James E. Garcia, Arizona Mirror

It wasn’t a debate, which is what we all really wanted to see, but we did get to watch the Republican and Democratic candidates for Arizona governor respond, one at a time, to hot topic questions about what they plan to do if they get the job.

Last week’s candidate forum was hosted by the Arizona and U.S. Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and sponsored by the Si Se Vota CPLC Action Fund — which is spending $10 million in this election cycle on a non-partisan campaign to boost Latino voter turnout called Latino Loud.

Arizona’s 2.3 million Latinos now make up a third of the state’s population, and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials predicts 644,000 Latinos will vote in November. Nationally, 11.6 million Latinos are expected to vote in the midterms.

Today, there are some 32 million eligible Latino voters nationwide, and 1 million Latinos reach voting age every year.

First up at the forum was Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor. Hobbs has become a national figure in efforts to counter the GOP’s baseless claims that former President Donald Trump was cheated out of winning his reelection bid in 2020.

He wasn’t. It’s a lie. There’s no evidence to back up that charge and dozens of court cases and ballot recounts have proven it wrong.

But that hasn’t stopped Hobbs’ Republican opponent, Kari Lake, from repeatedly spreading that lie during her campaign or insisting that Joe Biden is only president because of massive fraud at the polls.

Trump, at a Mesa campaign rally last week in support of Lake and other Republican candidates in Arizona, repeated false claims the election was “rigged” and “stolen.”

“I ran twice. I won twice,” Trump told the crowd.

One of the toughest things about running for office, unless you’re a demagogue, is the need to not only sound like you know what you’re talking about but to actually know what you’re talking about.

Hobbs, unlike Lake and Trump, is no demagogue. She may come across on stage as somewhat overwhelmed by the entire experience, but she’s basically a well-intentioned public servant who’s been on a fast learning curve going from relative obscurity to running in one of the most high-stakes elections in the nation’s history — the stakes are that high — and all while facing death threats from Trump supporters just for doing her job.

But where do Hobbs and Lake stand on the issues?

Here’s a rundown of the answers the candidates provided to national Univision Anchor Leon Krauze. The forum opened with Hobbs.

Hobbs

On education, she blames Republicans for not investing enough in our public schools and opposes a new law that is funneling millions in state taxpayer dollars to fund vouchers that parents can use to send their kids to private schools. Hobbs predicts $1 billion will eventually go to bankroll the voucher program. Students of color, and especially Latino students, will suffer disproportionately as a result of the voucher program, she said. Underfunding public schools, she added, is hurting the economy by leaving students unprepared to enter the workforce. If elected, she’d push for more public school funding.

On abortion, Hobbs opposed the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. She pledged to call a special legislative session to repeal an 1864 abortion law that was reinstated in September and recently put on hold by a state court. She added that she would lead a ballot initiative to roll back a state abortion law passed by Republicans earlier this year that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

On immigration, Hobbs says Congress needs to pass a comprehensive reform bill that establishes a more orderly immigration process, which she says would dissuade illegal immigration, boost our economy by growing the nation’s labor pool and lower inflation. But Hobbs, like many establishment politicians, also wants the federal government to step up border security. That, despite the fact that sending tens of thousands more agents to guard the border over the past 20 years has done little to reduce undocumented immigration. To her credit, Hobbs calls what’s happening at our border with Mexico a humanitarian crisis, and rejects Lake’s race-baiting claim that it’s “an invasion” that’s undermining our society.

Asked why she won’t debate Lake directly, Hobbs said Lake is more interested in ”creating a spectacle” and sparking a “shouting match” than participating in a civil debate over substantive issues. Hobbs is probably right, but as Lake pointed out, that doesn’t explain why Hobbs declined to debate businessman Marco Lopez, her opponent in the Democratic primary, who is hardly known for creating spectacles.

On how to reduce opioid-related deaths in Arizona, which kill more than 200 people a month statewide, Hobbs, a former social worker, said she would boost drug abuse treatment programs and step up cooperation between state and federal law enforcement to combat cross-border drug trafficking. Hobbs noted that Lake has called to dismantle the FBI.

