radiofree.asia

Category: Arizona

  • Arizona Judge Lifts Injunction Against State’s 1864 Anti-Abortion Law

    Planned Parenthood Arizona on Friday night vowed that its fight to protect reproductive healthcare in the state was “far from over” after a judge lifted a decades-old injunction which had blocked an anti-abortion rights law dating back to 1864 — before Arizona was even established as a state — and allowed the ban to be enforced.

    Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said in her ruling that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care, had been the basis for barring the 1864 law from being enforced. Since Roe was overturned in June, she said, the injunction should be annulled.

    Johnson’s decision will “unleash [a] near-total abortion ban in Arizona,” said Planned Parenthood Arizona, with the law including no exceptions for people whose pregnancies result from rape or incest. Under the law, which was first passed by Arizona’s territorial legislature and then updated and codifed in 1901, anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain abortion care can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

    The law does include an exception for “a medical emergency,” according to The New York Times, but as Common Dreams has reported, such an exception in practice has already resulted in a Texas woman being forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy until her health was deemed sufficiently in danger before a doctor provided care.

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the Times that “medical professionals will now be forced to think twice and call their lawyer before providing patients with oftentimes necessary, lifesaving care.”

    In a statement on Twitter, Hobbs vowed to “do everything in my power to protect” abortion rights in Arizona, “starting by using my veto pen to block any legislation that compromises the right to choose” if she becomes governor.

    “No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is.”

    The ruling was handed down a day before the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in March, was set to go into effect. Although abortion care had remained legal in Arizona after Roe was overturned on June 24, it has been largely unavailable as medical providers waited to see whether Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s motion to lift the injunction on the 1864 law would succeed.

    Johnson’s ruling made Arizona the 14th state to ban nearly all abortions following the overturning of Roe. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced his proposal to pass a nationwide forced-pregnancy bill that would ban abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Saturday called the ruling “catastrophic, dangerous, and unacceptable.”

    “Make no mistake: this backwards decision exemplifies the disturbing trend across the country of Republican officials at the local and national level dead-set on stripping women of their rights,” she said.

    Planned Parenthood Arizona, which had argued in court that medical professionals in the state should be permitted to continue providing abortions under the 15-week ban, said its “lawyers are evaluating next steps in the case.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nonwhite Voters Face High Risk of Being Dropped From Arizona’s Mail Ballot List

    The past year has been char­ac­ter­ized by wide­spread assaults on voting rights across the coun­try. This has been espe­cially true in swing states where the 2020 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion saw narrow margins. As our colleague Will Wilder explains, even among these states, Arizona stands out as a focal point for the fight over voting rights.

    Here, we look at one provi­sion of Arizon­a’s Senate Bill 1485, which was passed into law in May 2021 but won’t be in effect for the midterms. The bill turns Arizon­a’s extremely popu­lar “Perman­ent Early Voting List” into an “Active Early Voting List.” Voters on the list are auto­mat­ic­ally mailed a ballot before every elec­tion. Under the new rules, Arizon­ans will be removed from the list if they go four years without cast­ing a ballot by mail. Even if a voter parti­cip­ates but only does so in person, they will fall off the list.

    Like in much of the West­ern United States, Arizon­ans have a robust history of cast­ing their votes by mail. Since 2010, an aver­age of two-thirds of the elect­or­ate has voted by mail. Like four other states, Arizona has allowed voters to sign up to receive a ballot in the mail for all elec­tions, obvi­at­ing the need to fill out a new absentee ballot request form for each and every contest. Accord­ing to voter file data from L2 Polit­ical, some 3 million Arizon­ans (roughly 75 percent of the elect­or­ate) were on the list in April of 2021, shortly before S.B. 1485 was passed.

    To analyze the expec­ted effects of the law, we looked at voter file data from L2 Polit­ical, which records whether and how each voter parti­cip­ated in an elec­tion. Although voters won’t be removed from the list for a few years, we wanted to know who would be impacted based on the list as it was when the legis­lature was consid­er­ing this change. To do so, we looked at which voters on the list cast a mail ballot in any elec­tion in 2017, 2018, 2019, or 2020. If they voted by mail in any of these elec­tions, they are considered “not at risk” of being dropped; they are considered “at risk” if they did not cast a mail ballot.

    In Arizona, voters do not self-identify their race or ethni­city when they register to vote. To estim­ate each voter’s race or ethni­city, we use a tech­nique common among polit­ical scient­ists called Bayesian Improved Surname Geocod­ing, which predicts race/ethni­city based on each voter’s last name and the demo­graph­ics of the census block in which they live. This method is widely used by academ­ics and voting rights litig­at­ors alike to predict racial/ethnic demo­graph­ics. While it cannot perfectly estim­ate any indi­vidu­al’s race or ethni­city, it has very low error rates at the popu­la­tion level. (This method considers “Latino” to be mutu­ally exclus­ive from other races and ethni­cit­ies — put differ­ently, a voter is considered either white or Black or Latino.)

    To be clear, being dropped from the perman­ent early voting list does­n’t mean that a voter will be disen­fran­chised. They’ll receive a notice from the state indic­at­ing that they’ve been removed and can then either reen­list or vote in person. However, many voters might miss the noti­fic­a­tion in the mail — and mail deliv­ery is not always reli­able. As such, some people might not end up voting if they don’t receive their expec­ted mail ballot. And for all voters, the require­ment to rejoin the list of mail voters imposes the sort of small costs that can add up to major burdens on the right to vote — a prob­lem under any circum­stances, and doubly so when the costs have such clear racial dispar­it­ies as the Arizona bill.

    The chart below shows the share of each racial/ethnic group that is at risk of being dropped from the early voting list. About 11.6 percent of voters — or more than 340,000 Arizon­ans — are at risk of being removed, but there are clear racial dispar­it­ies. While just 8.4 percent of white voters on the list went four years without voting by mail, this was the case for more than 21.1 percent of Latino voters.

