Lawmakers in Arizona have renewed steps to end affirmative action. The Arizona Civil Rights Initiative (SCR 1031), a proposed ballot measure to end racial preferences, passed in committee Wednesday 6–3. It will now make its way to the floors of the state house and senate, where legislators will decide whether to approve it for inclusion on the 2010 ballot. This approval may not come until next year’s congressional session (Arizona lawmakers go on holiday June 30), but those leading the charge are hopeful that the practice of affirmative action could end in the state by late 2010. “If this is on the ballot, it passes by a vast majority,” predicts Max McPhail, executive director of the initiative behind AZCRI.
Last summer, then-candidate Obama bashed McCain’s support for a previous version of the bill, calling the movement surrounding the bill “divisive.” In the fall, that initiative failed to make it onto the ballot, in what many viewed as a failure to collect signatures effectively rather than as an indication of voters’ preferences.
Although organizers in a handful of other states are currently pushing forward similar initiatives, affirmative action may feel like an even more pressing issue to voters in Arizona, a border state in which Latinos and American Indians command a sizeable percentage of the population. McPhail notes, “A lot of the programs we have in Arizona right now that count as affirmative action programs are not—they are blatant preference programs.” In the state’s second-largest city, Tucson, for example, a municipal program aimed at promoting women and minorities in business boasts of the fact that woman and minority contractors may be entitled to “a 7% price preference on goods and service contracts.”
Although Arizona is a solidly red state, this push for an end to affirmative action has been met with substantial opposition in the past. In 2003, Arizona State University Law School filed an amicus brief in support of the University of Michigan Law School’s fight to continue using affirmative action in admissions decisions. In the months before the election last fall, By Any Means Necessary, a group committed to protecting affirmative action, descended on the state, in apparent efforts to sabotage the AZCRI. According to reports, BAMN activists were caught on tape trying to bribe signature-gatherers to hand over their petitions.
This affair in the Land of Goldwater is proving to be a cautionary tale of the difficulty in undoing left-wing programs, regardless of how the majority may feel.
– Lucy Morrow Caldwell is an intern at National Review.