To address the state’s growing water shortage, Hobbs says she would convene major stakeholders on the issue to develop solutions to the growing crisis, and work to promote conservation measures, like water recycling. She also wants to create a state energy plan to address climate change, which scientists say has worsened drought conditions in Arizona and increased the frequency and intensity of wildfires.

Curiously, the one question Krauze posed that seemed to stump Hobbs was this: “Growing up in Arizona…What have you specifically learned from the Latino community?” Hobbs appeared caught off guard by the question, even though she was speaking to a mostly Latino audience.

She hemmed and hawed before finally settling on “Arizona wouldn’t be Arizona without what the Latino community brings.” That seems pretty obvious. But how about the fact that Latinos account for more than $60 billion in consumer spending every year and now account for nearly 50% of the children in our public schools. Or that Latinos are becoming an ever more critical part of our electorate in an ever more important swing state, and addressing the issues that matter to them is critical. Or that Hispanic women make up the fastest-growing segment of small business growth in the state. Or that Latinos are not a monolith, politically, culturally or ethnically. Or that when you survey Latinos, that they care about all of the same major issues that non-Latino voters care about, like jobs, the economy, growing health care costs and abortion, but they care about these issues through a Latino lens.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it at this. If Hobbs is elected governor, she should be better prepared to answer that question and address the issues Latinos care about because, yes, “Arizona wouldn’t be Arizona without what the Latino community brings,” and that’s never going to change.

Lake

For her part, Lake was asked many, but not all, of the same questions Hobbs fielded at the forum.

On immigration, as with a number of other issues, the audience was treated to a version of the Republican candidate I’ll call “Lake-lite” — meaning she avoided many of her more outrageous stances and allegations, including her claim that Hobbs should be jailed for certifying the 2020 election, or that she wants journalists in the “corrupt media” jailed as well.

Lake told Krause she supports “legal immigration.” Hmm, I don’t know anyone who supports illegal immigration, except human smugglers who ferry undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers north across the border.

The point she was making is that Democrats, in her view, support and even encourage illegal immigration, though she offers no evidence to back that up. President Joe Biden, she alleged, has “handed over” control of the border to international drug cartels. False. If true, the same claim would apply to every U.S. president for the past several decades. They’ve all tried to control the border, to varying degrees of success. No president has ever declared, “I give up. Drug cartels, go for it.” Not to mention, who gobbles up and pays top dollar for those illicit drugs? Us. The American people. We order it and the cartels dish it out.

Still, according to Lake, “We had the most secure border” under Trump. Huh? Oh, right, under Trump undocumented immigration all but evaporated. The cartels gave up trying to sell us drugs. American-made guns stopped flowing south. And immigrants took one look at Trump’s wall and said, “Ya, no puedo.” “I just can’t.”

We had the most secure border? What we had was the most inhumane treatment of immigrants in modern history. The Biden administration is still trying to reunite hundreds of children who were ordered separated from their parents by Trump, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s de facto immigration czar, Stephen Miller. These children’s lives were destroyed and Trump, Miller and Lake couldn’t give a damn. And let’s not forget, Trump’s attempt to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

What Lake conveniently avoids when talking about immigration is the multiple push-pull factors that drive migrants from around the world to the U.S. For instance, climate change and deteriorating economic and political conditions in Central America, Cuba and Venezuela are pushing migrants to flee to the United States just to survive. And why do they come? Because we keep hiring them. And why are there so many jobs for immigrants to fill? Because U.S. population growth isn’t keeping up with our growing demand for workers.

In other words, we don’t need less immigration, we need more. But instead of coming up with an “orderly process,” they are forced to risk their lives crossing the Sonoran Desert. That’s not border security, it’s just plain cruel.

After pointing out that her husband is Latino and her mother-in-law came to the U.S. as a legal Colombian immigrant (as if that makes it okay for Lake to idolize Trump, the most anti-immigrant president in modern history), Lake quickly pivoted to a laundry list of heinous crimes that only a fraction of immigrants commit. People wouldn’t believe how many murderers, rapists and child molesters are detained every year by immigration and customs authorities, Lake told the audience.

Nevermind that if you were to randomly detain 2 million U.S. citizens traveling across the country (that’s about how many people were apprehended trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border last year) that you’d almost certainly find a higher incidence of dangerous criminals, since studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at “substantially lower rates” than American citizens.

