Committee didn't listen at hearing

Our view: Members' grandstanding may exacerbate volatile border situation

Republican members of the state House of Representatives ignored the commander of the Arizona National Guard on Monday in Phoenix.

Maj. Gen. David Rataczak testified, over and over, that soldiers on the Mexican border did not feel their lives were threatened by Mexicans they saw near the border at 11 p.m. on Jan. 3. Not feeling threatened, they did not fire at anybody. Which is, said the general, exactly how the soldiers were trained to behave.

Presumably, if the hearing conducted by the House Homeland Security and Private Property Rights Committee had been staged for its stated purpose — to gather information about what happened on the border near Sasabe — the general's detailed account would have put the matter to rest.

But it was clear in the packed hearing room Monday that the committee's Republican majority had an entirely different agenda. No matter how many times the general repeated that his troops were under specific orders from the Defense Department and Homeland Security Department to act in a support role to the Border Patrol, as observers, and to "not be involved in direct law enforcement," committee chairman Warde Nichols, R-Gilbert, used the event to make speeches critical of Gov. Janet Napolitano and federal policy.