The AZ GQP Is The ‘Political Suicide’ Squad Of Anti-Heroes

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Laurie Roberts of The Republic writes, The Arizona GOP has a genius plan to sabotage the Arizona GOP:

Arizona Republican Party leaders continue their quest to transform the party’s once-Big Tent into something the size of a six sleeper.

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No longer are party leaders content to go after Democrats, socialists and the assorted communists they see behind every bush.

Now they’re waging war on Arizona voters and even on each other.

And you wonder why independent voters now outnumber Republicans in Maricopa County?

AZ GOP is all too eager to eat its own

Just this week, state Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward sent out a tweet blasting Republican Sens. Paul Boyer of Glendale and Michelle Ugenti-Rita of Scottsdale for having the nerve to thwart the party’s plans to make it tougher to vote.

Only in Arizona would the chair of the Republican Party announce to the world that a Republican running for the state’s No. 2 job may be corrupt. Ugenti-Rita looks to be the Republican with the best chance of winning the secretary of state’s race, should she survive her own party’s primary.

As for Boyer, he’s long been a target of the hard right, having refused to go along with the plan to arrest the mostly Republican Maricopa County supervisors who dared to question whether they could legally turn over ballots from the 2020 election.

Who cares what voters wanted to fund schools?

Oh, but it’s not just elected Republicans that Republican leaders find suspect. They also don’t much like voters.

Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP-run Legislature have long engaged in a campaign to restrict our constitutional right to make laws (via initiative) – and to veto laws they’ve passed (via referendum) – at the ballot box.

So perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see many of them jumping for joy on Friday when a judge declared that Proposition 208, raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, unconstitutionally violated the state’s education spending limit.

Ducey proclaimed it “a win for Arizona taxpayers.”

“VICTORY,” tweeted Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler.

Yes, victory over a majority of the state’s voters who wanted to better fund our schools. Victory over 1.1 million children who attend some of the most poorly funded public schools in the nation. Who do those kids and those 1.7 million voters who support them think they are?

They want to replace a tax cut with a bigger one

So where is our victorious leaders’ plan to come up with an alternative funding proposal, in a good-faith effort to abide by the will of voters?

Answer: Nowhere. Because they don’t particularly seem to care about the will of the voters.

Speaking of rolling over voters, look for Ducey and the Legislature any day now to repeal a massive income tax cut that primarily benefits the state’s wealthiest residents.

Oh, not because they’ve heard voters’ repeated pleas to better fund the schools. It’s to thwart them.

The plan is to repeal the tax cut passed last year – the one 163,000 voters signed referendum petitions to freeze and put on the November ballot for voters to decide – and replace it with a new tax cut.

An even bigger one.

They also want to kill early voting

If you enjoyed that slap in the face, well then get ready for the backhand.

The Arizona Republican Party is suing to end early voting in Arizona.

Unable to get over the fact that Donald Trump lost, the party has actually filed a special action with the Arizona Supreme Court, asking to end the wildly popular program used by nearly 90% of voters who cast ballots in 2020.

Doesn’t matter that Arizona has allowed early voting for 30 years, during which time Republicans have dominated statewide and legislative elections.

Doesn’t matter that the program has worked so well for Republicans that in 2007, the GOP-controlled Legislature made it even easier to vote early, allowing voters to sign up to automatically get an early ballot in the mail.

In 2020, Trump lost and so now we’ve all go to pay — by returning to that long-gone era of standing in long Election Day lines to vote or even better (from a certain point of view) by just not bothering to vote.

Never mind that they (and we) all use it

Ducey, at least, has called the party’s lawsuit “ill conceived.” But Republican Kari Lake, who hopes to replace him, is all for it.

She even filed a “friend of the court” brief urging the justices to kill Arizona’s early voting program in order to rid the state of all that non-existent voter fraud.

“Absent an actual reason why a voter cannot vote at the polls, voting occurs at the polls on Election Day, not election month,” Lake’s attorney, Tim La Sota, wrote. “And a ‘reason’ does not include that the able-bodied, physically present voters simply does not want to take the minimally burdensome step of presenting him or herself at a polling place on Election Day.”

It’s worth noting that the able-bodied Lake has been voting early for years, as have most of the rest of us.

Yep, that’s a great way to win

Also worth noting? The fact that the Senate’s own election audit turned up no evidence of voter fraud, only “anomalies” that Republican-run Maricopa County has explained in great detail.

But then, those Republicans — the sort of conservative, business-oriented leaders who used to epidomize the party — belong in jail, right?

Now, it’ll be left to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democrats’ likely pick for governor, to defend our right to vote from the comfort of our kitchen table. A right that is cherished by nearly 9 in 10 voters.

It’s all apparently part of a genius campaign strategy by the hard right that has seized control of the once-Grand Old Party.

The ones who seem determined to transform that Big Tent into a pup tent.

The best and and only sane solution is to throw every one of these authoritarian Republicans who regularly abuse their power with utter contempt for the voters who foolishly elected them is to throw every one of them out of office. A price must be paid. There must be consequences, hold them all accountable by assisting their political suicide.





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1 thought on “The AZ GQP Is The ‘Political Suicide’ Squad Of Anti-Heroes”

  1. Vox.com reports, “Democrats’ fears about restricting mail-in voting were confirmed in Texas”, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/3/16/22967734/texas-voting-law-mail-ballot

    With the Texas primary earlier this month, we got our first look at whether the worst fears of Democrats and voting rights advocates were warranted.

    Thousands of votes were, in fact, thrown out, directly as a result of a new requirement in the law. A new AP analysis of data from Texas found that a whopping 13 percent of the state’s absentee ballots were discarded or uncounted.

    And in the state’s biggest county, the new procedures it mandated contributed to a hugely messy vote-counting process.

    “It’s been every bit as catastrophic as we feared it would be,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “I think the onus is on the legislature to acknowledge the harm that it did to Texas voters by passing Senate Bill 1 and make amends by repealing it next year.”

    But that probably won’t happen given that key Republicans who pushed for the law have continued to defend it.

    -See the full report for the details.

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