Lake’s alarmist messaging is designed to convey that most immigrants should be feared, not welcomed, a feat she manages to accomplish by failing to mention that the vast and overwhelming majority of immigrants, undocumented or not, come to the U.S. in search of work and a better life for their families, and not to rape, maim and kill.

Surprisingly, however, when asked about Gov. Doug Ducey’s so-called compassionate practice of busing migrants north from the Arizona-Mexico border and dumping them in Democrat-run cities, Lake said she would end the practice as governor. She even went so far as to say the practice by Ducey, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis equalled “human trafficking.” Good for Lake. Human trafficking, like separating children at the border, is wrong.

But despite labeling DeSantis a criminal — trafficking immigrants is, after all, a federal offense — Lake said she’d be more than happy to welcome National Guard troops from Florida to “stop people from coming across” the border. DeSantis, she said, has already agreed to join a multi-state effort to seal the border.

Why lock down the border at all? Because we need to stop what Lake labels an “invasion.” Do you know who else labels it an invasion? The same people who claim Democrats have a secret plan to replace all white people in the U.S. with brown immigrants. They call it the “replacement theory.” Trump also calls it an invasion.

Do you know who else viewed it that way? The Trump supporter who slaughtered 23 people, most of them Latinos, during a mass shooting in El Paso in 2019. Also another Trump fan who shot 11 people dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. Why? Because he thought Jewish parishioners were bringing dark-skinned immigrants to the U.S. to slaughter white people.

Let’s be clear, saying an invasion is underway and implying that immigrants are swarming across our border intent on destroying our way of life is not only irresponsible but it’s designed to incite violence in the ranks of, you got it, Lake and Trump supporters.

On abortion, Lake said she supports the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, adding it should be up to individual states to regulate abortion. Asked by Krauze if she would support the right of a 12-year-old girl who’s been raped by a relative to seek an abortion, Lake said she would, even though the abortion law recently signed by Gov. Ducey makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, and even though she has previously labeled people who seek abortions as murderers and executioners.

What she does oppose, she said, is Democrats who want to abort a fetus “up until the baby’s born and then after the baby’s born.” Lake is referring to a rare medical procedure commonly known as a “late-term abortion.” Discussions about the procedure by critics, according to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, “are often fraught with misinformation” from people who claim it occurs “moments before birth” or even “after birth.” In reality, according to KFF, “these scenarios do not occur, nor are they legal, in the U.S.”

Again, Lake’s goal isn’t to engage in thoughtful debate on the subject. It’s meant to characterize Hobbs’ stance on abortion as inhumane, bloodthirsty and criminal.

On education, Lake said she backs the state giving parents checks to send their children to private schools. She also pledged to raise teacher salaries — her father was a history teacher — while claiming the salaries of school administrators are too high. She also supports creating high school trade programs to prepare students for the job market. She didn’t say if she would increase public school funding.

Krauze closed his questioning by asking Lake if she will accept the results of the November election if she loses, especially given her previous claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump and that he, not Biden, should be in the White House today.

Lake didn’t answer the question directly, but said, “I’ll accept the results if it’s a fair election.” She also said she will insist on a hand count of the paper ballots because she believes, again without evidence, that electronic ballot counting machines are inaccurate.

Trump supporters in 2020, many of whom back Lake, also claimed the electronic vote-counting machines were inaccurate, but a hand-count paid for by Trump backers after the election confirmed that Biden won the 2020 race in Arizona by a slightly larger margin than the vote-counting machines had determined.

Lake didn’t mention that either.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

One of the great stories in Arizona politics involves the recall 10 years ago this month of then-Republican Senate President Russell Pearce, the far-right author of the single most anti-immigrant bill in modern U.S. history, Senate Bill 1070.

More commonly known as the “show us your papers" law, its passage wreaked terror in the immigrant community, sparked a national economic boycott of Arizona, and supercharged an already growing progressive movement whose reverberations are still being felt across state politics today.

One of the people inspired to counter the threat posed by Pearce's political ascent was Randy Parraz, a longtime community organizer and the founder and president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, which formed to drive the 2011 recall effort.

