Members of Jason LaBau’s LDS Church

LDS congregations are divided along fixed geographical boundaries. A local congregation, known as a ward, will encompass 100 to 200 active Mormons, those who show up to church most Sundays and share the load of making the Church function at the local level. Some five to 12 wards are grouped into larger geographical divisions called stakes. In Utah, a ward may encompass only a few city blocks, but in other areas of the nation with smaller concentrations of Mormons, ward boundaries can be quite large. Where I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, our ward boundaries for many years were two miles by two miles in size.

When I lived in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I belonged to the Hollywood Ward in the Los Angeles Stake. The ward boundaries encompass the neighborhoods of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, East Hollywood, Larchmont, and Hollywood, plus significant parts of West Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills, Fairfax, and Hancock Park. Latter-day Saints who live in that area go to church together in a little building on Normandie between Sunset and Hollywood. Those attending services each Sunday reflect the diversity of those areas, with a mix of English and foreign-language speakers, the native and foreign-born, the working poor and the wealthy. The broader Los Angeles Stake includes an even greater mix, stretching from Bel-Air to South and East L.A.

LDS wards are led by a bishop, a spiritual and administrative leader chosen from among the congregation to serve for a period of four to seven years, on a voluntary basis. For part of the time I was in the Hollywood Ward, the bishop was an Argentinean immigrant. He and his wife joined the LDS Church in Argentina in their early adulthood. When he was 35, they decided to begin a new life in the United States. They moved to New York, entered the restaurant business, and chose to attend one of the Church’s optional Spanish-language congregations. When his businesses later collapsed, he and his wife drove to Los Angeles to start a new life. This time they decided not to join a Spanish-language congregation so they could improve their English proficiency. He never imagined that in his late 60s he would be called to lead a ward. But for a ward reflecting the diversity of Los Angeles, he was the perfect choice.

While in the Hollywood Ward, I taught a Sunday school class for those joining the LDS Church, or returning after a period of non-attendance. The class also had plenty of active church members who wanted to reach out and support those joining us. In a class of about 25, we regularly had about a dozen languages swirling about, and it wasn’t unusual to have half a dozen countries of origin represented. Employment was just as varied, from day laborers to small business owners, from students to professionals (and always, of course, an aspiring actor or two). Across these many lines we shared some of our deepest personal experiences.

Now I live in a ward that includes much of Pasadena and Altadena. Most Sundays, my wife and I give a ride to some neighbors from around the corner: a single mother from Mexico and her son. We sometimes also picked up a young man who recently left for two years to do missionary work, an immigrant from Jamaica. Both the woman and the young man are converts to the LDS Church and the only members of their families to join. I’m not sure in what other context I, from a middle-class white family in suburban Phoenix, would be driving in a car with people of these backgrounds. But they have become good friends and an essential part of my community.

In the Hollywood Ward you would be hard-pressed to find a stereotypical Mormon family with a professional father, a stay-at-home mother, and a gaggle of well-dressed white, English-speaking children. You’d be more likely to find immigrants struggling with their English, many of whom joined the LDS Church as opposed to being born into it.

In Pasadena, the stereotypical “Romneyesque” Mormon family would be easier to find. But there’s still plenty of diversity. In just a few months, the Pasadena Ward will be supporting three local young men in their missionary work. All three are converts to the Church who immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean.

Of course, the LDS Church’s record on diversity is not perfect. The Church could do more to own up to its past policies excluding those of African descent from equal status. The LDS Church sometimes struggles to show its genuine care for its neighbors beyond a desire to win them to the faith. But in more subtle ways it is already promoting diverse interactions internally, with profound effects.

Consider, for instance, this little-covered aspect of Mitt Romney’s experience: his service as a local bishop and stake president in Boston. In those positions, he volunteered his time as the spiritual and administrative leader of all the Mormons within his congregational boundaries, areas that included as much class and social diversity as is found in Los Angeles.

This was the one part of Romney’s life where he could not have remained comfortably embedded with the wealthy elite. Instead, he would have spent most of his time ministering both individually and collectively to those in need. It may not have come naturally, but he spent a lot of years working on it, for reasons that had little to do with financial gain or courting voters.

I am not personally fond of Mitt Romney’s politics, especially not this primary season’s version of them. But I have at least this hope: If he does become the next president of the United States and does seek to represent all the people, he can draw on his daily experience in the LDS Church. In my experience, it is a church that not only declares that we are all children of God but reinforces that declaration by bringing us together each week to reach across our other divisions.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Top photo courtesy of waltarrrrr. Interior photo courtesy of Jason LaBau.

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But the Goldwater whose name pervades the state–U.S. Senator, 1964 presidential candidate, and conservative icon, Barry M. Goldwater–would not have existed without another Goldwater, his uncle: Morris Goldwater. In fact, Morris Goldwater’s constitutional and familial legacy has probably had a larger impact on Arizona’s politics than that of any adult living in the state at its founding in 1912, with the possible exception of Governor George Hunt. But where Hunt left a legacy of partisanship, Morris and Barry’s relationship exemplifies a cross-partisan civility that has become rare.

