Drunk With Power

Here's the thing, folks.  If you give fanatical Republicans too much power, they do completely crazy things with it because they are basically insane.  Case in point: one Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona.

Gov. Jan Brewer and the GOP-controlled state Senate on Tuesday touched off legal and political battles as they took the unprecedented step of removing the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.

On a 21-6 party line vote, the Senate gave the Republican governor the two-thirds majority vote she needed to oust Colleen Coyle Mathis, citing "gross misconduct" in her role at the helm of the independent panel. The commission is in the midst of drawing new political boundaries for next year's legislative and congressional races. As the Senate voted in early evening, commission attorneys left one court and rushed to the state Supreme Court to try to block the Senate's action. They were too late to get immediate relief, but said they will petition the court today to allow Mathis to remain as commission chairwoman.

"It's my view that she is most certainly still the chairman," said Paul Charlton, Mathis' attorney.

However, Senate officials and Brewer's office said Mathis' eight-month tenure as chairwoman ended once the Senate endorsed the governor's action.

The conflicting views will fuel a legal battle over the extent to which the five-member commission is independent.

Bottom line:  the independent redistricting board came up with a redistricting plan that didn't shuffle all the state's Democrats into one new district and give Arizona Republicans the other eight.  In the eyes of Jan Brewer, it's "gross misconduct" for making the plan even-handed and non-partisan, enough so that at this point the chair of the commission has been impeached and removed from office as far as the GOP is concerned for the crime of not giving the Republicans everything they wanted.

And yes, in Arizona, that's apparently an impeachable offense now, daring to include Democrats and Latino voters in the political process where Republicans are in charge.  After all, our founding fathers never really intended to let them vote anyway, right?

Still waiting to see how this is an example of small government, hands-off, common sense Republican values.