Arizona state House Speaker Rep. Rusty Bowers (R) has put a stop to a proposed piece of legislation that “would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an election and force a new one,” as The New York Times explains. Obviously, the proposal constitutes a startling affront to the basic functioning of democracy in this country — it’s supposed to be the people, not those in power, who fundamentally decide elections. As Bowers, who supported Trump in 2020, put it, “We gave the authority to the people… And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.” The bill, if enacted, would’ve put powers in place that directly reflected the sort of anti-democratic maneuvers launched by ex-President Trump and his allies after Republicans lost the last presidential election.
Pence in speech nearly 13 months after Jan 6 insurrection: “Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) February 4, 2022
State legislators in areas where Biden was victorious faced pressure to invalidate their states’ election outcomes, and at the federal level, Trump ally and then-Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark tried to help that pressure along with a proposed letter pushing Georgia leaders to participate in a special state legislative session to examine non-existent election fraud issues. The letter was never actually sent — but elsewhere, Trump allies like attorney Sidney Powell (unsuccessfully) sought to use the court system to obtain the desired outcome of upending Biden’s win. For a Michigan lawsuit in which she and other attorneys pushed for Biden’s presidential election victory there to be overturned, Powell has now been sanctioned.
“I think we are getting quite a bit of clarity about who the Republican party is. And I think the days of blaming this on Donald Trump, we have to stop … Donald Trump was basically a reflection of who the Republican party is,” Matthew Dowd says. https://t.co/9d0mT01MLZ
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 5, 2022
Besides the allowance for authorities to reject election outcomes, that Arizona bill would’ve outlawed early voting and required that all ballots be counted by hand, mirroring baseless conspiracy theories about supposedly fraud-facilitating voting and tabulation machines used in the last election. As explained by the Times, Bowers “killed [the bill] through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.” Bowers sent the bill “to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it,” the Times says.
Trump tried to destroy American democracy once, and he’ll try again. How are elected officials still turning a blind eye to this?!
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) February 5, 2022
This occasion isn’t the first instance when Bowers has confronted those in the GOP who’ve been pushing for what amounts to an upending of democracy; after the last election, amid calls for interventions by state legislators in the election outcome, Bowers observed that he “voted for President Trump and worked hard to re-elect him,” adding: “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.” Since the last elections, Republicans around the country have pushed suppressive changes to the electoral process, many of which have successfully been put into place. Trump has criticized one prominent initiative in that mix — a Georgia bill covering an array of aspects of the electoral process — for not going far enough, in his view, to address (imaginary) problems. An apparent Trump supporter was recently arrested by federal authorities for threatening officials in Georgia in apparent relation to comments from Trump.
NBC News confirms: Republican Jim Jordan spoke with Trump for 10 minutes by phone on the morning of Jan. 6, according to documents turned over to the Jan. 6 Committee by the National Archives. @NBCNews
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 5, 2022