    This adds up to big discrep­an­cies in the over­all number of voters who could be dropped when broken down by race and ethni­city. Although 31 percent of voters on the list are nonwhite, these voters make up half of those at risk of being dropped. All nonwhite racial groups are overrep­res­en­ted among those at risk of being removed, but none as much as Latino voters.

    Latino voters make up just 17 percent of the perman­ent early voters who aren’t at risk of being dropped but more than a third of those who might fall off the list. The figure below shows the relat­ive risk ratio that each racial group faces of being removed from the list. If a group’s share of the at-risk popu­la­tion is equal to its share of the total popu­la­tion, the group’s risk ratio is 1. A risk ratio above 1 indic­ates that a given group is overrep­res­en­ted in the at-risk popu­la­tion. As you can see, each racial/ethnic group except for white Arizon­ans is above 1 (although the risk ratio for Asian Amer­ican voters is very close to 1).

    Under­min­ing the perman­ent early voting list also spells danger for Arizon­a’s Native Amer­ican communit­ies. Because Native Amer­ic­ans make up a relat­ively small share of the popu­la­tion, it is often diffi­cult to identify them using tech­niques such as surname geocod­ing. As an altern­at­ive, we used the geocoded voter file and census shapefiles to identify voters who live on Native Amer­ican tribal lands. To be sure, this misses Native Amer­ic­ans who live off reser­va­tions. Never­the­less, it is help­ful to know whether indi­vidu­als living on reser­va­tions are dispro­por­tion­ately harmed by the new law.

    The differ­ence is stark: about 23 percent of voters on the list who reside on tribal lands are at risk of removal, compared to only 11.6 percent of perman­ent early voters statewide. In other words, voters on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to face removal.

    These results make plain that S.B. 1485, like so many other policies that restrict access to voting, will have a dispro­por­tion­ate effect on voters of color and Native Amer­ican voters.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump-Backed GOP Conspiracists Just Moved Closer to Control of Arizona Elections

    Republican election conspiracists endorsed by former President Donald Trump appear likely to sweep the Arizona Republican primaries, putting them closer to positions that would allow them to oversee the state’s elections.

    Former news anchor Kari Lake, who was endorsed by Trump after saying it was “disqualifying” for Republicans to reject “stolen” election claims, on Tuesday declared premature victory over Karrin Taylor Robson, an ally of Trump foe Gov. Doug Ducey. The race is still too close to call but Lake leads Robson by about 12,000 votes with 80% of the votes counted. The winner will face Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs, the current secretary of state, in a race that could determine whether the next election is actually certified by the state. Ducey famously drew Trump’s ire after refusing to help his effort to somehow reverse his election loss.

    Lake said at a debate last month that she would not have certified President Joe Biden’s win in 2020, falsely claiming that “he lost the election and he shouldn’t be in the White House.”

    State Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the loudest election conspiracists who attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and sponsored bills to “decertify” 2020 election results over debunked fraud claims, easily won the nomination for secretary of state in a split four-way race. Finchem is a longtime member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group whose members have been charged with sedition conspiracy related to the Capitol riot, and he participated in the Trump campaign’s “fake elector” scheme, which other GOP officials described as “treasonous,” and has since come under scrutiny by the federal and state prosecutors.

    “He’s communicated the fact he will not certify an election that Donald Trump does not win,” Adrian Fontes, who leads a too-close-to-call race for the Democratic nomination, told HuffPost. “He has no integrity. He has no honor. He has no intention of executing the office, under the oath that he will falsely swear to. So there’s really no question in my mind. He just won’t do the job.”

    Other Trump-backed conspiracists also won up and down the Arizona GOP ballot on Tuesday.

    Blake Masters, whose bid was heavily boosted by Trump’s endorsement and about $15 million from his mentor Peter Thiel, won the GOP Senate nomination. Masters, who echoed Trump’s false claims about the election, also made a number of controversial comments on the campaign trail, calling to privatize Social Security, blaming gun violence on Black people, and declaring support for a national abortion and contraception ban. He has echoed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that Democrats are trying to “replace Americans who were born here.” Masters will face Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in November.

    Former Maricopa County prosecutor Abraham Hamadeh, a Trump-backed election denier, appears to be headed for a win over attorney Rodney Glassman, another pro-Trump election denier, in the GOP attorney general race. Former state Sen. David Farnsworth, who was endorsed by Trump, easily defeated Arizona State House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who was labeled a “RINO coward” by the former president after he testified publicly in the House Jan. 6 hearings.

    The statewide candidates would gain significant influence over the state’s elections if they win in November, as will election deniers in local county offices, some of whom have already sought to influence elections by refusing to certify primary results or refusing to count certain votes.

    Finchem, who could be the state’s next election chief, is one of a growing number of election deniers to win the GOP nomination. Election deniers have also won secretary of state primaries in Alabama, Indiana, Nevada and New Mexico and the Michigan GOP nominated election denier Kristina Karamo earlier this year.

    Lake would also join a growing number of Republican election conspiracists to win the gubernatorial nomination, along with Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, Maryland’s Dan Cox, and Michigan’s Tudor Dixon.

    Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official who is now a senior adviser at Democracy Fund, called the trend of election deniers winning primaries “deeply troubling.”

    “We can debate policy issues, like what’s the right timeline for voter registration or proper security protocols,” she told NPR. “But I never thought we would be talking about individuals governing our election system … who felt that they should put their fingers on the scale.”

    While Republican officials like Ducey and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pushed back on Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election, every win by an election denier moves the country closer to potential chaos in 2024.

    “If somebody else had been in that position and had been willing to go along with that, we might have seen a different outcome,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of the nonpartisan States United Action, told NPR. “The truth is that a single election denier in a single state could throw our elections into chaos, could put our democracy at risk.”