Morris Goldwater was born in London, England on January 6, 1852, the son of Polish Jews who would soon immigrate to the United States. He arrived in San Francisco in 1854, spent some time at a Catholic school in Los Angeles, and was trained for the family mercantile business. But, like Barry after him, Morris prized the open wilderness over the bustling city.

Morris first arrived in Arizona in 1867, eventually settling in Prescott, where he opened M. Goldwater & Bros., a mercantile store, and became a major player in the economic and political life of Prescott and the state. He helped bring the railroad to his town and joined with partners to launch a bank, becoming its vice president. He was only 27 when first elected to serve as mayor of the territorial seat in 1879. In 1910, Morris won election to the state Constitutional Convention, where he served as Vice President and became the linchpin of the Democratic caucus. He led a group known as the Goldwater Democrats: a handful of moderate convention delegates that voted as a block, carrying the balance of power between progressives and conservatives.

Morris Goldwater’s most significant contribution to the new state constitution was the creation of the Corporation Commission. This powerful three-member elective body combined legislative, judicial, and executive authority over public service corporations such as public utilities. The Corporation Commission occupied–and still occupies–a tricky place where numerous interests must be balanced: labor, capital, government, and customers, among others. Morris’ moderating sensibilities were crucial in devising it

Equally significant was the political legacy Morris passed on to his nephew, Barry Morris Goldwater. Barry spoke of Morris as a man who exemplified conservative values and who ranked second only to Thomas Jefferson in the pantheon of Barry’s political heroes. To Barry, Morris was an exemplar of pioneer spirit, entrepreneurialism, and love for Arizona. In 1964, when Prescott celebrated its hundredth anniversary and Barry Goldwater was running for president, Barry nominated his uncle as “Man of the Century,” a title Morris won.

Speaking in 1968 to a group of political supporters, Barry had this to say about Morris: “I was first exposed to [politics] when my father died, and an old uncle who had founded the Democratic Party in the territory and helped write the constitution, sort of became my mentor. And the things he taught me, coming from his Democratic-oriented mind, serve me very well today as a Republican, because he was what I would call a conservative.”

It was that legacy from Morris–of public service, party loyalty, and conservative values–that Barry Goldwater carried with him into the political arena when he entered his first elected office as a city council member in Phoenix in 1949. The next year he managed the campaign of Arizona’s first Republican governor in 30 years. Then in 1952 Barry Goldwater defied the odds by winning a seat of his own in the U.S. Senate.

Of course, Barry’s party was not Morris’s party, but then neither was the Democratic Party of the 1950s the one Morris had built at the turn of the century. And so one of the lessons Morris left to Barry–a lesson that partisans of all stripes are too quick to forget–is that party isn’t everything. Though a loyal Republican, Goldwater was also a friend of Democrats.

Morris had been a father of the Arizona Democratic Party; his nephew Barry became a father of the Arizona Republican Party. Their relationship is a potent reminder that the partisan divide does not separate good Americans from bad Americans–or even the good from the best.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Photo courtesy of phxwebguy.

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Arizona was also among the most Democratic of states, with Democrats holding all statewide offices and overwhelming majorities in the state legislature. Registered voters were primarily Democrats, as were all of the state’s representatives to the federal government. Being a Republican politician was a dead-end job.

The man at the head of both the progressive coalition and the Democratic Party was Governor George W. P. Hunt. His success in forging both a progressive democratic government and a robust Democratic Party in the state demonstrates the possibilities and shortcomings of reform. For Hunt’s central historical legacy is his partisanship rather than his progressive politics.

Like many Arizonans today, Hunt was not a native. He came to Gila, Arizona from Missouri in 1881 as a 22-year-old jack-of-all-trades. In Gila he became a wealthy merchant and successful politician. He served more than a dozen years in the territorial legislature, including several as its president. When Arizona was given the green light to organize as a state in 1910, Hunt was well positioned to lead the charge for both his progressive ideas and the Democratic Party.

In 1910, Arizonans faced an array of choices. First, there were the progressive government reforms. Would Arizona’s constitution include the newly popular initiative, referendum, and recall? U.S. President William Howard Taft had hinted at a veto of Arizona’s request for statehood if its constitution included the recall of state officials, especially judges.

There was also a set of fiercely contested public policies: women’s suffrage, prohibition, and anti-corporate measures. Supporters of each of these had been campaigning for years both nationally and in Arizona. The constitutional convention provided an opening for their policies to be embedded in Arizona’s foundational law.

Arizona’s diverse social groups had not coalesced into stable party alignments.
In part, this was because both major national parties were in flux: The Republicans were torn between President Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt. Democrats were recovering from the aftermath of the populist movement and making tentative steps toward progressivism. Minor parties were also a regular part of state and national politics. The Socialist Party was active in federal and local elections, including in Arizona. The Prohibition Party frequently fielded candidates, and union members briefly formed a local Labor Party in the lead-up to Arizona’s constitutional convention.

