BREWER'S INDEPENDENT STREAK A POLITICAL RISK?

posted by Michael Chihak

Gov. Jan Brewer took a considerable political risk in calling this week’s special legislative session on unemployment benefits.

That’s because it continues Brewer’s recent departure from the lock-step conservative agenda that she and the Republican legislative leadership have carried out in the last couple of years.

She first broke that spell in April, vetoing more than two dozen bills, some of them the pet projects of her fellow conservatives. One GOP senator said in reaction that the governor wasn’t even conservative any more.

Now comes the governor’s call for extending benefits to thousands of Arizonans who have been unemployed for more than a year and a half.

Brewer argues that while she isn’t happy doing it, changing the law to allow the state’s unemployed another 20 weeks of benefits at federal expense is needed.

Legislators argue that it adds to the federal debt and discourages people from finding work.

Brewer’s approach could be labeled pragmatic, while the legislators are sticking to ideology.

In this era of political intransigence, wandering from the ideological base on either end of the political spectrum can be considered heresy. That’s the risk Brewer is taking with her long-time political allies in the Legislature.

The governor may consider it a risk worth taking, for a couple of reasons.

First, it can define her independence from the stranglehold that Senate President Russell Pearce has on the state’s political agenda, to the point that some have called him the de facto governor telling Brewer what to do.

Second, her stand on this and other important issues could define Brewer’s tenure as governor.

It’s political theater to most of us, but perhaps not to those 15,000 out of work Arizonans.