Rogers misleading voters to raise campaign cash

Sen. Wendy Rogers may have failed in her quest to turn doctors into felons but she's hoping to turn a tidy profit by misleading voters about her bill’s prospects.

The Flagstaff Republican sent out a campaign fundraising email last week, hoping to raise cash off of her proposal to virtually outlaw abortion.

“I am proud that Arizona may be among the first states to pass a Heartbeat Bill,” she wrote. “HB 2140 passed the Senate Appropriations Committee and hopefully is headed to the Senate floor — further than it's ever been.”

Actually, the only place her bill is headed is to the trash heap.

Rogers put out her plea for money on April 11, five days after Senate President Karen Fann said she would not bring the bill to the floor for debate.

The bill would make it a class 3 felony for doctors to perform an abortion after a heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as five and a half weeks.

“This bill was not vetted properly with stakeholders to ensure it is constitutional,” Fann told Capitol Media Services’ Howard Fischer on April 6, adding that Rogers didn’t check with her fellow Republicans to see if they’d support her proposal.

Yet five days later, there was Rogers, a self-described “pro-Trump firebrand” pleading for money “to make sure I can get the truth out there”.

Rogers is what you might call a stand-out at the state Capitol, so far out there on the fringe that she’s in a legislative league of her own.

She spent a decade trying to convince voters to send her to Congress, going so far as to baselessly accuse a Republican rival of having ties to a sextrafficking ring in 2018.

When that didn’t work, she moved from Tempe to a travel trailer in Flagstaff last year, hoping the Legislature

would be heights.

She spent more than a million dollars to win a seat in the state Legislature in 2020, running a slash-and-burn campaign against then-Sen. Sylvia Allen — charging that one of the most conservative members of the Legislature was “not conservative enough.”

Rogers’ campaign was so obnoxious that state Rep. Walter Blackman, a Snowflake Republican and staunch conservative, told the Arizona Capitol Times after the primary election that he would not campaign with or even vote for her, saying she phonied up endorsements.

a

springboard

to

loftier

“Integrity is a big deal,” Blackman said. “When she went to my neighbors, people I go to church with, people that I serve as a sitting representative and lied about their endorsements, it’s really hard for me to hitch on to someone’s wagon and really effectively campaign with them.”

Perhaps Rogers’ biggest legislative accomplishment thus far has been escaping censure from the Senate Ethics Committee. In March, the panel on a partyline vote dismissed a workplace harassment complaint, filed by a former aide even before the legislative session began.

Now she’s raising money for what undoubtedly will be another bruiser campaign in 2022.

Which brings us back to Sunday’s plea for money, in which she points to her (doomed) abortion bill as Exhibit A in showcasing her legislative effectiveness.

Speaking of “truth,” I reached out to Rogers to ask her whether it’s ethical to mislead people about her bill’s prospects in order to raise money. No response.

Then again really, what say?

In fact, her original abortion bill never even got a hearing in the Senate. Instead, it was revived late last month when the Senate Appropriations Committee amended it as replacement langauge on a bill dealing with license plate design that already had cleared the House.

Not even the state’s most ardent anti-abortion lobbyist, the Center for Arizona Policy’s Cathi Herrod, pushed for passage of Rogers’ bill, telling Fischer she was focused on bills that actually

could

she have a chance of becoming law, both politically and legally.

“The courts have declined to uphold heartbeat laws as constitutional,” Herrod said.

You sure wouldn’t know it from Rogers’ fundraising letter, in which she also touts a bill to establish a $30 million Border Security Fund and asks suporters to send “the largest donation you can afford.”

“In the age of Biden, you can’t back down,” she wrote. “You have to stand up for your beliefs to show the people that America First policies work!”

If one of those beliefs is to grift money from suckers by outright lying to them, then yeah, Rogers is not just standing up. She’s standing tall.