Businessman Wil Cardon, a Republican running for Senate in Arizona, wouldn’t say whether he thinks President Obama is a citizen of the U.S., the Arizona Republic newspaper reports. Cardon said he thinks that people running for office “ought to prove” their citizenship, but:
When asked if he was satisfied that Obama had met those qualifications, Cardon sidestepped the question.
“I haven’t been in the middle of that inspection,” Cardon said. “I’m running my own race right now, not worrying about Obama’s race.”
Cardon is running against Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in the GOP primary for the seat vacated by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who is retiring. Flake is the heavyfavorite in the race, though Cardon is still viable. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will likely beat the Democratic nominee in November. Cardon has lent his campaign more than $1 million.
Flake has strongly condemned birthers, saying people who think Obama may not have been born in the U.S. need to “get off this kick” and “accept the reality.”
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The House of Representatives is considering a behemoth surface transportation bill this week, designed to fund the roads, highways, and bridges that connect our country. It has nothing to do with the public lands that belong to all of us, but that didn’t stop three Republicans from Arizona from filing an amendment to the bill that would override Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s January decision to protect 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park from new uranium mining requests.
Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) penned the amendment:
SEC. __ . TERMINATION OF PUBLIC LAND ORDER 7787.
Public Land Order 7787 (77 Fed. Reg. 2563) and the withdrawal of lands by that Public Land Order shall have no force or effect, and the provisions of the land use plans applicable to such lands immediately before the issuance of such Public Land Order shall remain in effect.
If this sounds familiar, it is because this trio of lawmakers has tried three times in the last two years to undo new protections for one of our nation’s great places. Here is a list of their other attempts to do the National Mining Association’s bidding:
– They added roll back language in the text of last year’s budget bill (which did not pass) where it was dubbed “the Flake earmark for the mining industry.”
– Franks introduced legislation in the last Congress to stop the mineral withdrawal.
As ThinkProgress has outlined before, the Grand Canyon is incredibly important to the economy of Arizona. Tourists spending money in and around the Grand Canyon create jobs. Headwaters Economics found that Grand Canyon National Park supported over 6,000 jobs in 2009 and those tourists spent more than $400 million.
In addition, mining for uranium around the canyon poses risks to drinking water for 25 million people reliant on the Colorado River, as seen in the legacy of old, abandoned, and hazardous mines.
It remains to be seen whether Congressional rules will allow the amendment to be considered. But House Republicans have made their position clear—despite the fact that the battle over the Grand Canyon has been fought, and these three Congressmen lost, they will keep fighting another day. Franks recently stated to E&E News that “anything that we can do to promote the legislation we will.”
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Today the House Appropriations Committee is debating the FY 2012 spending bill for the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. No less than 25 anti-environment riders — policy provisions not related to spending — were included in the bill. In his opening statement, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), ranking member on the subcommittee, called the bill a “virtual dump truck of special interest legislative riders.”
As ThinkProgress reported on its introduction, the base text of this appropriations bill includes a provision that would block the Department of the Interior from protecting one million acres of land around Grand Canyon National Park from uranium mining. This rider was added by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) as a response to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s announcement a few weeks ago of a temporary withdrawal for these lands from mineral development while an environmental analysis is completed.
Moran offered an amendment to strip this rider from the bill, but Republicans rejected it by a 26 to 23 vote. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) stated:
This is the Flake earmark for the mining industry.
The provision has nothing to do with appropriations. Flake and leadership on the committee have received mining industry financial support in the past:
Nonetheless, Flake continued to denounce the Department of the Interior’s attempt to protect the Grand Canyon as a political move, “What is ‘special interest,’ if anything, if taking one part of this, uranium mining, and removing it for 20 years.”
Flake did not seem to take into account that the Interior Department is acting on advice from the 300,000 comments that it received on its draft withdrawal plans, many of which were in favor of the decision including the Sedona Chamber of Commerce.
The Grand Canyon is one of our nation’s most visited and economically important national parks. The park provided over 5,000 jobs and $412 million in economic returns in 2009, from the over 4 million visitors who came to the park that year. If this rider moves forward, tourism from many sectors could be greatly impacted. As Jim Stipe, chairman of the Arizona Council of Trout Unlimited stated today, “Uranium mining threatens to pollute our clean water and spoil habitat for fish and big game near the Grand Canyon. Fishing and hunting are big business in Arizona, especially near the Grand Canyon, and have been for generations.”
Killer tornado in Rep. Tom Cole's (R-OK) district.
On Thursday, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior and Environment approved a slash-and-burn budget for land and environmental agencies. The FY 2012 budget bill includes several riders to prevent the federal government from protecting Americans from global warming pollution. The agencies whose budgets were cut, including the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Forest Service, monitor and respond to flooding, drought, and wildfires.
