February 5, 2022: Bowers Blocks Bill to Change Outcome of Certified Election

2/5/22: Arizona Trumplicans are licking their wounds today, after a bill to allow them to overturn any election results they didn’t like went down in flames on Friday.

 

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“We gave the authority to the people.”

 

Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers

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That bill was torpedoed by Republican-with-a-conscience, and Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers.

 

Bowers, a lifelong conservative, had trouble stomaching several provisions of the proposal:

 

1.     The legislature would have had the power to “accept or reject the election results”  and force a new election – basically any time the side they supported lost. (What could go wrong with that?).

 

2.     A single lawmaker could challenge results, forcing a vote of the entire legislature.

 

3.     Early voting would be entirely ended. No more mail-in ballots. Show up on Election Day, or that’s it.

 

4.     If you still wanted to vote, you would have to carry a fifty pound knapsack on your back and climb the highest mountain near Flagstaff, Arizona to reach the only polling place in the entire state.

 

5.     Okay, I made up #4. But you catch the drift.

 

The New York Times explained why Bowers balked:

 

“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’

 

“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” he said in December 2020. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to re-elect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

 

Left unsaid: You know Trump would. He’d violate any law – he’d violate every law – if he could get away with it.

Speaker Bowers - a true conservative and patriot.

 

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BACK IN WASHINGTON D.C., the House Select Panel has subpoenaed the phone records of Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and her husband Michael. Ward is known to have called Republican election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, to suggest they talk to then-President Trump about – you know – election results. 

Cough, cough. 

Mr. and Mrs. Ward have decided they don’t want investigators looking at their phone records, and they’d rather ask a judge to block T-Mobile, their provider, from releasing the logs. 

Both husband and wife signed a document in days leading up to the attack on Capitol Hill, indicating that they were duly chosen in 2020 to cast their votes (for Trump) in the Electoral College.

 

This would have been news to Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a Republican, who had already certified his state’s electoral vote, and announced that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. had fairly won the state. 

Ward and Ward were lying.