“I just couldn't believe that someone with that type of extremist views — racist, anti-Latino — could be rewarded for that type of behavior. That's what really captured me and (made me decide and) say I have to do something," said Parraz, who recently published, “Dignity by Fire," a book about the recall.

For Parraz, Pearce's draconian views on immigration were just the tip of the iceberg. “Of even greater concern to some families was his insistence on cutting Medicaid, rejecting billions of health care dollars from the federal government and eliminating funds to assist patients waiting for organ transplants," Parraz writes. Pearce had also presided over a Senate that cut nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in funding from K–12 education.

“He was extreme in many ways," Parraz said. “Anti-union, anti-worker, anti-women. He wanted to change laws to make it more difficult to press charges against a man when they committed domestic violence against a woman."

But a grassroots campaign to take down the man many at the time regarded as Arizona's most powerful politician was viewed by most of the state's leading power brokers as not only unlikely but downright crazy and even counterproductive.

The widespread fear among leading Democrats, Pearce's mostly muted critics in the Republican Party and the state's powerful business community was that going after Pearce would fail miserably and spark a backlash that could damage their own agendas.

Among Parraz's most ardent Democratic naysayers was then-state Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who now represents Arizona in the U.S. Senate.

In his book, the author recounts a conversation between his wife, Lillia Alvarez, and Sinema about her involvement in the recall. According to Alvarez, Sinema called the campaign “dangerous" and warned, “You need to stop that right now . . . And, besides, he's my boss and he would kill all of my bills."

“Despite [Pearce's] anti-anything-progressive record," Parraz writes, “some Democrats still wanted to go along to get along in pursuit of their own agendas."

One reason so many of the state's established leaders opposed the recall, Parraz said, was the belief that Pearce was politically invincible. Pearce had never lost an election, he represented a “ruby red" conservative district, and he was president of the state Senate. Not to mention, no one in the Arizona Legislature had ever been recalled and there had never been a state Senate president recalled in U.S. history.

Even if he could be recalled, the “conventional wisdom" went, no Democrat could beat him in a special election and no Republican would risk sticking their neck out to run against him.

Citizens for a Better Arizona had an answer for all of that. The group's strategy was to first convince just enough registered voters in the district to sign a petition to recall Pearce, then get them to support a moderate Republican candidate to run against him.

Under the state's recall rules, the group needed 7,756 signatures — or 25% of the number of voters who had cast a ballot in Pearce's last election. Assuming that few Republicans would back the recall movement, Citizens for a Better Arizona set out to gather the necessary signatures from the district's pool of about 40,000 registered Democrats and independents.

The bigger challenge, of course, involved finding a moderate, pro-immigrant, Republican “unicorn" brave enough to take Pearce on.

Along the way, Parraz and his team learned that there was also a growing contingent of Republicans in the district who were fed up with Pearce's extremist agenda, including his racist anti-immigrant stance. Much of that opposition came from the district's influential population of followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as Mormons, though the church has shied away from that moniker in recent years.

Many in the church, despite leaning Republican, are generally pro-immigrant. Of the church's more than 16 million members worldwide, about 40% are in Latin America.

In the end, Pearce was not only recalled but beaten by double digits in a special election won by political newcomer Jerry Lewis in a campaign backed by a first-of-its-kind coalition that included a demographically diverse array of Democratic, Republican and independents voters.

Instrumental in Pearce's defeat was the district's growing bloc of Latino voters. In the latter months of the campaign, droves of mostly young volunteers from across the Valley, including some undocumented immigrants, knocked on thousands of doors in the district urging voters to turn out the powerful incumbent.

“For decades, Latinos in safe, red Republican districts [like Pearce's] had been ignored or taken for granted," Parraz writes. But thanks to Latino grassroots organizations like Somos America, Mi Familia Vota, and Promise Arizona in Action, Parraz writes, “For fifty straight days, Latino voters felt the love and attention of hundreds of volunteers who finally came to their neighborhoods, came to their casas (homes), knocked on their doors, and said, 'We need your vote!' "

The ultimate legacy of the Pearce recall, Parraz said, has been three-fold.

First, since Pearce's ouster, Arizona Republicans have failed to pass any major anti-immigration legislation.