With hundreds of billions of tons of fossil-fuel greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere, climate disasters are on the rise. The Republican members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior and Environment who voted to block interior and environmental agencies from fighting climate change come from districts that are being ravaged by these very disasters:
These climate deniers willingly accept federal taxpayer money to support the victims of climate disasters, but are shirking their fiscal and moral responsibility to defend our nation from the pollution that is making these disasters more intense and more frequent. They are letting polluters profit from the suffering of innocent, hard-working Americans and their children. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) says he’s scared of the EPA’s efforts to fight greenhouse pollution. He should be considerably more scared of the consequences of polluting our weather.
ThinkProgress filed this report from the Tea Party Patriots Policy Summit in Phoenix, AZ.
Over the weekend, Americans all over the country staged demonstrations demanding that corporations pay their fair share in taxes. As ThinkProgress’ Zaid Jilani reported, many of America’s largest and most profitable corporations, like ExxonMobil, CitiGroup Bank of America, have managed to avoid paying any corporate taxes for most quarters in recent years. As corporations pay out record bonuses and compile billions in untaxed profits, corrupt politicians are trying to force regular Americans to give up benefits and social programs to pay down the deficit.
At the summit, ThinkProgress approached two conservative Republicans, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), to talk about corporate tax dodgers as well as the burgeoning “Main Street Movement“/US-UnCut efforts (US-UnCut is modeled after the UK group demanding British tax dodging corporations pay their fair share). Asked how he feels about large corporations skipping tax payments, Franks was at first incredulous, telling us that they do pay taxes but simply “pass it along” to consumers. Reminded that firms like Bank of America and CitiGroup have earned profits and avoided paying taxes, Franks finally responded sternly: “Well, then they broke the law”:
FANG: A lot of liberals are hosting what CBS News has called you know a left-wing alternative to the Tea Party this weekend, demonstrations all over the country. And one of their key complaints is that corporations aren’t paying their fair share. And they give examples like, in 2009, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, CitiGroup, GE, none of these corporations paid a dime in corporate income taxes. Do you think it’s fair for these corporations not to pay income taxes? [...] But they’re using offshore bank accounts as loopholes–
FRANKS: Those things can be addressed. But the bottom line is, corporate income taxes, they’re taxes on the people, ultimately.
FANG: But they’re not paying any of these taxes.
FRANKS: But what I’m saying is to raise corporate taxes or increase corporate taxes, won’t hurt the corporations, they’ll just pass it along. [...]
FANG: CitiGroup had one of its most profitable years ever in the last two years and they didn’t–
FRANKS: And you’re saying they didn’t pay any taxes on the profit?
FANG: Yes, in 2009. We don’t know about 2010.
FRANKS: Well, then they broke the law.
Watch it:
Similarly, we asked Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) if very profitable corporations like Bank of America, which paid nothing in corporate income taxes in 2009, were “paying their fair share.” Flake responded, “people’s definitions of fair share is different.” Flake laughed in disbelief, and finally responded, “I’d have to look at your figures.” (see video above)
Many corporation have seized upon various loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Google, for instance, uses a variety of foreign subsidiaries as pass through corporations. In the case of CitiGroup, the IRS offered the company an exception to long-standing tax rules in 2009 because CitiGroup was still owned by taxpayer because of TARP. Even after CitiGroup sold its taxpayer-owned shares, it continued dodging corporate taxes. A GAO study found that CitiGroup maintains 427 subsidiaries in tax havens like Aruba and the Bahamas.
On the campaign trail, House Republicans repeatedly vowed to cut $100 billion in federal spending their first year in office. Once actually in power, though, they tried to put forward just $30 billion in cuts, only to face a backlash from tea party activists. Republicans went back to the drawing board and the Appropriations Commitee came back with $60 billion in proposed cuts.
The GOP has tried to pass this off as $100 billion in cuts by using as a baseline President Obama’s 2011 budget. But this is highly misleading as that budget was never enacted — instead, spending is at the lower levels set the year before.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who sits on the Appropriations Committee, admitted yesterday that the $100 billion figure is “funny math.” In an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, he went on to acknowledge that the GOP’s cuts are just a “rounding error when it comes to the overall budget and deficit”:
FLAKE: We’re proposing $100 billion in cuts — kind of. It’s a little funny math, as it always is here. But it’s a pretty significant cut to non-defense discretionary [spending]. But that’s a rounding error when it comes to the overall budget and deficit. It represents one-fifteenth of the current deficit that we’re running.
Listen here:
Indeed, Flake is correct in noting that his committee’s budget neither cuts $100 billion nor does much to significantly reduce the deficit. It will, however, cost up to a million federal employees their jobs, slash programs that help women, kill investment in education and transportation, and hurt financial regulators’ ability to do their job.
On the subject of conservatives and racism, the efforts of Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and a couple of other GOP congressmen to get the neo-Nazis out of their party seems noteworthy.
Businessman Wil Cardon, a Republican running for Senate in Arizona, wouldn’t say whether he thinks President Obama is a citizen of the U.S., the Arizona Republic newspaper reports. Cardon said he thinks that people running for office “ought to prove” their citizenship, but: 
The House of Representatives is considering a behemoth 
On the campaign trail, House Republicans repeatedly 