In the midst of this chaotic contest over reforms, policies, and parties, George W. P. Hunt emerged as the major victor. When union members and disaffected socialists met in Phoenix to form a Labor Party, Democrats worried that this third party would tip the scales against them, dividing their support and leading to a Republican triumph. So they reached out to labor leaders and cut a deal centered around the progressive reforms. As a long-time advocate of these measures and friend of labor, Hunt helped seal the alliance.

Hunt and the Democratic Party made similar deals with local suffragists and prohibitionists. By agreeing to back the initiative, referendum, and recall, and promising to give their favored issues a hearing at the convention, the Democrats were able to draw on their support from grassroots organizations. The result was a landslide Democratic victory, with the party winning 41 of the 52 convention seats.

Republicans charged that progressive reforms and social policies were too risky because they were likely to draw a veto from President Taft. This was especially true, they argued, of the recall of judges, which Taft viewed as an assault upon the principle of an independent judiciary. The Democratic Party itself was divided internally between conservative and reform elements. But Hunt and his fellow reformers were able to unite the party around the initiative, referendum, and recall. They countered the Republicans by arguing that Arizona should have the constitution it desired regardless of the presidential threat.

But on women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the more stridently pro-labor or anti-corporate measures favored by the unions, the Democratic Party backed down, deciding they were indeed too risky for inclusion in the original constitution. Frances Munds, head of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Campaign Committee called out Hunt on this argument:

You say you think it is unwise to put a suffrage plank in the constitution and then you go on to say that it should contain the initiative and referendum and recall by all means. Either you think that we women are very dense or else you are not sincere. You know as well as can be that there is nothing that Mr. Taft will so seriously object to as that very thing that you are advocating so strenuously. On the other hand you have no authority whatever for saying that he is opposed to woman suffrage.

Ultimately, the progressive reform measures were in, women’s suffrage and prohibition were out. After some wrangling with President Taft (who vetoed the initial constitution), the judicial recall was removed. But the progressive coalition that Hunt had built within the Democratic Party survived for a few more years. In the 1912 election, a few months after statehood, Arizona voters reinserted the judicial recall in their state constitution. Two years later, they passed a prohibition law.

Perhaps most impressive for the progressive coalition, in 1912, Arizona voters approved, by a 2-to-1 margin, an amendment granting women the right to vote. The vote passed thanks to an unlikely coalition of Mormons, farming communities, and Socialists.

But Hunt’s progressive legacy was fleeting. Once the initiative, referendum, recall, suffrage, and prohibition were firmly in place, many groups that had once supported reform shifted their political focus to issues where they held more conservative views. Hunt’s Democratic Party remained in power after 1914, but both the party and the state began a long shift to the right.

Hunt’s partisan legacy has been the more lasting. His vision of reform stopped short of measures that might disrupt the power of political parties. He blocked efforts at open primaries or non-partisan elections, which would have interfered with his party-building goals. As reform slipped from his grasp he retained his position by mastering the art of patronage. Even as his own party became more conservative, Hunt managed to hold on to his leadership role, serving seven two-year terms as governor between 1912 and 1933.

Today, the progressive governance reforms have lost much of their grassroots vitality. Initiatives and referenda rely on wealthy donors to get them on the ballot and buy necessary advertising. Closed primaries tilt the field in favor of partisans rather than reformers.

Now Arizona is an ideologically diverse state dominated by a conservative Republican Party. Liberal Arizonans might long for a Hunt, a politician who could deliver on real promises for progressive reform. But what the state really needs is a champion who can go the next step and reform the party system. Only then will the growing number of Arizona voters registering as independents have a real progressive champion.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Photo courtesy of Lon&Queta.

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Cabrera was seeking a seat on the city council of San Luis, Arizona, a border community in the state’s southwestern corner. Cabrera’s primary language is Spanish, which serves her well with most residents. Spanish didn’t hold her back from starting two recall petitions to remove the mayor, Juan Carlos Escamilla, or from filing the necessary nominating petitions to run for office. But it may keep her name off the ballot,

Last month, in response to a legal filing from Mayor Escamilla, a judge ordered a linguistic evaluation of Cabrera. Professor William G. Eggington of Brigham Young University in Utah was hired by the city to perform the exam. The three-part test evaluated Cabrera’s ability to speak, read, and comprehend English. Eggington reported back that Cabrera “does not yet have sufficient English language proficiency to function adequately” as a member of the city council. Based on that report and his own observations, the judge ruled that Cabrera was ineligible to run for office. In response to an appeal from her lawyers, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the judge’s ruling last week without comment.

The case raises profound and uncomfortable issues. Is English language proficiency a reasonable requirement for members of a city council in a heavily Latino community? Those on both sides of the San Luis dispute concede that Spanish is the standard language of daily life in the area. Spanish speakers often appear before the city council, aided by interpreters. So why not allow Cabrera to bring her own interpreter to translate the English portions of the proceedings?

The answer to that question can be traced back to the state’s origins. When delegates met in 1910 to draft Arizona’s constitution, many lawmakers in Washington worried that Arizona was not sufficiently “American.” In particular, they were distressed over Arizona’s large number of Mormons, Native Americans, and people of Mexican ancestry.