Also, Parraz adds, had Pearce remained in office, a later push in the Legislature to expand access to Medicaid would almost certainly have failed. As a result of what Parraz calls as an “unintended victory" of the recall, hundreds of thousands of low-income Arizonans today have health care coverage.

Most importantly, defeating Pearce showed, said Parraz, that “citizens can and must get involved when the prevailing institutions [including the state's major political parties] fail to hold certain politicians accountable."

With the publication of his book behind him, what's next for Parraz?

As co-founder and president of Organizing Institute for Democracy, Parraz said he and his family are making plans to relocate soon from California to Arizona, where they plan to buy a home.

Parraz said his group might get involved in a new voter initiative to repeal the ban on in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants. He also plans to fight what he calls recent steps by the legislature to “criminalize" voting rights.

No word on whether Parraz and Pearce plan to meet up anytime soon to talk about old times.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Congressman Ruben Gallego got it right when he recently described his House colleague, Paul Gosar, as “Just an awful human being."

Gallego was commenting on the news that Gosar had posted an altered anime video of himself on Twitter, which he's since removed, that depicted him executing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, by slashing the back of her neck with a sword and nearly decapitating her, and then attacking President Joe Biden — the animated version of “Gosar" freezing a split second before his blades make contact with the president's head.

Gosar, a Prescott Republican and white nationalist icon, later said it all was a big joke.

It was. A very sick and repugnant joke.

And while his “joke" may not mean that Gosar actually wants to kill Ocasio-Cortez, it's the latest illustration of just how far Gosar and a growing contingent of the Republican Party are willing to go when it comes to trivializing and often outright encouraging violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

Gosar has also described the throngs who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to block the certification of Biden's 2020 election as “peaceful patriots." Really? Those peaceful patriots left more than 140 Capitol and D.C. police officers injured, and one officer dead. Others also died as a result of the attack.

But in case you're wondering, Gosar's mock-murder of Ocasio-Cortez isn't really about politics, in the same way that rape isn't really about sex.

This isn't Gosar's way of saying he disagrees ideologically with the congresswoman's progressive stances on issues like climate change, universal pre-K or paid family medical leave.

Gosar's assault on Ocasio-Cortez is about race and gender — and especially race.

Ocasio-Cortez is everything Gosar and his ilk detest and fear: an intelligent Brown woman with power.

Gosar wouldn't dare circulate an anime video of him pretending to behead Rep. Liz Cheney, and not because she's a fellow Republican — though she's recently turned her back on many of her Republican colleagues — but because she's a white woman, and even the most racist members of today's Trumpian GOP wouldn't stand for it.

“After all, Paul," I can just imagine some of them saying, “you wouldn't want to encourage anyone to do anything crazy now would you? You know, like chop Liz's head off!!!"

Nevermind that that's precisely what Gosar's cartoon caricature of himself does to Ocasio-Cortez.

The video also goes out of its way to tie Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in Bronx, to the theme of illegal immigration.

The video repeatedly cuts to grainy clips showing immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, as Border Patrol agents, including some galloping on horseback, valiantly “defend" America.

And just so you know how dangerous these immigrants are, the video screen is splattered with anime blood stains, though I'm not sure if the implication is that the immigrants have sparked a murderous bloodbath or if “Gosar the Titan slayer" is slashing them as they cross.

Either way, the message is clear: Menacing Brown immigrants are invading the U.S. and our evil villain, Ocasio-Cortez, is leading the charge. But never fear, hard-right, neo-fascist white America, Gosar is here!

For her part, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted soon after landing in Scotland to attend an ongoing global climate conference about the “creepy" colleague “who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups" that shared his fantasy of killing her: “This dude is just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway. White supremacy is for extremely fragile people (and) sad men like him, whose self concept relies on the myth that he was born superior, because deep down he knows he couldn't open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself."

Ocasio-Cortez predicted that Gosar, given the Republican Party's recent track record, is unlikely to face any serious consequences for what's become his pattern of reprehensible behavior.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Congressional ethics inquiry and criminal investigation into Gosar's depiction of violence against Ocasio-Cortez and Biden.

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu added this: “In any workplace in America, if a coworker made an anime video killing another coworker, that person would be fired."

