Sen. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, is grandstanding again. Harper is the co-chairman of a legislative committee looking into recent events at the Arizona State Veterans Home that led to fines from state and federal regulators for inattention to and possible neglect of the residents.
At the committee’s first hearing Wednesday, lawmakers had a chance to publicly question some key aides to Gov. Janet Napolitano, who had learned what investigators uncovered at the veterans home more than a month before Napolitano was told anything.
Naturally, other lawmakers asked some important questions about why Napolitano was kept in the dark so long as they sought to shed light on how her administration deals with serious problems that come up unexpectedly. But in just a couple of minutes, Harper managed to turn the hearing into an attempted political smear against one of her chiefs of staff, Alan Stephens.
As the Tribune’s Dennis Welch reported Thursday, Harper “innocently” asked Stephens to explain if he had any dealings with Napolitano before she took the governor’s office in 2003. Harper knew full well that Stephens, a former state senator, and Napolitano, a longtime Democratic Party activist, have work together professionally for more than 20 years.
But Harper wanted to dredge up a 1991 legislative bribery scandal and the fact that Stephens had been a target of the probe while Napolitano served as his attorney. Stephens never was charged with a crime, a judge dismissed him from a civil lawsuit for a lack of evidence and the Senate Ethics Committee cleared him of any wrongdoing.
That didn’t stop Harper on Wednesday from declaring, 16 years later, this was a “shocking revelation” and abruptly ending the hearing for the day without giving Stephens a chance to defend himself.
If this was the first time Harper had turned an important moment of introspection into a silly sideshow, it could be dismissed as a simple mistake in the pursuit of exploring the behind-the-scenes relationship between Napolitano’s office and the agency that runs the veterans home.
But Harper has quite of a pattern of this type of clownish behavior. Earlier this year when Harper introduce a bill to require all legislative candidates to be drug tested, a Valley newspaper sent him a check to pay for his own test to determine Harper’s sincerity. Harper took the test (and paid for it himself), but he also suggested the newspaper somehow was trying to bribe him.
Last year, Harper so badly mishandled an “investigation” of ballots from a controversial 2004 Republican legislative primary that former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton intervened, taking custody of the ballots and later declaring that nothing underhanded had occurred in the election.
Harper also has taken cheap shots at colleagues and other officials on the Senate floor, as if he can’t see the difference between this seat of state authority and the back halls of a political party headquarters.
Questions about why Harper continues to serve as a state senator lie primarily between him and the voters of his West Valley district. But his fellow Republican senators inexplicably keep placing Harper in positions of leadership when they should be doing their best to isolate him and to ignore him until his behavior improves.
