claims the Hohokam used Hole-in-the-Rock to mark the solstice. Early American settlers also appreciated the beauty of the ancient rock formations, including Carl Hayden (born in 1877) growing up across the river in Tempe.

Later in the 19th century, the reservation was contracted to the present-day borders of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Some desultory mining activity took place around the buttes and they became more popular as exotic destinations for visitors. In 1914, a grown up Hayden, the new state's only representative in the U.S. House lobbied his friend, President Woodrow Wilson, to make the area a National Park. Wilson declined, but using the presidential powers of the Antiquities Act, declared it the Papago Saguaro National Monument. At the time, it stretched from the Salt River to Thomas Road.