The “enabling act” laying out the conditions for Arizona statehood required that its new state constitution ensure the state’s “Americanization.” Regarding Mormonism, the new constitution prohibited polygamy. It contained prohibitions against selling alcohol on the state’s extensive Indian reservations or taxing that land. And it contained the following sentence: “The ability to read, write, speak, and understand English language sufficiently well to conduct the duties of the office without the aid of an interpreter, shall be a necessary qualification for all state officers and members of the state legislature.”

So what Cabrera ran up against was a constitutional provision and a century-old state statute extending it to other officeholders in the state. Arizona’s constitution is neither the first nor the last example of lawmaking that has limited the political participation of citizens on grounds other than age. But it’s in dubious company. The language-proficiency provision brings to mind the Jim Crow laws in effect throughout the American southeast when Arizona became a state. In 1910, African Americans, although legally citizens of the United States, were effectively barred from voting through a series of byzantine legal codes.

Literacy tests for voters were a central tool of the Jim Crow legal regime. Theoretically implemented to defend the integrity of the ballot by eliminating uninformed or coerced voting, in practice these laws allowed white officials to disqualify black voters who failed to meet arbitrary standards of literacy. In 1912, Arizona passed its own literacy law requiring voters to demonstrate that they could read the Constitution and write their name.

The era of Jim Crow was supposed to have ended in 1965 with the landmark Voting Rights Act. In fact, Arizona is one of the nine states subject to special oversight in the legislation. Along with Alaska, it is one of only two states outside the old Confederacy to require extra federal scrutiny of its voting laws and legislative boundaries, as a precaution to protect the rights of minority voters. But while the 1965 law barred disqualifying voters on discriminatory grounds, it did not overturn Arizona’s disqualifying of officeholders on discriminatory grounds.

Cabrera’s case bears a troubling resemblance to the Jim Crow literacy tests in three ways. First, the law being used to exclude her was written in the same period and with the same motivations–to limit political participation to “true” Americans. Second, the law has been arbitrarily rather than uniformly applied. Cabrera was subjected to the language test only after a hostile local official, the sitting mayor, raised a concern. Finally, according to Professor Eggington, the exam had no clear minimum standard. It was simply the professor’s opinion that Cabrera’s English was not sufficient. Sounds like the definition of arbitrary.

Societal demands for English as an official language often clash with the imperative to allow immigrant communities full exercise of their rights. And there are legitimate debates to be had about where to draw the lines on such matters. But if the law is applied inconsistently and without a clear standard, it’s rooted less in legitimate debates than in Jim Crow-style impulses. Arizona’s language-proficiency requirement relies upon and reinforces a sense of what makes someone “American” that is more closely tied to ethnicity than to citizenship and equality before the law.

Arizona’s constitutional past may seem long ago and far away to those residing in the state today, particularly to the droves of immigrants who came to the state in recent decades, both from Mexico and the rest of the Unites States. But it’s a shame more people aren’t aware of how Arizona’s founding laws, enacted in order to ensure the state’s “Americanness,” continue to haunt the state as it seeks to move into the 21st century.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Photo courtesy of midwinter.

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Whether you are attending a Tea Party meeting or an Occupy Wall Street protest, you are unlikely to hear that rallying cry. But the chronic understaffing of the federal courts is becoming a significant crisis. This decimation (literally a cut by 10 percent) threatens basic protections guaranteed in the Constitution, including the right to due process and a speedy trial.

Neither party has much incentive to crusade energetically against this attack on the judicial branch. The opposition party never wants to fill the judgeships, at least not until its president gets to do the nominating. The majority is wary of accusations that it is “politicizing” the courts by packing them with partisan appointees.

The public only tunes in when a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, when nomination battles bring the courts into the limelight. But those vacancies do get filled, and what’s left unnoticed are the significant number of empty benches below the Supreme Court level. Often, nominees for these openings do not even get so far as an up or down vote after enduring months of a life in limbo.

The issue has been in the news of late, due to the Republicans’ filibuster of Caitlin Halligan, President Obama’s nominee to join the important federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. And this is no isolated stalemate. There are currently 80 open judicial seats out of 874 federal judgeships. That’s nearly a 10 percent vacancy rate. Twenty-nine of these are classified by the federal court system as “judicial emergencies,” due to the mounting caseload in those jurisdictions or the duration of the opening. Many of these vacancies have been open for years. Nineteen additional seats are scheduled to become empty over the next seven months, potentially raising the vacancy rate to as high as one in nine.

Can you imagine if we had a 10 percent vacancy rate for governorships across the nation–five states without a governor? Or how about a Congress to which 43 districts across the country didn’t bother sending representatives, and to which 10 states sent only one senator? What if one Supreme Court seat was simply left empty for an entire term because the Senate would not agree to hold a vote? Any of these scenarios would be scandalous, for good measure, and it is no less scandalous that this is the norm in the judiciary as a whole.

