Partisan Hack AG Mark Brnovich To Run For U.S. Senate Instead Of Governor

Above: This Richard Nixon pose is not going to impress voters.

Governor Doug Ducey has consistently said that he is not interested in running for U.S. Senate when he terms out of office in 2022. He has fantasies about running for president in 2024. We have been over this ground.

It had been widely assumed by political pundits that Attorney General Mark Brnovich wants to run for governor. But the Washington Examiner reports, Arizona attorney general eyes Senate race against Mark Kelly:

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, is leaning toward challenging Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022 after initially moving toward a run for governor.

Brnovich, 54, has won two statewide elections in Arizona, which means he has survived two Republican primaries — including one since former President Donald Trump came to dominate the party. The attorney general’s supporters believe those results are proof he can attract support from disparate wings of the GOP and make him the ideal candidate to run against Kelly in the general election.

“The attorney general is strongly considering a run for U.S. Senate and is being asked by folks inside and outside of Arizona to consider a campaign,” a Republican operative in the state familiar with Brnovich’s plans confirmed Monday.

[T]he Democrat is a top Republican target in the midterm elections, with GOP candidates emerging.

One potential contender is Blake Masters, A Republican who works for venture capitalist and wealthy GOP donor Peter Thiel.

Masters is chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, president of the Thiel Foundation, and co-author of Thiel’s book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. Should Masters pull the trigger on a Senate bid, sources speculate Thiel might pour millions of his own money into a super PAC to boost his campaign — the same way he did for Republican J.D. Vance, a close associate poised to run for Senate in Ohio.

Other Republicans viewed as potential Senate candidates include Christopher Landau, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico under Trump; lobbyist Karrin Taylor Robson; and Mark McGuire, former adjutant general of the Arizona National Guard. Gov. Doug Ducey, term-limited in 2022, continues to wave off the encouragement from fellow Republicans to mount a Senate campaign. The GOP is looking to reclaim power in a 50-50 Senate controlled by the Democrats through Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.

Tim Steller of the Arizona Daily Star recently wrote about our partisan hack attorney general, AG Brnovich descends into political absurdity, and Arizonans pay for it:

Attorney General Mark Brnovich made another court filing April 12 that appears designed to win him publicity for his next campaign and to troll liberals.

It’s the latest in the increasing number of political stunts he’s pulled as he approaches the limit of two terms as state attorney general in 2022 and must leap to another political office.

We the taxpayers, of course, are subsidizing his efforts.

Brnovich’s latest ruse was to sue the Department of Homeland Security because it stopped building the border wall. He claimed that stopping construction violated the National Environmental Protection Act. His lawsuit also says that by stopping the “Remain in Mexico” program, Biden’s administration increased the population, and that should be evaluated under the same act.

The logic, to the extent there is a sincere legal rationale, is that stopping the wall-building allowed more migrants across the border, where they litter and increase population.

The irony is so thick with this one you could cut it with a reciprocating saw, as smugglers have done with the new border wall itself.

That’s because, of course, infinitely greater damage was caused by the road-building, demolition, explosions, grading, water-sucking and habitat-splitting of the wall project itself. The Trump administration actually waived the National Environmental Protection Act to build the wall.

Now Brnovich wants to use the same law Trump waived to build the wall to force Biden to resume construction.

Smells like “absurd political grandstanding,” as attorney Brian Segee of the Center for Biological Diversity put it in a statement. Segee and others actually sued the federal government unsuccessfully to invoke the environmental protection act to stop the wall.

Doomed legal argument

If you take Brnovich’s lawsuit as a sincere effort to use federal law to address environmental problems, it falls flat. I asked two out-of-state experts on the National Environmental Protection Act, and they spelled out why.

“NEPA’s concerned with action, not inaction,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard University’s law school and an expert in environmental law. “They’re talking about the lack of building a wall as opposed to building a wall. NEPA’s application to the government’s failure to act is quite limited.”

Separately, he said, the government can be forced to consider the environmental impacts of an action like building a highway or a parking lot, which are intended to bring more people to an area. That’s not the case with unintended cross-border migration, especially if it’s illegal.

“That wouldn’t count under NEPA,” he said.

Robin Craig, a professor at the University of Utah law school and a specialist in environmental law, agreed with Lazarus that suing the government over not doing something, like not building more border wall, is almost certainly doomed.“It’s stopping a project, which means we’re leaving the environment in the status quo, which shouldn’t trigger NEPA,” she said.

The complaint about stopping the Remain in Mexico program doesn’t make much more legal sense.

Stopping it “is to halt a program that does not directly implicate the environment,” she said. “The fact that we have an immigration policy that might increase population growth doesn’t mean the policy itself has an immediate environmental impact.”

Culture-war keywords

When I asked, both of these professors showed admirable earnestness and focus in discussing the merits of the lawsuit filed by the state. They didn’t scoff or rage.

Leave that to me.

During the Trump years and now under Biden, Brnovich increasingly has made a mockery of his public position, using its powers and public money to campaign for his next office.

He’s done it by unilaterally inserting Arizona into high-publicity, polarizing political issues lawsuits where the state does not need to go. This has burnished his reputation as a pro-Trump conservative.