  • A Woman’s Ex-Husband Is Suing the Clinic That Provided Her Abortion 4 Years Ago

    Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision.

    A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020, alleging that physicians failed to obtain proper informed consent from the woman as required by Arizona law.

    Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician. But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said.

    The experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners, experts said.

    Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in tort law and reproductive rights, said the Arizona case is a “harbinger of things to come” and called it “troubling for the future.”

    Finley said she expects state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups to use “unprecedented strategies” to try to prevent people from traveling to obtain abortions or block them from obtaining information on where to seek one.

    Perhaps the most extreme example is in Texas, where the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law in May 2021 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in December, allows private citizens to sue a person who performs or aids in an abortion.

    “It’s much bigger than these wrongful death suits,” Finley said.

    Civia Tamarkin, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, which advocates for reproductive rights, said the Arizona lawsuit is part of a larger agenda that anti-abortion advocates are working toward.

    “It’s a lawsuit that appears to be a trial balloon to see how far the attorney and the plaintiff can push the limits of the law, the limits of reason, the limits of science and medicine,” Tamarkin said.

    In July 2018, the ex-husband, Mario Villegas, accompanied his then-wife to three medical appointments — a consultation, the abortion and a follow-up. The woman, who ProPublica is not identifying for privacy reasons, said in a deposition in the wrongful death suit that at the time of the procedure the two were already talking about obtaining a divorce, which was finalized later that year.

    “We were not happy together at all,” she said.

    Villegas, a former Marine from Globe, Arizona, a mining town east of Phoenix, had been married twice before and has other children. He has since moved out of state.

    In a form his then-wife filled out at the clinic, she said she was seeking an abortion because she was not ready to be a parent and her relationship with Villegas was unstable, according to court records. She also checked a box affirming that “I am comfortable with my decision to terminate this pregnancy.” The woman declined to speak on the record with ProPublica out of fear for her safety.

    The following year, in 2019, Villegas learned about an Alabama man who hadn’t wanted his ex-girlfriend to have an abortion and sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville on behalf of an embryo that was aborted at six weeks.

    To sue on behalf of the embryo, the would-be father, Ryan Magers, went to probate court where he asked a judge to appoint him as the personal representative of the estate. In probate court, a judge may appoint someone to represent the estate of a person who has died without a will. That representative then has the authority to distribute the estate’s assets to beneficiaries.

    When Magers filed to open an estate for the embryo, his attorney cited various Alabama court rulings involving pregnant people and a 2018 amendment to the Alabama Constitution recognizing the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

    A probate judge appointed Magers representative of the estate, giving him legal standing to sue for damages in the wrongful death claim. The case, believed to be the first instance in which an aborted embryo was given legal rights, made national headlines.

    It’s unclear how many states allow an estate to be opened on behalf of an embryo or fetus. Some states, like Arizona, don’t explicitly define what counts as a deceased person in their probate code, leaving it to a judge to decide. In a handful of states, laws define embryos and fetuses as a person at conception, which could allow for an estate, but it’s rare.

    An Alabama circuit court judge eventually dismissed Magers’ wrongful death lawsuit, stating that the claims were “precluded by State and Federal laws.”

    Villegas contacted Magers’ attorney, Brent Helms, about pursuing a similar action in Arizona and was referred to J. Stanley Martineau, an Arizona attorney who had flown to Alabama to talk to Helms about Magers’ case.

    In August 2020, Villegas filed a petition to be appointed personal representative of the estate of “Baby Villegas.” His ex-wife opposed the action and contacted a legal advocacy organization focused on reproductive justice, which helped her obtain a lawyer.

    In court filings, Villegas said he prefers to think of “Baby Villegas” as a girl, although the sex of the embryo was never determined, and his lawyer argued that there isn’t an Arizona case that explicitly defines a deceased person, “so the issue appears to be an open one in Arizona.”

    In a 2021 motion arguing for dismissal, the ex-wife’s attorney, Louis Silverman, argued that Arizona’s probate code doesn’t authorize the appointment of a personal representative for an embryo, and that granting Villegas’ request would violate a woman’s constitutional right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

    “U.S. Supreme Court precedent has long protected the constitutional right of a woman to obtain an abortion, including that the decision whether to do so belongs to the woman alone — even where her partner, spouse, or ex-spouse disagrees with that decision,” Silverman said last year.

    Gila County Superior Court Judge Bryan B. Chambers said in an order denying the motion that his decision allows Villegas to make the argument that the embryo is a person in a wrongful death lawsuit, but that he has not reached that conclusion at this stage. Villegas was later appointed the personal representative of the estate.

    As states determine what is legal in the wake of Dobbs and legislators propose new abortion laws, anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee see civil suits as a way to enforce abortion bans and have released model legislation they hope sympathetic legislators will duplicate in statehouses nationwide.

    “In addition to criminal penalties and medical license revocation, civil remedies will be critical to ensure that unborn lives are protected from illegal abortions,” the group wrote in a June 15 letter to its state affiliates that included the model legislation.

    James Bopp Jr.,general counsel for the committee, said in an interview with ProPublica that such actions will be necessary because some “radical Democrat” prosecutors have signaled they won’t enforce criminal abortion bans. Last month, 90 prosecutors from across the country indicated that they would not prosecute those who seek abortions.

    “The civil remedies follow what the criminal law makes unlawful,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

    The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation, which advocates prohibiting abortion except to prevent the death of the pregnant person, recommends that states permit civil actions against people or entities that violate abortion laws “to prevent future violations.” It also suggests that people who have had or have sought to have an illegal abortion, as well as the expectant father and the parents of a pregnant minor, be allowed to pursue wrongful death actions.

    Under the legislation, an action for wrongful death of an “unborn child” would be treated like that of a child who died after being born.

    In one regard, Arizona has already implemented a piece of this model legislation as the state’s lawmakers have chipped away at access to abortion and enacted a myriad of regulations on doctors who provide the procedure.

