Former Graham County sheriff Richard Mack announced last month during a speech in Pueblo, CO, that he plans to turn Navajo County Arizona into a right-wing paradise. Mack told a Tea Party assembly he will move to Navajo County and run for for election as sheriff there in 2016.
Following up during a speech in Olympia, WA, this weekend (reported by Right Wing Watch) Mack elaborated and invited those in his audience to move to Navajo County to help usher in a shining vision of nullification.
Mack leads an organization that believes the highest elected political authority in the United States is the county sheriff. He is also, you may recall, the person who advocated using women and children as shields during the Cliven Bundy standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management in Nevada earlier this year.
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The Constitutional County Project was announced in October in Scottsdale at a gathering of assorted gun nuts, right wingers and doomsday preppers. The Project's goal is to take over a government at the county level and then carry out a program of "constitutional restoration" through nullification and "interposition."
Doing so would mean refusing to carry out federal law or regulations with which the county government disagrees. This might include supporting Bundy-esque stunts, or refusing to cooperate the federal law enforcement efforts or investigations.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says Mack spends most of his time fighting federal gun and firearms enforcement efforts and won early notoriety by opposing the Brady Act. That made Mack a darling of the National Rifle Association, which provided most of the funding for Mack's court challenge in 1994.
The Constitutional County Project to take over Navajo County has been endorsed by the Navajo County GOP chairman, and by other right wing officials, including former Congressional candidate Jonathan Patton, sitting Arizona State Senator Judy Burgess, and former state senator Sylvia Allen (who is now a Navajo County Supervisor), among others.