Note: Worse than this, Brnovich frequently follows the lead of the most corrupt state attorney general in the United States, the indicted and under investigation attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton. Paxton was indicted a few years ago on felony securities fraud charges. Two months ago, his troubles got worse when members of Paxton’s own AG team made multiple criminal allegations against him. Meanwhile, Associated Press reported a few weeks ago that the FBI is investigating allegations that Paxton “broke the law in using his office to benefit a wealthy donor.”

Brnovich frequently joins or follows whatever partisan political lawsuit his counterpart Paxton is filing in the “Texas pipeline” of partisan political lawsuits in the 5th Circuit. Paxton is not someone one should want to emulate.

While Trump lost Arizona to Biden, any Republican seeking a statewide public office must appeal to pro-Trump voters, who dominate the GOP and will presumably pick the primary winners. Over time, Brnovich has tried to show again and again he is one of them, even if his actions misrepresent the majority of state voters.

In 2018, he unilaterally decided to join a 20-state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, seeking to have it declared unconstitutional. This, of course, would have undermined the state’s decision to expand Medicaid through that act, giving health care and insurance to a half-million more people.

In 2019 he inserted Arizona into the DACA litigation, filing an amicus brief on our behalf, supporting Trump’s position to overturn President Obama’s program for undocumented residents who arrived as children.

Amid Trump’s first impeachment, in January 2020, Brnovich sent a letter to Arizona’s then-senators, Martha McSally and Kyrsten Sinema, arguing they shouldn’t vote to convict. He claimed such a vote would “desecrate the Constitution’s separation of governmental powers,” as if impeachment itself were unconstitutional.

More recently, he’s zeroed in on the culture-war keywords. In an opinion piece Brnovich published on Fox News’ website Friday, Ariz. AG Mark Brnovich: Supreme Court vs. cancel culture – here’s how justices can strike a blow for liberty, he said he opposed a California requirement that nonprofit organizations disclose their major donors to the state. Disclosing donors “fuels the cancel culture,” he claimed.

You could also hear Brnovich speaking Fox News lingo in his explanation of the border-wall lawsuit to Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services.

“The left has used this to delay all sorts of projects,” he said of NEPA. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

“The left” — this is another Fox-News phrase conservatives use often when they want to conjure a political enemy without doing the work of figuring out who they’re really talking about.

And it’s a sign of what Brnovich has become — an attorney general working for a fraction of Arizona residents to further his own political ambitions at all of our expense.

Elvia Díaz at The Arizona Republic similarly writes, Mark Brnovich’s transformation from independent Arizona AG to partisan hack is complete:

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich just added another ploy to cement his Trumpeteer standing that he apparently believes could put him in the governor’s seat.

U.S. senators are gearing up to tackle the Democrats’ sweeping voting rights legislation, H.R.1, which is designed to improve voting access – particularly for people of color.

Cue the Republican Brnovich, who has recently been intervening in favor of just about any GOP-backed political and legal bout.

“The Act (HR 1) threatens to bring chaos to Arizona’s well-established election procedures without improving access for Arizona voters,’’ Brnovich wrote in a letter to Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema urging them to vote against the legislation.

“For decades, Arizona has enacted commonsense and commonplace laws to not only expand opportunities for people to vote, but also maintain the integrity of our elections,” he said in the letter, which he also shared on Twitter.

Is Brnovich OK with an assault on voter rights?

What’s Brnovich smoking?

Was it commonsense to reduce the number of voting precincts in 2016 that caused long lines everywhere but particularly in heavily Latino areas? Or require all sorts of ID at the polls? Or limit who can return early ballots for another person, a popular method among minorities?

But wait, there’s more.

Arizona Republicans just went on overdrive this year with a flurry of proposed voting restrictions in direct response to Trump’s lie of widespread voter fraud. Brnovich, who defended Arizona’s 2020 presidential vote results, is apparently OK with the renewed assault on voting rights.

Voting restrictions aren’t the only thing Brnovich is OK with. He also has emerged as one of the biggest defenders of Trump’s anti-immigrant whims.

Brnovich is defending Trump’s “public charge rule” designed to deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to use public benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid or health insurance for the poor.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that illegal. Trump had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case, but now he’s gone and Biden has withdrawn the appeal.

He’s also fighting immigration actions

Brnovich, of course, jumped at the chance to get some publicity and joined with 10 other Republican state attorneys general trying to intervene in the case.

Brnovich has also filed a lawsuit against Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium and fought to deny Arizona driver licenses to “Dreamers,” the young immigrants protected from deportation under an Obama-era program.

You get the point. Brnovich, the attorney general who once I called the “legal moral conscience of Arizona” for his independence has turned out to be nothing more than just another partisan hack.

There is nothing left of the attorney general who unapologetically investigated fellow Republicans over their handling of elections, sided with Phoenix on an immigration matter and challenged university tuition. There is nothing left of the guy who vigorously defended the voter-approved minimum wage initiative because it was the right thing to do.

All what’s left of that independent attorney general is somebody eager to do Trump’s bidding – just for the chance to compete for the governor’s seat.

Or run for the U.S. Senate, as it turns out.