The Senate bears the lion’s share of the blame. Senators on both sides of the aisle have made a habit of holding nominations hostage. Democrats routinely stalled Bush appointees, and Republicans are now doing the same to Obama’s choices. As the vacancies mount, the stakes continue to climb. A president who could consistently push through his appointments would drastically alter the shape of the federal courts for decades to come.

The Senate may be inching toward ending the minority’s ability to block judicial appointments. But suddenly opening the floodgates, though appealing, could do actual harm to the courts. The majority must avoid the perception that it is merely eager to pack the courts with political allies. Such an impression would undermine the courts’ legitimacy.

What is needed is a grand bargain for the judiciary that addresses both the long-term problem of stalled nominations and the current crisis of understaffing, while avoiding the appearance of court packing. To address the long-term problem, the Senate should adopt a rule requiring a vote on all judicial nominees within 90 days. The “advice and consent clause” of the U.S. Constitution requires the Senate’s approval for judicial and other high-profile presidential appointments. But Senate rules govern how it grants such consent. Only in recent history has it taken a super-majority to move along judicial nominations. The Senate rule could set a longer timeline for Supreme Court nominees, but 90 days should be enough time for a vote on lower court nominations.

To address the current crisis, President Obama should strike a deal with the Senate. For his part, he should agree to defer on one-third of the nominations for current judicial vacancies to Senate Republicans. As a constitutional matter, of course, the nominees would remain the president’s, but by finding a mechanism to engage Republicans in these choices, the White House could help resurrect the type of true consultation that once took place in filling these slots. Such a proportional agreement that resulted in the appointment of judges from each party would ensure that the federal bench maintained an ideological balance.

In exchange for a larger role in the nomination process, the Senate would have to agree to a tight voting deadline and filibuster-proof schedule for this new set of judicial nominees. All nominees should receive an up or down vote within the next six months. After that, the Senate would take up its new rule, allowing future presidents to keep the judicial bench fully staffed.

In theory, the judicial branch is co-equal with the legislative and executive. But it can only operate properly if not suffocated by the Congress. The Senate and President Obama must find a way to break that logjam, and soon. Otherwise, basic Constitutional rights like those of due process and a speedy trial are in danger of becoming empty promises.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is currently at work on a book project, Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of runJMrun.

The post Clearing the Benches appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The race for the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Jon Kyl has sparked a Mormon primary contest. Jeff Flake, an active Mormon and U.S. Representative from Arizona’s 6th congressional district, entered the race several months ago. Flake is a staunch fiscal conservative, a principled opponent of earmarks, and a leading conservative voice in the battle over the federal budget. He’s also an internationalist who has distanced himself from immigration hardliners, and his libertarian orientation has turned him into a strong critic of trading and travel restrictions on Cuba.

In August, Wil Cardon entered the race to challenge Flake for the Republican nomination. Cardon is a fellow Mormon, family friend, and former political supporter of Flake’s. In fact, as McKay Coppins reported in The Daily Beast, the two attended the same Mormon congregation for a time. Cardon, though, is running as a nationalist, adopting a hard-line anti-immigration stance and courting Tea Party backing. Both men will seek the support of their fellow Mormons, who account for less than 10 percent of Arizona’s population but still constitute an influential constituency in the Arizona Republican Party.

The second intriguing race getting national attention is the heated recall election of State Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, the chief sponsor of SB 1070, the controversial Arizona law that made illegal immigration a state crime and directed local police to investigate residents’ immigration status. The law has since become a model for other states. But Pearce’s outspoken views have upset enough constituents back at home to earn him a spirited battle for his job.

Pearce’s recall challenger is Jerry Lewis, a local charter school administrator. Lewis has held prominent local leadership positions in the LDS Church and served as a religious instructor at both the high school and college levels, making him well-known among the area’s Mormons. Though conservative, Lewis is more moderate than Pearce on immigration, favoring the Utah Compact. That document, endorsed by the LDS Church, calls for “a humane approach” to the reality of immigrants’ presence, a recognition of the positive economic contributions of immigrants, and an effort to keep families together.

The LDS Church’s statements in favor of more moderate immigration legislation in Utah have become something of a hurdle for Pearce, who must avoid the perception that he is at odds with his Church. When asked at a recent town hall meeting whether his views conflicted with the Church’s position, Pearce defensively stated that he had consulted with LDS leaders in Salt Lake City and been assured that they did not oppose his approach.

Because the Church has declined to comment specifically on SB 1070 or Pearce’s recall, its members will have to decide for themselves how to reconcile their religious and political views. With immigration serving as the main distinction between the Mormon candidates, the recall will provide the clearest indication yet of whether the Church’s immigration stance is swaying its members without a direct institutional effort to command their obedience.

The contest for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat is also likely to become a referendum on immigration policy, testing the strength of nationalism and internationalism, both among Mormons and within the Republican Party more broadly. Since the Republican primary victor will probably become Arizona’s next U.S. Senator, the outcome will have a more direct impact on future federal immigration legislation.

