(Tuesday, January 25. Phoenix, AZ) As President Obama prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight with an expected call for civility, the Arizona legislature is taking up a bill with a less chummy message to the federal government. That declaration can be summed up in three words: “Stay outta Arizona.”
HB2077 doesn’t t actually ban Feds from entering the state. It would just harass them and prevent them from doing their jobs. And who better to enforce this anti-Washington law (with its old-timey, anti-Easterner resentment) than that iconic Western figure: The Sheriff.
But Pearce has never been known for his sense of humor — and that’s not t likely to change with the “joke” he recently told about what would happen if President Obama visits Arizona.
One note of context: during the president’s 2009 visit to Phoenix, where he addressed the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars, armed men milled around outside the hall, including one carrying a semi-automatic version of a U.S. military assault rifle. The man with the assault rifle was a member of a Phoenix-area church that also expressed a less-than-welcoming posture toward the nation’s first Black president.
The day before Obama’s visit, Steven Anderson, pastor of the Faithful World Baptist Church, explained that he wasn’t about to “pray for God to give [Obama] a good lunch tomorrow, while he’s in Phoenix, Arizona. Nope. I’m not going to pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.”
To be clear, Pearce is not a member of Anderson’s church. But, he is certainly aware of the hate-talk and prayers for the president’s death that filled the airwaves in Phoenix during and after the president’s visit. It’s a climate Pearce continues to stoke. In late November, Pearce told a crowd that Obama had committed treason when the president “sided with a foreign government” against the United State by opposing SB1070.
In a few weeks, Pearce will be sworn in as president of the Arizona State Senate. And that’s no joke.