    The state’s “informed consent” statute for abortion, first signed into law by then-Gov. Jan Brewer in 2009, mandated an in-person counseling session and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. It allows a pregnant person, their husband or a maternal grandparent of a minor to sue if a physician does not properly obtain the pregnant person’s informed consent, and to receive damages for psychological, emotional and physical injuries, statutory damages and attorney fees.

    The informed consent laws, which have changed over time, mandate that the patient be told about the “probable anatomical and physiological characteristics” of the embryo or fetus and the “immediate and long-term medical risks” associated with abortion, as well as alternatives to the procedure. Some abortion-rights groups and medical professionals have criticized informed consent processes, arguing the materials can be misleading and personify the embryo or fetus. A 2018 review of numerous studies concluded that having an abortion does not increase a person’s risk of infertility in their next pregnancy, nor is it linked to a higher risk of breast cancer or preterm birth, among other issues.

    The wrongful death suit comes at a time of extraordinary confusion over abortion law in Arizona.

    Until Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, a law dating to before statehood had banned the procedure. In March, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has called Arizona “the most pro-life state in the country,” signed into law a bill outlawing abortions after 15 weeks, and said that law would supersede the pre-statehood ban if Roe were overturned. But now that Roe has been overturned, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another Republican, said he intends to enforce the pre-statehood ban, which outlawed abortion except to preserve the life of the person seeking the procedure. On Thursday, he filed a motion to lift an injunction on the law, which would make it enforceable.

    Adding to the muddle, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked part of a 2021 Arizona law that would classify fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people starting at conception, ruling that the attorney general cannot use the so-called personhood law against abortion providers. Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, eight of the state’s nine abortion providers — all located in three Arizona counties — halted abortion services, but following the emergency injunction some are again offering them.

    In the wrongful death claim, Martineau argued that the woman’s consent was invalidated because the doctors didn’t follow the informed consent statute. Although the woman signed four consent documents, the suit claims that “evidence shows that in her rush to maximize profits,” the clinic’s owner, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, “cut corners.” Martineau alleged that Goodrick and another doctor didn’t inform the woman of the loss of “maternal-fetal” attachment, about the alternatives to abortion or that if not for the abortion, the embryo would likely have been “delivered to term,” among other violations.

    Tom Slutes, Goodrick’s lawyer, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”

    “They didn’t cut any corners,” he said, adding that the woman “clearly knew what was going to happen and definitely, strongly” wanted the abortion. Regardless of the information the woman received, she wouldn’t have changed her mind, Slutes said. Slutes referenced the deposition, where the woman said she “felt completely informed.”

    Martineau said in an interview that Villegas isn’t motivated by collecting money from the lawsuit.

    “He has no desire to harass” his ex-wife, Martineau said. “All he wants to do is make sure it doesn’t happen to another father.”

    In a deposition, Villegas’ ex-wife said that he was emotionally abusive during their marriage, which lasted nearly five years. At first, she said, Villegas seemed like the “greatest guy I’ve ever met in my life,” taking her to California for a week as a birthday gift. But as the marriage progressed, she said, there were times he wouldn’t allow her to get a job or leave the house unless she was with him.

    The woman alleged that Villegas made fake social media profiles, hacked into her social media accounts and threatened to “blackmail” her if she left him during his failed campaign to be a justice of the peace in Gila County, outside of Phoenix.

    Villegas denied the allegations about his relationship but declined to comment further for this story, Martineau said.

    Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said certain civil remedies can also be a mechanism for men to continue to abuse their former partners through the court system.

    “What happens if the father who is suing on behalf of the fetus is your rapist or your abuser? It’s another way to torture a woman,” Chatman said.

    Chatman added that these legal actions can be a deterrent for physicians in states where abortion is banned after a certain gestational period, because the threat of civil suits makes it harder for doctors to get insurance.

    The lawsuit has added to the stresses on Goodrick, who has been performing abortions in Arizona since the mid-1990s, and her practice. She said that since the lawsuit was filed, the annual cost of her medical malpractice insurance has risen from $32,000 to $67,000.

    Before providers in Arizona halted abortions following the Supreme Court decision, people would begin lining up outside Goodrick’s clinic at 6 a.m., sometimes with lawn chairs in hand, like “a concert line,” Goodrick said.

    “Every year there’s something and we never know what it’s going to be,” Goodrick said recently at her Phoenix clinic. “I’m kind of desensitized to it all.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Federal Judge Blocks Arizona Law Giving “Personhood” Rights to Fertilized Eggs

    A federal judge on Monday barred enforcement of a so-called “personhood” law in Arizona that advocacy groups warned would be used to criminalize abortion across the state.

    The Center for Reproductive Rights — part of the coalition that demanded and obtained the injunction — noted in a press release that the 2021 law crafted by Republican legislators “classifies fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs as ‘people’ starting at the point of conception.”

    “The vague provision placed both providers and pregnant people at risk of arbitrary prosecution,” the group said. “Amid the uncertainty surrounding the interpretation and application of the personhood law, Arizona abortion clinics in the state have suspended abortion services. Arizona’s personhood law is one of several conflicting laws on the books, including a pre-Roe ban, adding to the confusion on whether abortion providers can resume services.”

    Judge Douglas Rayes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona expressed agreement Monday with the reproductive rights coalition’s argument that the 2021 statute is overly and unlawfully vague. Arizona officials have conceded in legal filings that it’s “anyone’s guess” what the law’s impacts would be across the state.

    “When the punitive and regulatory weight of the entire Arizona code is involved, plaintiffs should not have to guess at whether their conduct is on the right or the wrong side of the law,” Rayes wrote in his decision Monday.

    Victoria López, director of program and strategy with the ACLU of Arizona, said that in response to the ruling that “while we’re glad that the court has blocked it and that prosecutors can’t use this to go after pregnant people or providers, the fight for abortion access continues.”

