Brewer: White House Snubbed Me

Politico reports:

Fresh off her veto of her state’s “birther” bill, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer says that the White House gave her a “snub” by leaving her off the guest list for a meeting about immigration reform.

“I wish I would have been invited,” the Republican said Tuesday night on Fox News. “You would have thought one of the governors would have been invited, since we are on the front lines fighting for security there. It was a little bit of a snub, if you will.” More broadly, she said, the meeting illustrated a disconnect between President Barack Obama’s immigration policy goals and the reality on the ground in border states.

Obama sat down Tuesday with a group that included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Rev. Al Sharpton, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.). The guest list didn’t include any current governors or members of Congress, though it did include some business leaders, including the COO of Facebook and former Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who now works for JPMorgan Chase.

The list of attendees leaned toward those who would support the Obama administration’s approach to immigration. The meeting itself has been framed as an effort to show Obama supporters that he is trying to make progress on the issue even if it’s doomed to stall in Congress.

Brewer, meanwhile, has been a foe of the administration’s immigration policy. The Justice Department filed suit against Arizona to stop the state’s controversial illegal immigration law Brewer championed — which requires all immigrants to carry documentation and allows police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant, among other provisions — from being enforced. Brewer filed a countersuit earlier this year in response, saying the federal government has failed to protect her state from an “invasion” by illegal immigrants. Last week, a court refused to lift a stay on the law, and the Justice Department responded by asking a judge to dismiss the countersuit, The Associated Press reported early Wednesday.