Seems there was something of a split in the Arizona Senate. Several of the Republicans there split with their party leadership and voted to defeat five bills created to turn the screws on suspected illegal immigrants.
Fox News Latino is playing it up like these few Republicans are heroes who saw the error in their ways and decided to vote on the side of treating people with dignity rather than trying to turn people into spies on their neighbors. This is of course a slight distortion of the facts.
What happened is that the business lobby in the state pressured the Republican Senators to reconsider. From the New York Times:
In an abrupt change of course, Arizona lawmakers rejected new anti-immigration measures on Thursday, in what was widely seen as capitulation to pressure from business executives and an admission that the state’s tough stance had resulted in a chilling of the normally robust tourism and convention industry.
So 60 of Arizona’s largest business leaders sent a letter (PDF) to the Senate Republicans explaining that while they aren’t “pro-illegal immigration,” they need to put the bottom line first. Arizona’s Republican Senators had a tough decision to make. Who wins in a battle between the anti-immigration base and the corporate benefactors?
Surprise: business wins.
While the few Arizona Republicans who voted against these five bills did the right thing, they only did so after their big-business sugar-daddies asked them to.
Does that still qualify as doing the right thing?
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