Montini: Jan Brewer - living proof that Brexit is Azexit

I pointed it out last week, but a few people (who don't live in Arizona) didn't believe me.

Thank you, Jan Brewer.

They believe me now.

Great Britain is the Arizona of Europe.

Former Gov. Brewer went on TV over the weekend and affirmed all the xenophobia and loony secessionist paranoia that lead to the Brexit vote and has lead the Arizona Legislature to rail against the federal government for years.

This time, she did so by reaffirming her ardent support for Donald Trump.

“I get fed up that we hear over and over and over and over again from the president of the United States that every time somebody wants to support on the Constitution and the rule of law that we are out there because we are racist and bigots,” Brewer said on CNN.

When Trump's crude, dismissive and bigoted remarks about Mexicans were mentioned, Brewer said, “I don’t believe Donald Trump meant it in the manner that he said it. I believe that he felt that he was being treated unfairly.”

The British vote was much like the vote that saw our Legislature pass Senate Bill 1070, saw Brewer sign it and saw her get elected for having signed it.

It's all about fear. About demonizing individuals and even entire ethnic groups, races or religions.

It's what Trump has done with Mexicans, women and many other groups.

Fear is a powerful motivating force.

We saw it here.

They saw it in Great Britain.

The people of the United Kingdom have spoken, and they sound pretty much like … us?

A lot of us, anyway,

Too many of us, honestly.

The British decision to break from the European Union is a grand scale version of the Arizona Legislature’s yearly ritual of trying to find one way or another to secede from the union.

It happened early this year with a bill in the Legislature that said, essentially, that the federal government is not the boss of us.

We've been seceding (or trying to) for years

I recall back in 2000 when an Arizona legislator named Karen Johnson introduced legislation that would have dissolved the federal government and set up sovereign states. It actually passed, 3-2, in the Federal Mandates and States Rights Committee.

Every year some version of this get introduced, as if the state motto is: “If at first you don’t secede…”

Former legislator and de facto governor Russell Pearce was among those who once introduced a bill that would have created a 12-member committee within the Legislature that could "vote by simple majority to nullify in its entirety a specific federal law or regulation that is outside the scope of the powers delegated by the people to the federal government . . . "

The difference between us and Great Britain is that our secession lunacy invariably gets derailed while the British put theirs to a vote.

Bad idea.

If we did that, I suspect we’d all be living in the nation of Arizona.

A terrible, disastrous scenario.

Then again, if Trump wins …