Even the congressman's sister, Jennifer Gosar, has labeled him a “sociopath" and demanded that he be held accountable.

But Gosar won't be held accountable. He won't be fired by the Republican Party. He won't be castigated by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. And he won't be voted out by a majority of voters in his shamefully gerrymandered Arizona district.

Why? Because Gosar is a white supremacist, male member of a political party that's now dominated by white supremacists and whose core agenda has almost nothing to do anymore with so-called traditional Republican values.

The party's singular agenda today is the preservation, at all costs, of this country's historically white, male-dominated power base, and Gosar has become a sociopathic foot-soldier for cause.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

The way I see it, our elected officials should wake up every morning and ask not what they can do to sate their political ambitions, but what they can accomplish that most improves the lives of the people they chose to serve.

The trouble with Sinema these days is that she's confused her determination to get reelected with doing what's best for her constituency and our country as a whole.

Sinema's track record since entering Congress, and especially since joining the Senate, has a lot of people asking, “What happened to the Kyrsten Sinema I used to know?"

Many in Arizona remember the days when she called herself a progressive and cared more about the powerless among us than her big money donors.

I remember those days vividly. So, the question I have is: “What does Kyrsten Sinema stand for?"

It's as if she's concluded that if she can draw just enough Democratic, Republican, and independent votes to win a second term in office, then she must be doing her job right.

Isn't that what the person Sinema replaced, Republican Sen. John McCain, did when he was in office?

Yes. But I knew John McCain. And you, Krysten Sinema, are no John McCain.

McCain had his faults, as we all do. The biggest mistake of his political career was picking Sarah Palin as his running mate in his 2008 presidential run against Barack Obama. He was far too chummy with the infamous land developer, Charles Keating. I was also sorely disappointed when he appeared in a ham-fisted “complete the danged fence" campaign ad with now discredited ex-Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

Sinema seems to think she's the next John McCain, but she's only proven to be an unflattering imitation.

Whatever mistakes McCain may have made in his long Senate tenure, he took the job seriously.

Our greatest aspiration, he often said, should be “to serve a cause greater than ourselves."

Kyrsten Sinema, on the other hand, is basically serving Kyrsten Sinema.

The first-term senator treats the job as a game, whose goal is to prove how much smarter she is than her opponents and even the people who voted for her.

Behavior she thinks comes off as shrewd and competent is instead often flip and insulting.

Asked by a reporter this week about progressive Democrats who say they don't know “where she is" on President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure" bill, Sinema quipped, “I'm clearly right in front of the elevator."

It was a condescending and juvenile answer. The reporter asked a serious question. The least Sen. Sinema could have done was offer a serious “no comment."

The senator's cheeky attitude to her solemn responsibility was also on display earlier this year when she cast her vote on her Democratic colleagues' proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour.

Here's how one reporter described what happened that day: “When Sen. Kyrsten Sinema walked onto the Senate floor in March to vote against the inclusion of a minimum-wage hike in President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, the 'no' vote itself didn't come as much of a surprise." What took people aback was that “after showing up for the vote carrying a chocolate cake, Sinema entered the chamber, walked to the front, paused, formed a thumbs down — a gesture often used by voting senators — and curtsied."

Voting senators don't usually curtsy.

“So, she curtsied!" I can hear her defenders saying. “Can't the woman have a little fun?!"

Sure. Enjoy the job. The problem is that there are millions of people in the U.S. who try and fail every day to eke out a living on today's national minimum wage of $7.35 an hour. To treat the issue so trivially, it's as if to say, “Watch this, poor people! Ain't I funny?!"

The unfunny irony, of course, is that Sinema herself grew up in poverty. Or has she forgotten?

Which brings us to her current moment in the limelight as one of two conservative Democratic senators — yes, that's how far she's come —who seem bound and determined to tank Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure" legislative package aimed at funding the greatest boost to the country's social safety net since Roosevelt's New Deal.

Enter Sinema, convinced that this is her chance to complete her metamorphosis from a one-time Green Party radical to an archetypical Arizona conservative.

Is that what this is all about, Sen. Sinema? Is your transformation finally complete? Is this really what you stand for? Or is this just what you think it'll take to win reelection in 2024?

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.