3 GOP mayors asked to quit

[donsu]

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1028mayors1028.html


Arizona Republicans have begun to turn on some of their own for not marching in lock step with their party, and it all may have started because of a miscommunication.

GOP leaders from Legislative District 4 on Friday called for the resignations of three West Valley mayors, all registered Republicans, because of their endorsement of Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat.

-snip-

Friday's move by GOP activists underscores deep fissures in the Republican Party, political observers said. Conservative members hope to pressure those holding more moderate views to remain silent in deference to Len Munsil, Napolitano's Republican challenger.

City council, school board and other local elected offices traditionally are nonpartisan. But District 4 party leaders said they followed orders from Arizona Republican Party Chairman Matt Salmon in demanding the resignation of any GOP elected official who endorsed a candidate from another party.

On Friday, District 4 GOP leaders hand-delivered letters to the offices of Mayors Elaine Scruggs of Glendale, Joan Shafer of Surprise and Ron Badowski of Wickenburg, demanding that they step down for publicly supporting Napolitano.
-snip-
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wow

[waiting for hope]

1. If not another reason not to vote

for a Repuke....what happened to our country?

[Jack Rabbit]

2. OK, somebody in Arizona help me out here

Who is the chairman of the state Republican Party to demand that an elected official resign his office over political endorsements or any other issue?

I lived in the Los Angeles area when I was a youth. Sam Yorty was mayor of Los Angeles at the time. As in Arizona, the mayor of any town or city in California is by state law a non-partisan office. Yorty was a Democrat who made it a habit to endorse Republican candidates and support President Nixon's policies in Vietnam. Many local Democrats were upset with him (it didn't help that he was clueless as mayor, too) and the Democratic Party Central Committee once voted to ask him to join the GOP. But nobody asked him to resign as mayor.

The power brokers may have the right to withhold funds from any of these candidates should they seek re-election, but to demand they leave their posts as if endorsing a candidate of whom they do not approve as if that were a betrayal of public trust is just beyond the ridiculous.

Speaking of betrayals of public trust, aren't these people asking elected officials to resign over their choice for governor the same people who don't think a president should be impeached for lying his way into a war or that a vice president should be impeached for conflict of interest?

[SheilaT]

4. Mayors in Arizona

are partisan, that is they belong to a specific political party and run as such. Where did you get the idea that AZ mayors are non-partisan?

I know that in at least some smaller cities in some states the Mayor is selected from the city council and is a non-partisan office. But not in Phoenix or Tucson.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. I got the idea from the OP

City council, school board and other local elected offices traditionally are nonpartisan.

Perhaps I made the error of reading California law into that.

Here, municipal and county offices are non-partisan. In some cases, the local official may campaign as a Republican or Democrat or Green or Libertarian or whatever, but they will not be identified as such on the ballot. It doesn't matter if the mincipal or county office is mayor of Los Angeles or supervisor in Alpine County.

[SheilaT]

6. It varies from state to state and from

locality to locality. City council seats are often, perhaps typically non-partisan. Mayors, in my observation, unless they are selected from the city council (which is a system some small cities use) are more likely to be partisan.

We moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in October of 1983. At the time there was a mayoral race going on. It was a very important election to the city because it meant that, no matter which candidate won, be it the Republican or the Democrat, it would mean a fundamental shift in the power structure that had been running the city since 1948 (Republican). My husband and I both registered, but decided not to vote in that election as we'd been there so briefly that we felt we did not really know the issues and the candidates, and did not simply want to vote our preferred political party. On election day itself, my husband was out of town (ironically enough, in the Kansas City area where we now live) with two co-workers. One co-worker had lived in Phoenix about seven years, the other about eleven years, and both felt that once they didn't have to shovel snow off their cars in the middle of winter, life was perfect and what more could you ask? On the evening of election day I spoke with husband on the phone and told him that Terry Goddard (the Democratic candidate, although in this story party affiliations are absolutely not the point) had won the election. Next morning when husband told his co-workers they said, "Huh? What? What election? Terry who?"

That is, to me, the quintessential Arizona story, the attitude that nothing other than escaping winter really matters. And while I'll be among the first to agree that it's quite nice not to have to shovel snow off your car in winter, I also know that there are many more things than that which make up a quality of life. I also, in the four years I lived in Phoenix (1983-87) met no more than a handful of people whose time in Arizona pre-dated my original time there, 1962-68. It was scary, how so very many people had no sense of the history of the state, or the city, any real idea of where it had come from, what had really shaped it.

[yellowcanine]

9. So the party doesn't support them for reelection. But they have no right

to demand their resignation unless they have abused the public trust. Endorsing a candidate of the opposing party does not constitute abusing the public trust.

[gratuitous]

3. We'll see if this exercise in party power politics plays well in AZ

Certainly on the Democratic side of the aisle, we'd prefer our elected folks to remain silent rather than endorse a Republican. Odd, though, that the mayoral endorsements would catch the state party by such surprise. Are the Republicans perhaps not as organized and dedicated to party discipline as they'd like everyone to believe they are?

[Generic Brad]

7. No one did that to Randy Kelly when he endorsed Bush

We had to remove him from his St Paul mayor's office with our votes.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

8. The flip side of Lieberman, although on a smaller scale.

NT

[Supersedeas]

10. I guess the Re-pig Party decides what Free Speech is free--where Communist

Party politics meets the American suburbs.