    “Arizona’s personhood provision was crafted recklessly by extremist lawmakers in their harmful quest to eradicate abortion access in the state,” said López. “Over 80% of Arizona voters want abortion to remain legal — and we’ll continue to fight for that freedom.”

    The judge’s decision came as pregnant people and healthcare providers in Arizona are also bracing for the looming activation of a 15-week abortion ban that Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed into law in March.

    Additionally, Arizona’s GOP attorney general has argued that thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a total abortion ban that’s been on the books since 1901 — before Arizona was a state — is now enforceable.

    “The Supreme Court’s catastrophic decision overturning Roe v. Wade has unleashed chaos on the ground, leaving Arizona residents scrambling to figure out if they can get the abortion care they need,” said Jessica Sklarsky, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “People should not have to live in a state of fear when accessing or providing essential healthcare. We will continue our fight to preserve abortion access in Arizona and across the country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Arizona Legislators Attack Public Education With New Universal Voucher Law

    Last Friday, while the country reeled from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Arizona made history of a different sort. Legislators in the Grand Canyon State passed a universal school voucher bill that, once signed by Gov. Doug Ducey, will become the most wide-reaching school privatization plan in the country.

    In his January State of the State address, Ducey called on Arizona lawmakers to send him bills that would “expand school choice any way we can,” and the Republican-dominated legislature obliged, delivering last Friday’s bill, which will open a preexisting program for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) up to the entire state. In practice, the law will now give parents who opt out of public schools a debit card for roughly $7,000 per child that can be used to pay for private school tuition, but also for much more: for religious schools, homeschool expenses, tutoring, online classes, education supplies and fees associated with “microschools,” in which small groups of parents pool resources to hire teachers.

    Ducey said the law had “set the gold standard in educational freedom” in the country, and right-wing politicians and education activists quickly agreed. Corey DeAngelis, the research director of Betsy DeVos’ school privatization lobby group American Federation for Children, declared on Twitter that Arizona “just took first place” when it comes to school choice. Anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo — the Manhattan Institute fellow who this spring called for fostering “universal public school distrust” in order to build support for “universal school choice” — tweeted, “Every red state in the country should follow [Ducey’s] lead,” since the law “gives every family a right to exit any public school that fails to educate their children or reflect their values.”

    From the American Enterprise Institute, education researcher Max Eden happily concluded that “Arizona now funds students, not systems,” deploying a formulation that has become common among conservative education activists, as when last week the Moms for Liberty network chastised Arizona public school advocates who opposed the bill as “system advocates” rather than “education advocates.” From Rhode Island, anti-CRT activist Nicole Solas, a fellow with the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum, tweeted, “You know what happens when you abuse people? People leave you. Bye, public school.”

    And back in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank founded in honor of former senator and right-wing icon Barry Goldwater, celebrated the law it had done much to create as a “major victory for families wary of a one-size-fits-all approach to education,” plus a cost-saving measure to boot, since the total funding parents would receive through ESA vouchers is $4,000 less than Arizona’s already paltry per-pupil funding for public schools.

    By contrast, Democratic politicians and public education advocates described the law as the potential “nail in the coffin” for public schools in Arizona, as Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS Arizona) put it.

    “The Republican universal voucher system is designed to kill public education,” tweeted former Arizona House Rep. Diego Rodriguez. “OUR nation’s greatness is built on free Public schools. The GOP goal is to recreate segregation, expand the opportunity gap, and destroy the foundation of our democracy.”

    “I think it’s a very serious mistake and the result will be that, within a decade, Arizona will have a very, very poorly educated adult population,” added Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. “Maybe that’s the game.”

    * * *

    For years, SOS Arizona says, their state has been treated as a “laboratory for predatory national privatizers” of education. When Betsy DeVos founded another of her advocacy groups, Alliance for School Choice, on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, as the progressive White Hat Research & Policy Group noted in a 2019 report, it was headquartered in Phoenix. When the Network for Public Education graded states’ commitment to public education in a “report card” earlier this year, Arizona came in last. For years, the Goldwater Institute and its allies have advanced an array of programs to expand public funding of private schools, including, in 2011, shepherding the country’s first-ever ESA program into law, and thus launching a national model.

    The 2011 Arizona law that created ESAs — under which parents of eligible students who agreed in writing to opt out of public schools could receive vouchers ranging from $3,000 to more than $30,000 — was initially conceived in reaction to a conservative defeat. In 2006, just a few years after DeVos infamously called on conservative Christians to adopt “school choice” as a cause and a means of “greater Kingdom gain,” Arizona passed two voucher programs. But three years later, both were found to be unconstitutional means of redirecting public funds to private schools.

    In response, the Goldwater Institute developed the ESA concept as a workaround, giving the public funds directly to parents to spend as they saw fit, including on sectarian schools. (While in Arizona, “ESA” refers to Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, the same abbreviation is also used to cover similar programs with different titles, like “education scholarship accounts.”) To public education advocates like Charles Siler, cofounder of the progressive political consultancy firm Agave Strategy, the program amounted to “a money laundering scheme to get around the Blaine Amendments” — the state-level amendments that, until another groundbreaking SCOTUS decision last week, barred taxpayer funds in most states from being used to fund religious schools.

    But that’s not how it was sold. From its inception, says Lewis, ESAs were presented as a solution for high-needs students who required specialized education options. Then they were systematically expanded to include group after group: students in F-rated schools, in foster care, in active-duty military families, on Native American reservations.

    “The people who were pushing this through knew what they were doing — that they were going to expand this incrementally through sympathetic populations,” said Lewis. “And it didn’t raise huge amounts of opposition because people didn’t see the game plan at the time.”