Mormons promoting a hard line on immigration can find some support in their church’s history and theology, even if they are out of step with their current church leaders. The Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational scripture, proclaims a favored role for the United States as the chosen land. Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, was among the more outspoken Mormon conservative nationalists to maintain that God had set the United States above all other nations as an instrument of His divine plan. More recently, Mormon convert Glenn Beck has been active in spreading this religious nationalism to his Tea Party audiences.

If the American nation is a sacrosanct instrument of God’s will, it isn’t a stretch to then consider preserving the nation’s essence, not to mention its territorial integrity, a spiritual–as well as a political–imperative. This is a starkly different worldview from the one espoused by contemporary Mormon leaders, who are less likely to view the rest of the world as a threat and more likely to see in it an opportunity for future growth. The LDS Church explicitly supports legislation allowing undocumented immigrants “to square themselves with the law and continue to work” in the United States and claims such a policy approach flows from the church’s moral teachings to love thy neighbor.

Watch the election returns next week out of Arizona to see whether those teachings have much sway among conservative Republican primary voters.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book project, Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of More Good Foundation.

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The Tea Party movement, with its rejection of Chamber of Commerce-type Republican elites, rose-tinted view of America’s past, and belief in self-reliance and small government, has reinvigorated isolationist nationalism within the GOP. Though much of the movement’s rhetoric has lately focused on public spending, suspicion of all things foreign–be they immigrants, overseas military missions, or Obama’s family roots–is one of the Tea Party’s animating forces.

At the same time, we’re in the midst of a Mormon political moment, with two active Mormons vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Though conservatives, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are internationalists whose backgrounds suggest they must find it very distasteful to have to pander to the isolationist crowd in their own party.

The notion of a political elite that is more cosmopolitan than party activists is far from a new phenomenon in American politics, but what is startling about the emerging tension within the Republican Party, particularly in the West, is that the counterweight to nativist rancor isn’t exclusively the business elites–but the Mormon church itself.

This makes sense from an institutional point of view. Based on the scale of its enterprise and its future growth prospects, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)–the official name of the Mormon church–has more in common with a multinational corporation like Coca-Cola or IBM than it does with local evangelical Christian congregations or state-based political activist groups. A president (regarded as a prophet), his two counselors, and a body of twelve apostles may lead the LDS Church from its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, but they recognize that the Mormon doctrine needs to have a global appeal for the enterprise to flourish.

Partly because of the religion’s missionary zeal, Mormons as a whole tend to be more worldly than most Americans. Companies needing multilingual workforces often head for Utah; the CIA has long relied on Mormon hires because so many of them are bilingual (in addition to their straight-arrow reputation). Jon Huntsman is fluent in Mandarin not because he was President Obama’s ambassador to Beijing, but because he did his LDS mission as a young man in Taiwan. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, did his mission in France, though he is as unlikely to reminisce about that on the campaign trail as he is to extol his family’s Mexican roots.

Of the church’s 14 million members, more than half live outside the United States, including a large portion in Latin America who have a personal or familial stake in America’s immigration debates. From Salt Lake City, Church leaders face the difficult responsibilities of managing a global church, and caring for some members living at the margins of U.S. law. Strict enforcement of U.S. immigration policy has disrupted the Church’s internal affairs and upended the lives of some of its members.

Young men and women in the United States who volunteer for missionary work but lack proper documentation cannot safely cross the nation’s borders. Laws designed to discourage illegal immigration can limit the religious freedom of Church members, many of whom came to the United States as children.

In June, two Utah men were arrested and deported, the first to El Salvador along with his family and the second to Guatemala without his family. Both men were serving as the spiritual leaders of their local Spanish-speaking congregations. For a Church that relies on a lay clergy and places special emphasis on family relationships, deportations like these are doubly wrenching.

In this political context, the LDS Church leadership has supported a more permissive approach to immigration policy than that promoted by many other conservatives. The Church endorsed the Utah Compact, a declaration of five principles for a moderate state immigration policy. The Church also played a role in the passage of legislation that grants undocumented workers driver’s licenses and the right to work upon paying a fine. And it went a step further in explicitly tying that endorsement to Mormon religious principles.

This isn’t to say that all Mormon politicians are falling into line: the author of Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant legislation S.B. 1070, State Senate President Russell Pearce, is a Mormon, and plenty rank-and-file church members in Utah wish their state had followed Arizona’s example. It will be increasingly interesting to see how far the Church goes in flexing its institutional muscle on behalf of a more progressive approach to immigration.

The LDS Church leadership has a proven capacity for motivating its members to take political action on specific policy matters, sometimes across party lines. Though the Church has an official policy of partisan neutrality, it reserves and exercises the right to become involved in specific policy issues. When it does so, the Church can draw on its influence over the beliefs of individual members and on the strength of its corporate structure.

The most recent evidence of the Church’s political power came in the fight over California’s Proposition 8. Here the LDS Church joined with other groups in seeking to outlaw same-sex marriage. In addition to lending support to the coalition at the highest levels, Church leaders mobilized its local members in a coordinated effort to raise funds, get out the vote, and persuade others.

