We’re at it again with Arizona State Attorney General Tom Horne. Rather, he’s at it again.
Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk found that Horne violated Arizona’s campaign finance laws when he ran for attorney general in 2010 and accepted around $400,000 from an outside group which was chaired by Kathleen Winn, his aide at the time.
Horne’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said in an email reacting to this bad news, “This case will proceed to a hearing where it will be found that there was no coordination.”
Meanwhile, Felicia Rotellini (who lost the attorney general race in 2010 and is campaigning for the position in 2014) demanded, “For the balance of (Horne’s) term, he should recuse himself from every case prosecuted by the Attorney General's Office.”
This is a good place to start for Horne, considering the people of Arizona have waited for him to act like a professional since the day he assumed office.
We could have been done with this earlier in the year, but Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Secretary of State Ken Bennett didn’t count their p’s and q’s and the lawsuit to bring Horne to justice over the issue was thrown out on procedural grounds.
According to The Arizona Republic’s editorial board, Horne challenged Bennett’s “decision to bypass the attorney general and send a complaint directly to Montgomery.” This incorrect procedure by Bennett led to the charges being dropped.
I’m not sure if this is just confusion on the part of three Republican elected officials or if they are colluding by simply playing dumb. At the very least, a lot of people who hold responsibility for the laws in Arizona are messing up.
Horne, in particular, has generated so many headlines with so many ridiculous stories that I, for one, cannot wait for the witching hour of his 2014 election defeat.
Going way back to his early days, after his bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard, Horne “willfully aided and abetted violations of securities laws” when his investment business went bankrupt.
As State Superintendent of Schools, before he became attorney general, Horne literally wrote the law eliminating Tucson’s ethnic studies program, a class attributed with a 90 percent graduation rate of Latino students.
As attorney general, Horne filed a lawsuit over the voter-approved medical marijuana law, claiming the suit was “neutral,” meaning it didn’t seek to overturn a direct decision from the voters.
But it gets better. Federal District Court judge Susan Bolton told the plaintiffs, “That's not how lawsuits work.”
If Horne is so afraid he will anger the majority of voters who approved the medical marijuana law, why would he even file the suit? He’s against the majority and bad at his job.
In the fall of last year, Horne allegedly left the scene of an accident after he backed into a car. He paid a $300 fine for the incident. To top it off, this only came to light because the FBI was tailing him to investigate his alleged violation of campaign finance laws.
The FBI, of all institutions, called him “slimy.”
There are bigger civil rights issues at stake with Horne in office, however. Earlier this year, after the city of Bisbee passed a city ordinance allowing civil unions, he threatened to sue because the ordinance violates a state ban on gay marriage.
The threat of legal action, however, does not make legal sense. According to Bisbee City Attorney John MacKinnon, the ordinance would only affect the rights conferred by civil unions, within the city council’s jurisdiction — including burial rights and property rights, among other issues.
The next year should be a year of reflection for Arizona voters. Horne committed so many weird and offensive acts against the dignity and respect of ordinary Arizonans he’s supposed to be protecting.
I can only imagine what else will come out about Horne in the next year, and I hope that we can, as voters and Arizonans, re-evaluate who we want as our attorney general.
Reach the columnist at peter.northfelt@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @peternorthfelt