    “The basic sales pitch was that schools are failing, and don’t meet the needs of children,” agreed Siler. While today Siler is a progressive public education advocate, a decade ago he worked as a lobbyist and PR staffer for the Goldwater Institute, helping other states follow Arizona’s lead in setting up ESA programs. “We definitely leaned into marginalized communities as much as we could. In Arizona, we started with special needs students. If we could use Black children as the face of our programs, we’d do it in a heartbeat, even though all of this is really about taxpayer-funded white flight and Christian nationalism.”

    To demonstrate that point, Siler pointed to one of the figures who drove ESA and other conservative school privatization campaigns for years: Clint Bolick, who, before being appointed by Ducey as an Arizona Supreme Court associate justice, served as the Goldwater Institute’s director of litigation, the first president of DeVos’ Alliance for School Choice and cofounder of the Arizona libertarian law firm Institute for Justice. In the late 1990s, the New York Times dubbed Bolick the “political right’s point man on race,” for his two-year fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1991, his campaign against affirmative action and his work to scuttle the Department of Justice nomination of the late Lani Guinier, the first Black woman to be tenured at Harvard Law School, by labeling her a “quota queen.” More recently, the White Hat report described Bolick’s legacy as “primarily focused on laying the legal groundwork for a national disinvestment in public education in favor of free market education reforms.”

    But in 2017, says Lewis, Arizona’s education privatizers overreached, passing a law providing for universal voucher expansion. In response, a grassroots group of educators and parents launched a citizens’ initiative referendum campaign and put the issue on the ballot. In 2018, that led to a landslide repudiation of the law, with 65% of Arizonans voting against it — a nearly two-to-one margin.

    As Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts recently recalled, Arizona’s voters “didn’t just reject” the scheme: “They stoned the thing, then they tossed it in the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”

    That came as a rude shock for the privatization movement, says Siler. “They thought Arizona was this playground where you could do whatever you want, see what works, then export it to Florida, Tennessee or wherever. This was the first time they had a big loss.” But the win came with its own repercussions, Siler continued, as conservatives responded by taking steps to overhaul the citizen initiative process in Arizona, working to disqualify some ballot initiatives in court and crafting legislation that required new supermajorities to pass an initiative into law.

    Now, less than four years after that public rejection of universal vouchers, Lewis says, Republican lawmakers have returned with a law that’s even worse than the one passed in 2017, immediately making every child in the state who is already in private school or being homeschooled eligible for the new funds — leading to an immediate cost increase of nearly $600 million, and opening the door for all of Arizona’s 1.1 million public school students to follow suit.

    ***

    Since Arizona pioneered ESAs in 2011, similar programs have been launched in a number of other states. Among conservative education reform advocates, they’ve become a favored model. Last July, as the right was ramping up its attacks on public schools over pandemic safety measures, CRT and more, the AEI’s Max Eden warned that simply allowing public funding of private schools was an insufficient bulwark against “wokeness,” since too many private schools were under the sway of accreditation bodies that had already “gone woke.” Instead, Eden told the right-wing outlet Washington Free Beacon, state legislatures should promote ESAs, which would allow those funds to be spent on non-accredited schools — or almost anything else, for that matter.

    In praising Arizona’s new law this week, Eden wrote that ESAs represent “the purest form of school choice,” adding that they might spark the proliferation of microschools, opening what had been a “luxury good” for wealthy families during the pandemic to all Arizona families. He praised entrepreneurs who had transformed small microschool pods into companies that now offer their curricula of “self-paced Chromebook lessons and group problem-based learning” to the broader public, as well as established charter school networks, like the Texas- and Arizona-based Great Hearts Academy, that have expanded into the microschool business. (In 2018, Great Hearts drew national headlines after one of its Texas instructors directed students to list the pros and cons of slavery.) Eden also suggested that ESA-funded microschools might become a boon for teachers, since educators who go freelance and successfully advertise their services to the parents of a dozen kids, could potentially “draw nearly $80,000 in public funding,” amounting to a higher salary than the median public school teacher pay, even after deducting their expenses.

    But what Eden heralded as the entrepreneurial reboot of “the one-room schoolhouse” in private families’ homes is seen in grimmer terms by public school advocates. Both microschools and the sorts of private schools fueled by widespread voucher use, they say, tend to leave the quality of education students receive largely up to chance.

    In Florida, as a 2017 Orlando Sentinel investigation found, massive voucher expansion led to the creation of low-cost but low-quality “voucher schools”: private schools inexpensive enough that low-income parents could cover their tuition with voucher funds alone, but so poorly regulated that repeated problems arose — schools set up in decrepit strip malls, schools that violated health and safety requirements, schools that hired teachers without credentials. The same situation holds in Arizona, said Lewis, and even a Goldwater Institute report found that ESA benefits would only cover about two-thirds of the median tuition for the state’s private high schools.

    While the words “private school” conjure an image of stone and ivy in most people’s minds, in school districts like South Phoenix, which primarily serves low-income families of color, Lewis said, “you’re not going to all of a sudden have a gleaming new Notre Dame prep school.”

    “It’s very easy to set up a one-room shop in a strip mall, give every kid a Chromebook and a plaid skirt, tell parents they’re on an accelerated curriculum and take that $7,000,” said Lewis. But it’s equally easy for those schools to “close up shop whenever they want,” as numerous low-quality voucher schools have been known to do, leaving students stranded partway through the school year. When that happens, said Lewis, “There’s no recourse to claw those funds back.”

    As Arizona’s new law was making its way through the legislature, reported Arizona’s 12 News, Democratic lawmakers tried to add accountability and transparency measures, including testing mandates, background checks for employees hired with ESA funds and demographic tracking to ensure the program wasn’t just subsidizing private school tuition for rich families who didn’t need it. But none of those things made it into the final bill, shot down by arguments like that of bill sponsor and House Majority Leader Ben Toma, who argued that parents must serve as the “ultimate authority. They know what’s best for their children, and we should trust them to do the right thing.”

    Unfortunately, said Carol Corbett Burris, ESA programs have already demonstrated problems with that approach, through numerous cases of fraud, in which parents used the funds for things other than their children’s education.