In the process, the Church demonstrated its ability to transform its membership into a highly motivated, local, grassroots political movement almost overnight. And it did so successfully, outside of Utah, in the most populous state in the nation. Though already-conservative members formed the bulk of activists, the Church was also able to draw more moderate members into its efforts. On immigration, and possibly down the line on issues like foreign aid and trade, an internationalist Church leadership would presumably be more at odds with many in its flock than it has been when touting a socially conservative agenda.

The Republican Party is torn these days between its corporate base, which still clings to a more internationalist outlook, and its socially conservative base, which is embracing a more insular worldview–turning first against immigration and trade, and more recently against foreign military interventions as well. It’s surreal to think that, not long ago, a conservative Republican president, George W. Bush, was pushing for comprehensive immigration reform.

His push was ill-fated, but an intriguing question in coming years will be whether Mormon political activism may have an unexpected moderating influence on the right, insofar as the Church allies itself with business elites to push back against the xenophobic politics of the Tea Party.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book project, Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

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But a better story lies in the case history: What was Arizona, land of libertarianism and the free enterprise spirit of Barry Goldwater, doing with such an egalitarian law in the first place?

The answer reveals a central divide of modern conservative politics: the fissure that separates the Supreme Court’s libertarian and intellectual views on campaign regulation and the “law-and-order” activism of conservatives who play politics in rough-and-tumble places such as Arizona.

The campaign finance law in question is called the “Citizens Clean Election Act,” but its roots lie not in legal debates but in the muddy history of Arizona’s politics – and in three major political scandals over the last generation.

The first scandal: In 1988, Republican Governor Evan Mecham was removed from office by the state senate as he faced the threat of recall – and felony charges – stemming from a series of controversial actions, including his misuse of campaign and public funds. The following year brought the second scandal: a U.S. Senate investigation of the “Keating Five” for exercising undo influence on federal investigators on behalf of a campaign contributor, Charles Keating, Jr. Among those investigated were Arizona’s U.S. senators, the Democrat Dennis DeConcini and the Republican John McCain.

Finally, just as the U.S. Senate ethics committee was releasing its report on the Keating Five in 1991, a sting operation by the Phoenix Police Department produced the scandal known as AzScam. Seven state legislators were caught accepting $370,000 in bribes from “gaming consultant” J. Anthony Vincent in exchange for their support of his gambling enterprises. In fact, the man they believed was an experienced criminal operative flush with Las Vegas cash was undercover agent Joseph C. Stendino. One video produced as evidence showed a lawmaker stuffing money into a gym bag while joking about the presence of the very hidden cameras that were recording the transaction. Many of the bribes came in the form of campaign contributions.

Coming on top of these three scandals, the 1997 bank fraud conviction and forced resignation of Governor Fife Symington offered the final impetus for reform. The governor’s conviction was later overturned by the courts, and President Clinton pardoned him. But the impact of losing a second governor shook Arizona’s political establishment and forced action.

The very next year, Arizona voters approved the campaign finance law at the ballot. Under the new finance regime, candidates qualify for public financing by collecting a certain number of small donations. (The exact number varies depending upon they office the candidate is seeking). Candidates also must comply with limits on the size of individual contributions they can collect and the amount of their own money they can spend.

Once candidates receive public funds, they must stop accepting private contributions. But a crucial provision of the law added another way to even the political playing field: candidates could qualify for additional public funds if their opponents or independent groups significantly outspent them. That matching funds provision was what the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional.

And it was exactly this provision that made the public financing scheme attractive to candidates, two-thirds of whom had joined the public system. The Supreme Court’s logic was that the law was unfair to those who didn’t take public financing because it blunted the impact of their speech by cutting down on their financial advantage. And in this court’s eyes, money is speech. The provision, the Court found, “substantially burdens the speech of privately financed candidates and independent expenditure groups without serving a compelling state interest.”

Supporters of public campaign financing voiced relief that while the Supreme Court decision disrupted the particulars of the law in Arizona and some other states, the court did not strike down all public financing schemes. But this isn’t the most significant distinction in the case.

Far more important – and problematic – is the Court’s logic that campaign behavior and governance are two separate entities. Many conservatives in Arizona, unlike their counterparts in D.C., understand that the two are linked.

This understanding is born of all those scandals. The Mecham impeachment, “Keating Five” investigation, AzScam, and Symington conviction served as potent reminders that political behavior is inseparably linked with campaign financing. Seeking to clean up government without addressing campaign finance is a fool’s errand.

Arizona’s public financing law wasn’t a progressive exception in the state – it was part and parcel of its history of embracing the conservative values of law and order. The Supreme Court, speaking from far away, did not understand that the law was not a matter of regulating free speech, but an attempt to regulate the behavior of office holders. A candidate struggling to raise cash in a contest against a wealthy opponent will need to find deep pockets of his or her own, often granting at least an implicit promise of future aid and access. Arizonans know this too well.

