Ariz. GOP has a genius plan for self sabotage
Arizona Republican Party leaders continue their quest to transform the party’s once-Big Tent into something the size of a six sleeper.
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?
Just last 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.
“Keep your eyes open AFTER the legislative session to see what rewards Boyer and Ugenti-Rita get from the swamp for killing #ElectionIntegrity bills in the Senate … ,” Ward tweeted.
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.
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?
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.
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 got 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.
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.
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 onceGrand Old Party.
The ones who seem determined to transform that Big Tent into a pup tent.