Shortly after he announced his intention to enter the congressional race in CD8, Arizona State Senator Jonathan Paton graciously accepted my invitation for an interview to introduce him to the members of the Saddlebrooke Republican Club. The interview took place on January 21, 2009.

 RDB:  Jonathan, welcome. Thank you for doing this interview.

 JP:        Thank you.

 RDB:    Jonathan, what made you decide to enter the race against Gabrielle Giffords?

 JP:        I don’t know if there necessarily was one single event but the main thing was just looking at the direction our country was going in and I think the health care vote, the stimulus vote, the “Cap and Trade” vote, plus a plethora of other things that are going on, like the Copenhagen trip. I finally just said we can’t go on like this anymore. We need to make a change in our country. I serve in the military and I really feel like if we don’t do something now there won’t be something we can defend. There won’t be a country left we can defend.

 RDB:   The members of the Saddlebrooke Republican Club are interested, even concerned, about our candidates’ campaign infrastructure and funding capabilities. Can you tell us who you have as key positions in your campaign and what your funding plans are?

 JP:        Literally, while we’re speaking we are hiring our operational campaign manager. We’ll announce that by the end of the day. I want to give him a chance to accept our proposal. We’ll have someone who has been involved in local politics, grass roots politics, to organize the people.

 We’ve already agreed with Corine Lovas (fund raiser for Senator Kyl) to start putting on some fund raising events for us. We hired Daniel Scarpinato, who is the former political reporter for the Arizona Daily Star and the Yellow Sheets for the Capitol Times to be our Communications Director, primarily because he’s covered Giffords for the last two election cycles and knows her inside and out. I think we wanted to have the best communication strategy we can possibly have.

So we have two very big fund raisers already planned: one in Tucson and one in Phoenix. We’re going to probably look at some of the folks who contributed to the Bee campaign and the Graf campaign, previously. We’ve got a big fund raiser that Tom Stewart is going to be putting on. He’s an extremely successful businessman in the State. I’m actually  picking up some checks today.

 RDB:    I know you’ve been focused on State level issues as Senator from LD 30 but as a candidate you’ll be turning your focus on national issues. Let’s begin with a few high profile issues recently in the news. What is your position on the health care bills in Congress?

 JP:        Well, I think that there are some good Republican proposals but the ones we’ve seen . . . probably the biggest ones I’ve seen are the House and Senate versions of the health care bills. I think they are bad. We can spend quite a bit of time on the [bills’] problems but let me highlight a couple of those.

 One of the things we see in our State is the unfunded mandates we get from the federal government. We believe that the health care bill that is coming out of the Senate will virtually cripple our State.

 The cuts for Medicare Advantage for seniors, I have a lot of seniors in my district, they’re going to see dramatic, dramatic cuts that are going to be untenable. I think that the government’s involvement of basically deciding what level of care you’re going to get, how you’re going to get it, who you can see and basically taking away choice away from individuals is going to be a disastrous.

 Then there is the issue of tort reform and liability. There’s an interesting thing, our State for example, we cannot put any caps on damages, whatsoever. On the other end of the spectrum you have a system in which the country . . .  $65 billion we’re estimating, is just the added cost for all these litigations that we have, just for medical care alone. We always talk about tort reform but one of the things I don’t think we’ve looked at is that tort was not the main way of settling grievances until about the 1970s. I think tort reform and contract law, the former way of settling grievances, are parallel solutions to this particularly thorny problem.

 RDB:    What is your position on the so-called “Cap and Trade” bill passed by the House late last year and expand on your position regarding energy policy in general?

 JP:        My issues with “Cap and Trade” are, first of all, I call it “Cap and Tax,” because you’re going to be, by conservative estimates, taxed more than $1,800 in fuel costs for the average family in America. My problem with it is it’s based on science that has not been settled. In fact we’re finding out there’s been a lot of bad science has taken place at even our own university here in Arizona.

 It’s unfair to the United States. We are in competition with other countries right now that refuse to have the same restrictions: China, India, the third world. We’re suddenly going to say we’ll have these restrictions but we don’t expect other countries to have it?

