Janet Napolitano

From Ballotpedia

25th Governor of Arizona

Janet Napolitano (D)
2003 — Current Preceded by: Jane Dee Hull

Janet Napolitano (b. November 29, 1957) is the current Governor of Arizona, and a member of the Democratic Party. She was originally elected in 2002 and was re-elected in 2006. She is Arizona's third female governor, and the first woman to win re-election. In November 2005, Time Magazine named her one of the five best governors in the U.S.^[1] She served as the Chair of the National Governors Association in 2006-2007.^[2] In February 2006, Napolitano was named by The White House Project as one of "8 in '08", a group of eight female politicians who could possibly run and/or be elected president in 2008.^[3] Her placement on this list also generated whispers of placement on the Democratic ticket for vice president.^[4]^[5]

1 Early life
2 Political career
3 Administration policies
4 Footnotes
5 External links

Early life

Napolitano was born in New York City to Jane Marie Winer and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the Dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.^[6] She has two siblings, older brother, Leonard Michael Jr. and Nancy Angela Haunstein. She has partial Italian heritage on her father's side and was raised a Methodist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque in 1975 and was voted Most Likely to Succeed. She graduated from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, where she won a Truman Scholarship, and then from the University of Virginia School of Law (Juris Doctor). Her early professional career was as an attorney at Phoenix law firm Lewis and Roca and as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona.

Political career

In 1991, while a partner with the private Phoenix law firm Lewis and Roca LLP, Napolitano served as attorney for Anita Hill. Anita Hill testified in the U.S. Senate that then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had addressed her inappropriately ten years earlier when she was his subordinate at the federal EEOC.

In 1993, Napolitano was appointed by President Bill Clinton as United States attorney for the District of Arizona. As U.S. attorney, she was involved in the investigation of Michael Fortier of Kingman, Arizona, in connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. She ran for and won the position of state attorney general in 1998. Her tenure focused on consumer protection issues and improving general law enforcement.

She won the gubernatorial election of 2002 with 46 percent of the vote, succeeding Republican Jane Dee Hull and defeating her Republican opponent, former congressman Matt Salmon, who received 45 percent of the vote. Napolitano was the first female US governor to succeed another. Some initially considered Napolitano to be a possible running mate for presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. presidential election but Sen. John Edwards was selected instead.

In November 2006, Napolitano won the gubernatorial election of 2006, defeating the Republican challenger, Len Munsil, by a nearly 2-1 ratio. In January of 2006, she won the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service.

She is currently a member of the Democratic Governors Association Executive Committee. Furthermore, she has also served previously as Chair of the Western Governors Association, and the National Governors Association. She served as NGA Chair from 2006 to 2007, and was the first female governor and first governor of Arizona ever to serve in that position.

On January 11, 2008, Napolitano endorsed Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for President.^[7]

In the 2010 Elections, Napolitano is term-limited, leading to speculation that she is considering challenging John McCain for his U.S. Senate seat or running for the open seat should McCain retire or be elected President in 2008. She had also been seen as a possible Vice Presidential candidate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama in 2008^[4] prior to Obama's selection of Delaware Senator Joe Biden.

Administration policies

Napolitano advocates education and immigration reform. As a Democratic governor, Napolitano sought funding for the public education system, health care programs, teachers pay, state government workers pay, and prison employees pay.^[8] She signed legislation that offered voluntary full day kindergarten throughout Arizona.^[8] Napolitano opened the nation’s first state counter-terrorism center, signed legislation for a prescription drug card for seniors^[1] and signed into law property and income tax cuts, which were proposed by the Republican legislature.^[8]

In her first year as governor, the state's budget improved from a billion-dollar deficit in the year after the September 11, 2001 attacks to a billion-dollar surplus, without a tax increase.^[1] Every budget Napolitano has signed has been balanced. However, the projected 2008 budget has a deficit of $1 billion.^[9]

Napolitano received a low grade from the libertarian Cato Institute for fiscal spending, citing the fact that her budgets annually increased spending by an average of 6% over the previous year's total.^[8] Napolitano's position on budget issues has been to defend education spending as "investing in what matters", citing the benefits of academic achievement and economic growth. Faced with a conservative Republican majority in both houses of the Arizona Legislature, she issued her 115^th veto on June 6, 2006, breaking the record previously held by former Governor Bruce Babbitt. By the end of June 2006 her veto total had grown to 127 vetoes.^[10]

In a Washington Post op-ed, she explained her belief that the topic of illegal immigration was urgent and needed to be solved through comprehensive federal reform.^[11] In another op-ed in the Arizona Republic Napolitano was critical of sections of the federal proposal debated at that time, saying that, "As a border state governor and a former attorney general and United States attorney, I can already spot issues that make key provisions of the compromise impracticable and ineffective."^[12] She was the first governor to call for the US National Guard to be placed at the U.S.-Mexico border at federal expense and succeed. In July 2007, she signed state legislation designed to penalize employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Previously, when Arizona's voters passed Proposition 200, which would not allow illegal immigrants to collect welfare benefits, Napolitano opposed the measure.^[1]