Impeach Irvin now
Every day he stays in office is a mockery of justice, our republic

Editorial
East Valley Tribune
August 4, 2003

When it comes to evaluating our own conduct, we have no worse judges than ourselves. We tend to think of ourselves as good people even if our lives are but a trail of wreckage. We see ourselves as the misunderstood victims of vast conspiracies. We blame others, or the system, or genetics, for our misdeeds. But seldom do we blame ourselves, if indeed we ever get to the point of admitting that, in the popular term, "mistakes were made."

This tendency toward self-exculpation is one reason judges and juries were invented. Judges and juries can see things as they are, call a spade a spade and a crook a crook - even if the crook remains unconvinced of his own crookedness. This gives society something of a cleansing mechanism, and heaven knows we need one.

Of all the rogues who have strolled through recent Arizona history, Jim Irvin is among the leaders in the "Who, me?" category. The Arizona Corporation Commissioner - re-elected last fall, by the way, even as the legal storm around him grew - has been told repeatedly and with considerable vigor that he has been a bad boy, yet the message never seems to sink in.

The controversy centers around Irvin's interference with efforts by Southern Union to purchase Southwest Gas Corp., an interference that so outraged a jury last year that it slapped Irvin with a $60 million judgment for punitive damages. Despite that verdict and repeated calls for his resignation, Irvin has refused to budge.

Last month federal Judge Roslyn Silver got into the act, upholding the jury's verdict and excoriating Irvin in the harshest possible terms. "The degree of reprehensibility of Irvin's conduct is marked by two factors: Repeated actions and harm caused by intentional trickery and deceit," the judge wrote. She said Irvin had engaged in an "ignoble neglect of the public trust."

Judge Silver presided over the trial that led to that astonishing judgment - which, by the way, she said Irvin should have to pay out of his own pocket.

It is too much to expect that Silver's tongue-lashing will precipitate a mea culpa and a resignation from the thick-hided commissioner. He has ridden out the storm this long; why quit now?

But the faultiness of self-judgment is why the people invented another cleansing mechanism. It's called impeachment, and it is slowly gaining momentum in the Legislature. Given the egregious nature of Irvin's underhandedness and deceit, it's hard to see how he could survive that process, belated though it may be.

That will leave Jim Irvin disgraced by the judgments of judge, jury and the people's representatives - but still, undoubtedly and forever, a legend in his own warped mind.