The Supreme Court, with its conservative “originalists” who say they ground their decisions in the original history of the country, got the history wrong. Arizona’s clean election law was less about campaigning than it was about good government; less a contradiction of libertarian conservatism than an embrace of “law-and-order” conservatism. Voters in a famously conservative and infamously contentious state came together in their recognition that campaign coffers don’t only pay for campaigns. And campaign funds often purchase much more than speech.

Jason LaBau, the Hearst Postdoctoral Fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, is currently writing Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo by Surat Lozowick.

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But Tea Party politics aren’t the only reason Arizona is a natural fit for Palin: the state also has a long history of embracing strong-willed female politicians from both sides of the aisle. Arizona’s tradition of female leaders dates back to its pioneering days, when ideals of feminine domesticity prevailed in much of the rest of the nation and marked suffragists as outliers. In Arizona, the frontier’s demands undermined such strict gender roles. Tales of Arizona women guarding their homes with rifles and bearing their children without the assistance of doctors or midwives contributed to widespread belief in female strength and self-sufficiency.

Building on this image, an eclectic mix of socialists, reformers, and Mormon wives worked together to win a popular vote on female suffrage just a few months after Arizona became a state in 1912, a full eight years before women’s voting rights went national. Once they secured the vote, Arizona women quickly entered Democratic politics and the state legislature, even though the new state constitution technically limited office-holding to men. Democratic women were winning statewide office in the mid-1920s. In 1932, Arizona voters elected Isabella Greenway to the U.S. House of Representatives, making her one of only a small handful of Congresswomen. She won reelection two years later.

In 1950, Ana Frohmiller became the first Arizona woman to be nominated for governor, winning the Democratic nod on the strength of her strict fiscal discipline during 13 years as state auditor (Palin would have loved her ability to say ‘no’ to spending requests). Unfortunately for Frohmiller but fortunately for Palin, 1950 also marked the beginning of the rise of the conservative Republican Party in Arizona. Frohmiller lost the election by less than 3,000 votes to Republican Howard Pyle, whose campaign was managed by Goldwater.

As the state shifted right, conservative and Republican women continued the pattern of political involvement begun by their liberal counterparts, building on an established reputation of independence, experience, and tenacity while simultaneously emphasizing family values and education. As a result, Arizona has been home to more female governors than any other state: two from each party.

Twice, Arizona has turned to women – Democrat Rose Mofford in 1988 and Republican Jane Hull in 1997 – to lead the state after a man resigned in disgrace, tasking them with cleaning up the capitol. In 1998, not only did Hull win reelection, but women took each of the five top elected offices in the state. Among that class of ‘98 was Janet Napolitano, a former United States District Attorney who was elected state attorney general. In 2002 and again in 2006 she won the governor’s office as a law-and-order Democrat in a now very conservative state.

When Napolitano left office to become the Secretary of Homeland Security, Republican Jan Brewer inherited the top post, becoming Arizona’s third consecutive female governor. Brewer’s candidacy for reelection in 2010 was initially met with skepticism and a host of potential primary challengers – until she proved her toughness to many Arizonans by signing controversial immigration bill SR 1070 (which Palin heartily endorsed). With one swoop of the pen, she cleared the field for her reelection in 2010, a prospect that had once seemed remote. Assuming she finishes out her term in 2015, women will have occupied the governor’s seat for at least 17 consecutive years.

Arizona women have prevailed not only in the offices of the executive branch. In 1965, Arizona’s Lorna Lockwood became the first woman in the nation to serve as Chief Justice of a state supreme court. When Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952, she found the doors of private law practices closed to her because of her gender, yet she was welcomed in each branch of Arizona government. She served as assistant attorney general, became the nation’s first female majority leader in the Arizona state senate, and then was appointed a state appeals court judge. It was no coincidence that when President Reagan searched for a conservative woman qualified for the Supreme Court, he found one in Arizona.

Yet despite the success of female politicians in Arizona, the state has never elected a female senator, which poses an intriguing possibility for Palin. Sen. Jon Kyl’s seat is open in 2012 and Sen. John McCain will be 80 when his current term ends in 2016. Arizona offers Palin a clearer path to the U.S. Senate than any state in the country.

Even on purely geographic grounds, a home in Arizona would provide an ideal base. Whether or not all politics is local, presidential politics tends to be regional. In the modern Republican Party, the southwest is the key region. Six of the eight Republican presidential nominees over the last fifty years have come from the area between Texas and Southern California. No current Republican presidential aspirant can claim the Southwest as his or her home turf.

So Palin’s new home will shift her base of national support from the edge of the nation to a focal point of Republican political power. It puts her within easy striking distance of the wealth of California and Texas. She can draw on a ready supply of local donors in the rapidly growing Phoenix area, many of whom already see her as the better half of the 2008 McCain-Palin ticket. And she can do it all in a state where many voters share her political values and have a track record of backing strong female leaders.

In trading the 49th state for the 48th, she can make all these gains without sacrificing her Mama Grizzly brand, trading one set of frontier imagery for another. Whatever her future political goals, Arizona is the place for Sarah Palin.

Jason LaBau, the Hearst Postdoctoral Fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, is currently writing Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of eskimojoe.

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