    “There are no real checks to make sure children receive the education they deserve, no proof parents have to provide that their children learned,” said Burris. Even among the vast majority of parents who would use the funds as intended, she added, “You have people with absolutely no education credentials in charge of students, and nobody checking to ensure the education is of any quality at all.”

    “It’s like an insurance company giving parents of a sick child $7,000 and saying, ‘We don’t care if you go to a physician or a dentist — take that money and do what you believe is best,” Burris continued. “Parents may know best about many things, but they’re not professional educators any more than they are doctors, dentists or nurses.”

    What’s more, SOS Arizona pointed out, the ESA funds could also be used to send taxpayer funding to the sort of private school being established by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who recently announced plans to start a network of anti-“woke” Turning Point Academies, first in Arizona, then around the country. The first such school, with more than 600 students, is set to open in Glendale this fall, as the result of a partnership between Kirk and Phoenix megachurch Dream City. According to Newsweek, the academy will ban CRT, the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and what it calls “radical LGBT agendas.” Those 600-plus students, Lewis notes, will add up to some “4 million taxpayer dollars that go straight into Kirk’s academy.”

    ***

    On a larger level, the new law also speeds up the same sort of death spiral that has afflicted public schools across the country, by steadily draining funds away from public education. While the immediate cost of ESA expansion — for students already outside the public school system — will draw on Arizona’s general funds, the money to cover children who leave public schools in coming years will be deducted from public school budgets.

    “When that happens, especially in rural areas, if enough kids leave the system, they leave behind all kinds of stranded costs,” said Burris. Schools will still have to pay staff and keep the lights on, but will receive substantially less support to do so. “Then you have a vicious cycle, where the quality of education in public schools starts to suffer, which means more people leave, and the more people leave, the more the quality of education deteriorates.”

    That problem is compounded, adds Lewis, by the fact that private and charter schools are allowed to “cherry-pick” high-achieving students without special needs, while leaving higher-needs students in public schools as those schools are systematically drained of the resources to teach them well. That pattern, she continued, already means that one of Arizona’s top charter schools regularly starts each of its classes with hundreds of students, but only a few dozen remain by graduation, since the school has pushed most lower-performing students out. And if such charters convert into private schools, as they’re allowed to do, ESA expansion will mean they get more money and even looser regulation.

    “We know historically that when systems are opened up for everybody, students of color and low-income students never get the long straw, ever,” said Lewis. “They use this terminology of choice, but what they fail to acknowledge is that it’s the school’s choice, every time.”

    Already, Arizona’s investment in public education is dismal, ranking second-to-last in per-pupil funding nationwide. Last Friday, alongside the ESA expansion, Arizona’s legislature also passed a budget that included a $400 million increase in public funding — enough, SOS Arizona noted, to potentially nudge Arizona’s ranking up to 45th-worst — but that’s complicated too. As Network for Public Education founder Diane Ravitch noted earlier this month, only half of that money is recurring, and all of it is contingent upon the voucher bill becoming law. That “poison pill,” wrote Ravitch, was a clear effort to preempt a replay of public education advocates’ 2018 ballot initiative, by holding the increase in school funding hostage to a privatization agenda.

    To SOS Arizona, it amounted to “adding more money to the top of our education funding bucket while drilling massive holes in the bottom.”

    “I think we’re witnessing the dismantling of public education in our state,” said Lewis. “Will it happen overnight? No. But the effects will be felt quickly and the blow to public schools will be unsustainable.” If even a few kids leave a neighborhood school, the difference in funding is noticeable. If six or seven do, “that’s a whole teacher [salary] down.” In her own school, where Lewis teaches third grade, that sort of downsizing would mean the immediate increase of her class size of 27 students to more than 40. “Or do you make the cuts elsewhere? Do you cut special education, which has already been cut to the bone? Or music, arts and after-school programs, which have already been cut to the bone? Do you not have an assistant principal? Then how many students don’t get what they need?”

    “We are going to stop this by any means necessary,” Lewis said, including electoral work, public education, and possibly another ballot initiative, even if that means risking the “poison pill” cancellation of the state’s newly increased public school funds. “All options are on the table.”

    But all options, suggests Charles Siler, are also on the table for the other side. “One of the things people never fully comprehend is how far privatization advocates want to take things,” he said. “They want to get rid of all public funding for education. Eventually vouchers will die off too.” What will remain, he argues, will be a self-funded primary education system, funded by a lending market much as colleges are. Or as Lewis says, a “system of haves and have-nots.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Skiing on a sacred mountain: Indigenous Americans stand against a resort’s expansion

    Hopi farmer Bucky Preston talks to the clouds that form atop Arizona’s tallest mountain. And they talk back. But last fall, the sacred conversation fell silent. “I did not have a harvest,” says Preston, 72. “It was the first time in my life that happened.” He says other farmers, who grow without chemical fertilizer or irrigation, experienced the same. While the climate crisis and historic drought in the south-west may be factors, Preston blames another, human-made force for the disruptions: a ski resort carved into Nuva’tukya’ovi.

    The post Skiing on a sacred mountain: Indigenous Americans stand against a resort’s expansion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Arizona Supreme Court Rejects State GOP Lawsuit to Eliminate Mail-In Voting

    On Tuesday, the Arizona state Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from the state’s Republican Party that sought to completely eliminate mail-in voting.

    The Arizona Republican Party’s attempt to abolish or severely curtail mail-in voting in the state is part of a nationwide push by the GOP to place more restrictions on voting in response to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

    Republicans issued the request to Arizona’s highest court earlier this year, asking it to dismantle the mail-in voting system, or, failing that, to eliminate the “no excuse” provision of its statute that allows any eligible voter in the state to request an absentee ballot. That provision has been allowed in the state since 1991, meaning that it has been utilized in the last eight presidential election cycles.