 On energy in general, I think we should expand our abilities to go after oil in our own country.  We should be able to reduce restrictions on getting energy out of oil shale and other things like trying to reduce restrictions on putting new nuclear plants on line. We talked about the fact that we need to allow, in the United States, recycling of fuel rods so we can have a better competitive advantage. States like Arizona, I think, would benefit tremendously because we could start selling energy to California. Our largest property tax payer in Arizona right now is the Palo Verde [nuclear] plant.

 RDB:    What is your position regarding moving captured terrorists from military tribunals to civilian courts in New York and even Washington, D.C?

 JP:        Steve Pierce, a State Senator from Prescott, is a great guy. He came to me the very first year of the session and said we want to, and this will dove-tail with Guantanamo Bay, but we want to do a bill this year that would restrict the ability to house any inmates from Guantanamo Bay in Arizona.

My problem is that our federal court system has the potential to turn these trials into a circus. It also has the potential of letting these people go that we know were involved in doing very bad things. The biggest problem I see is that, in order to win those cases, we’re going to have to reveal intelligence gathering, we’re going to reveal our sources, we’re going to have to put a lot of classified information at tremendous risk. So, in order to have this spectacle that will satisfy the left in this country, we are going to compromise our own national security interests and our own intelligence gathering abilities, burning sources, showing off our techniques that we have to the rest of the world. We’re telling the world what our tactics and strategies are going to be. That’s bad military policy, it’s bad national security policy that I don’t agree with.

 RDB:    President Obama is talking about a third stimulus package because unemployment is still above 10%. Do you agree with a third stimulus package or do you think significant tax cuts are the answer?

JP:        You know, in poll after poll, right now, overwhelmingly, the American people are saying we want to cut costs, we want to cut spending and we want to cut taxes. I believe that’s the best way to get us out of this mess.

 The Democrats already are trying to raise the federal debt limit to $13 trillion. It is unbelievable to me that we would allow that to go forward because, ultimately, the only beneficiaries of that are the Chinese who are financing that debt. What happens, not only to our economic security, but what happens to our national security when the Chinese say, you know what, we don’t like the way the direction of the dollar is going.

 That is a scandal that we need to fix now. We should eliminate anything that we’re doing to support the stimulus. Stop it right now. Two-thirds of it has not been spent. There’s still time to give that money back to the American people in the form of tax cuts or simply not spending it.

RDB:    With President Obama and his Democrats in Congress raising taxes to draconian heights to pay for questionable social programs and shift wealth to those who have not earned it, would you be willing to entertain the idea of a flat tax or Fair Tax in place of the destructive progressive tax?

 JP:        I actually voted for something quite like that in our own legislature. I believe the broader and the lower the tax the fairer the tax is for everyone. When you reduce taxes on investment, when you reduce taxes on income, you’re going to spur economic development. I think that’s the key.

 Right now my biggest priority is to reduce the corporate income tax. I’ve been trying to do that at the State level. It’s at seven percent. At the federal level it’s 35%, the second highest in the entire world. For some States, like Arizona, that puts us at 42%. Who wants to come to this State?

 RDB:    It has been said that education is the next biggest civil rights issue, especially in light of minority children stuck in under performing schools. Do you favor government funding of charter schools, private schools or even religion sponsored schools as long as religion is not taught as part of the curriculum?

 JP:        I’ve voted in favor of all those things and I want to qualify or explain something to your readers. It has been said that I don’t support vouchers. I do support tuition tax credits in the State, which is a primary way of funding private school education for families in Arizona. There is a significant difference between vouchers and tax credits. The difference is that in every single voucher bill there was a regulation on private schools, where the state government could go in and say to the private schools, you can’t put a crucifix on your wall or you can’t do this or you can’t do that. I have a problem with that because people send their kids to private schools because they don’t like the public schools. They don’t want them [private schools] to become more “public.”

 But tax credits are completely different. The Supreme Court has ruled that you don’t have to have strings attached. It’s not considered government money. It’s considered taxpayer money that can be used for whatever purpose you want. Without those strings, its flourished in Arizona, it’s done some remarkable things.

