[mcall.com] Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, President-elect Barack Obama’s top choice to run the Homeland Security Department, is tough on illegal immigration, child abuse and Republicans.
A
former federal prosecutor, state attorney general and twice-elected
governor of Arizona, Napolitano would bring a wide skill set to what
many have called the hardest job in government. If confirmed by the Senate, she would take over the newest and third-largest department in Obama’s Cabinet.
The
Homeland Security Department, formed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks, includes divisions that protect the borders, develop new
radiation detection equipment, study and test infectious diseases,
enforce immigration and maritime laws, protect the president and other
dignitaries, coordinate disaster response, work to keep terrorists off
of airplanes and other forms of transportation, and monitor and prevent
cyber-intrusions.
Under
the scrutiny of more congressional oversight than any other federal
department, Homeland Security has weathered a run of controversies
including its handling of emergency response during and after Hurricane
Katrina, its involvement in a scuttled deal that would have allowed a
Dubai company to manage certain U.S. ports, its mismanagement of large
government contracts and its delayed implementation of key, post-9/11 security programs.
Napolitano, 50, an early Barack Obama supporter, is no stranger to Washington controversy either.
As
a private attorney in Phoenix in 1991, Napolitano was part of the legal
team representing Anita Hill, a former Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission colleague of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas,
whom Hill had accused of sexual harassment. Her work on that case
postponed Napolitano’s own Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney but did
not derail Thomas‘ confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. At the
time, some Republicans suggested she coached a witness for Hill into
changing testimony. Napolitano refused to answer questions about that
on grounds it would violate the lawyer-client confidentiality agreement.
She
was the Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for Arizona when the Justice
Department decided against prosecuting Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s
wife, Cindy, for stealing prescription drugs from her medical charity,
but she took no part in that case because she was awaiting Senate
confirmation, on which McCain was to vote.
Napolitano’s not
known as a great orator; when she does speak, she takes care to be
grammatically correct. She usually introduces herself on the phone as
"Janet Napolitano," not "Gov. Napolitano."
Single and a breast
cancer survivor, Napolitano is a basketball fan, plays tennis and
regularly visits her brother and his family in California.
People
who work with her say she has a strong temper on occasions. She can be
both brusque and evasive when fending off reporters‘ questions she
doesn’t want to answer. She is known for her partisanship and has
patronized and belittled critics, such as Republican legislators.
Napolitano
earns $95,000 a year as governor. Her assets last year included a trust
and a retirement account worth at least $100,000 each, a personal
financial report she filed with the state earlier this year showed.
Arizona doesn’t have a governor’s mansion; Napolitano lives in a
condominium her trust purchased in 2004 for $165,000. If Napolitano
becomes a Cabinet secretary, she will have to disclose her assets in
greater detail than the state requires.
For homeland security
secretary, "you want somebody who has a politician’s touch and can
communicate with the public," said David Heyman, director of the
homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a Washington think tank.
Among the homeland security
secretary’s most visible tasks is announcing to the public when there’s
been a change in the color-coded terror alert system and why. The alert
level — currently at orange, or high, for the aviation sector, and
yellow, or elevated for the rest of the country — has not changed since
2006.
Napolitano, in many ways, is a combination of her would-be predecessors, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff.
Ridge was a sitting governor, of Pennsylvania,
when he helped create the new department that he later led and
initially defined for the public. As a former federal prosecutor, judge
and top Justice Department official, Chertoff had law enforcement
credentials to wrestle with the many difficult policy issues that came
across his desk as secretary.
As governor, Napolitano set career
records for vetoes as she battled with the Republican-led Legislature
over spending and illegal immigration. In her first term, she resisted
initial efforts on a state crackdown on illegal immigration, instead
taking the position that immigration and border security are federal
responsibilities. As attorney general, she put a priority on cases
involving abused and neglected children.
Napolitano also has
been a prominent figure in the debate over REAL ID, a federal program
launched after the 2001 terror attacks to make driver’s licenses more
secure. In 2007, Napolitano struck a deal with the Homeland Security
Department that was supposed to lead to her state adopting the REAL ID
standards. But in June of this year, she signed legislation refusing to
implement the standards.
As homeland security secretary, she
would be in the position of persuading other governors to get on board
or lead the administration’s effort to abandon the new rules, if
Obama’s administration decides to do that.
State auditors
faulted Arizona’s use of federal homeland security grants, citing
sloppy record keeping of millions of federal dollars doled out to
communities. As homeland security secretary, Napolitano would oversee
$2 billion-a-year in counterterrorism grants to states and high-risk
urban areas.
Napolitano has fought to curb illegal immigration,
but has been skeptical that building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico
border will solve the problem. She once said: "You build a 50-foot
wall, somebody will find a 51-foot ladder."
Last year, her state
passed a law that requires all Arizona businesses to use the federal
online database, E-Verify, to confirm that new hires have valid Social
Security numbers and are eligible for employment. This has been a
cornerstone of the Bush administration’s immigration policy.
As governor she has overseen wildfires and severe flooding and worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
which is now part of the Homeland Security Department. If confirmed,
she could oversee a fight to remove FEMA from the department, a
position gaining some traction on Capitol Hill.
___
Associated
Press writers Liz Sidoti, Devlin Barrett, Sharon Theimer in Washington
and Paul Davenport and Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix contributed to this
report.
Source: http://www.mcall.com/topic/sns-ap-transition-napolitano,0,572981.story?track=rss-topicgallery