 RDB:    The welfare reform bill, signed by President Clinton in 1996, ended the federal entitlement to welfare, imposed strict work requirements on recipients, and set a five-year lifetime limit for aid. The program was very successful. President Obama’s social programs eliminated Clinton’s welfare law in exchange for wealth redistribution. Would you support a return to Clinton’s reform?

 JP:        This is one example of how divided government actually works to the advantage of the tax payer and citizenry. A Republican Congress, by holding Clinton’s feet to the fire, produced one of the best things that ever happened to this country. I absolutely believe this is thee way we should do things. It was incredibly popular with the American people. It was incredibly popular for Clinton to do it. He didn’t get a lot of friends in his own party for doing it but it was the right thing to do, and it helped us put this country back to work again. I think it was part of the reason why we had a spur of economic activity in the decade that he was president not because of all the other crazy social policies that he had.

 RDB:    The Saddlebrooke Republican Club is drafting a Contract With America 2010 that includes a Balanced Budget Accountability Act that contains two provisions. The first provision calls for “Providing for a balanced budget and no off-budget budgeting; all spending shall be budgeted and budgets made public at the time of enactment by Congress.”  The second provision states that, “All appropriations shall have the names of sponsors and co-sponsors attached to the applicable appropriation; anonymous earmarks shall not be allowed in any bill.”  Would you be willing to support this proposed Constitutional Amendment?

 JP:        Not only do I support this but we’re trying a portion of this in our own State. I’ll give you a very specific example. We don’t have earmarks in our own State but what we do have is Budget Reconciliation Bills, its language that goes into the budget on how those bills should be enacted If you’re trying to put a BRB into the budget, you should have a name attached to it so we can at least have an honest discussion about who is doing what. There are a lot of deals that go on.

 Giffords decided that she kept all of her earmarks anonymous until the Arizona Daily Star said, hey what are your earmarks, which were an issue brought up by Daniel Scarpinato, by the way, when he covered her. Then she finally released what her list of earmarks was. We should not have a Congresswoman, we should not have someone in Congress, who has to be scolded by the Arizona Daily Star in order to be more transparent. Just like when she went to Copenhagen, she shouldn’t have to be scolded to say, okay we’re going to pay it [expenses] back. We always intended on paying back for the trip for my husband. People are frustrated with that. That is what disgusts the American people.

 RDB:    Jonathan, we’ve covered a lot a ground in ten questions. Is there anything else you would like our SaddleBrooke Republican Club members to know about you or your positions?

 JP:        Immigration. I know it is a very big issue for a lot of members of your club and also citizens across the State. I recently testified before Congress, in front of the Government Reform Committee. I testified on two items, on gun rights and on immigration, and how the two are inter-related. I think that one of the biggest problems we have is that there is a lot of people who talk immigration at the federal level.

 We’ve been incredibly frustrated in Arizona at their lack of activity. To respond to that when I first got elected, I created the State’s Human Smuggling statute. We’re the first State in the union that can go after human smugglers, bringing people illegally into the country with a Class 4 felony. That was my bill. It is now the law of the land.

 What the federal government should be doing is looking at ways of stopping people from entering the country illegally but we should be putting pressure on the Government of Mexico. We’ve given them a huge amount of money to fight the cartels, to buy new infrastructure to go after them, and that’s a good thing. What we’re finding is many of the people that are smuggling people into our country and smuggling drugs into our country are the same people that are bring guns and money into Mexico. They make that same trip.

 We find as we track people who leave our country with the license plate readers on I19, we are able to catch more people who are smuggling in the United States by focusing on people who are leaving. If Mexico were to do the same things and take their border security as seriously as we do, we could dramatically reduce all the problems our countries are having: the violence that is taking place in Mexico as well as the flood of illegal immigrants into the United States

 RDB:    Thank you, Jonathan, for the interview and allowing me to sort of introduce you to our members. It’s been a pleasure.

 JP:        Thank you.