    Nevertheless, the party argued in its lawsuit that “in-person voting at the polls on a fixed date (election day) is the only constitutional manner of voting in Arizona.”

    At the time, Democrats spoke out against the lawsuit.

    “This is yet another attempt by the Arizona Republicans to make it harder for people to vote,” said state Sen. Raquel Terán, who is also the chair of the Arizona Democratic Party.

    Earlier this week, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and a defendant in the lawsuit, condemned the state GOP’s attempt to eradicate mail-in voting.

    “Abolishing early voting doesn’t make our elections more secure — it just makes it harder for eligible Arizonans to vote,” Hobbs, who is also running for governor, wrote in a tweet. “These partisan attacks on our freedom to vote are about suppressing the vote, not protecting it.”

    Although the ruling is a win for voting rights, the victory may be short-lived. In its ruling, the Arizona state Supreme Court said that they rejected the Republican Party’s lawsuit because it hadn’t gone through the proper channels. The party can resubmit their complaint in lower state courts, the court said.

    Still, the temporary win for voting rights will likely be enough to ensure that mail-in voting remains an option for registered voters in the state, at least through the 2022 midterm elections later this year. Arizona Republicans were hopeful that the state Supreme Court would rule in their favor before November, tossing out mail-in voting before this year’s races.

    Any attempt to dismantle mail-in voting would be an unpopular choice in the state. Recent polling indicates that Arizonans overwhelmingly support keeping voting by mail as an option in elections, with 74 percent backing the measure and only 10 percent saying they oppose it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Arizona Senate Approves GOP Bill That Could Spur US’s “Most Extreme Voter Purge”

    Votes wait to be counted by staff at the Maricopa County Elections Department office on November 5, 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona.

    The Arizona Senate on Wednesday passed a Republican-authored bill that advocates warn could prompt “the most extreme voter purge in the country” by requiring state residents to retroactively provide proof of citizenship to stay on the rolls.

    Marilyn Rodriguez, founder of the Arizona-based firm Creosote Partners, argued in a Twitter thread that H.B. 2492 is a “monumentally terrible attack on our elections.”

    “Take the proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration, which was adopted in ’04. By making this a requirement for voters, this bill would retroactively apply it to the millions of AZ voters registered before the proof of citizenship law took effect 18 years ago,” Rodriguez explained. “Arizona is the only state in the nation with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement currently in force, but it exempts previously registered voters. But this bill would do away with that protection.”

    Without intervention by the Arizona Supreme Court, Rodriguez continued, “the clear language here means that to be eligible to vote — regardless of when you registered — you need to have shown proof of citizenship.”

    “Imagine how many of Arizona’s 4.35 million registered voters would be immediately forced off the rolls or given just 30 days to provide proof of their citizenship, such as a birth or naturalization certificate,” she wrote. “This is a recipe for chaos, not election integrity, and it would likely cut the state’s electorate in half overnight. If Arizona proceeds with this bill, it will draw numerous lawsuits and be in lonely, uncharted waters defending the indefensible.”

    Just one of a slew of voter suppression measures that the GOP-controlled Arizona legislature is currently working to advance — including a bill to abolish early voting — H.B. 2492 now heads to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk, having passed the state House last month along party lines.

    Arizona, which President Joe Biden carried narrowly in 2020, emerged as a flashpoint in efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the election results.

    Following the November 2020 presidential contest, state Republicans fueled by Trump’s baseless claims of fraud hired the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct an audit of ballots in the state’s most populous county. The review ultimately found that Biden won the election.

    But Arizona Republicans, as evidenced by H.B. 2492 and other legislation, have yet to abandon their unfounded narrative that the state’s election system is riddled with unlawful voting and “foreign interference.”

    “A group of Arizona legislators continue to directly attack democracy and voting rights using every tool at their disposal,” Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting Is Local, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ducey must veto H.B. 2492, which creates illegal barriers to voting for the people of Arizona by imposing improper requirements on voter registration.”

    Gulotta warned that the legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-12), requires “anyone who registered to vote before 2005 to provide additional documentation” and “targets voters born outside the United States for special scrutiny and investigation.”

    “Bills like this one are being passed through the Arizona legislature to appease a small, but loud group of legislators who are basing their decisions on unfounded claims from the sham election review conducted by the discredited and defunct Cyber Ninjas,” said Gulotta. “This is the latest anti-voter measure from a group of legislators who are more interested in grabbing power than protecting the will of the people. Even though their own Senate rules attorney told them this bill was illegal, they continue to recklessly squander taxpayer money by provoking inevitable and expensive litigation.”

    H.B. 2492 is one of more than 250 bills that state-level Republicans nationwide have intro­duced, pre-filed, or carried over into 2022 in an effort to restrict ballot access, according to the latest tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

    “Across the country, Republican state legislators are trying to purge voters and erect massive barriers to the ballot box in order to choose their voters and exclude everyone else,” said Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America. “Arizona’s H.B. 2492 is one of the most egregious examples of anti-voter legislation being peddled by the GOP under the guise of election integrity.”

    “But there’s no hiding their true intentions; this bill places a disproportionate — and often insurmountable — burden on older, minority, and low-income voters,” Harvey added. “A vote for H.B. 2492 is a vote to disenfranchise Arizonans. Governor Ducey must now decide whether he’s on the side of everyday Arizonans or the Republican legislators who are trying to silence their voices.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Pick for AZ Secretary of State Participated in January 6 Capitol Breach

    State Representative Mark Finchem speaks with attendees at a Save America rally at Country Thunder Arizona in Florence, Arizona, on January 15, 2022.

    As the world watches the Russian military bombarding its way through Ukraine and police arresting Russian anti-war activists by the thousands, the dangers of autocratic, unaccountable rule, rubber-stamped by stage-managed elections, becomes ever clearer.

    There’s no doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has held the presidency for most of the years between 1999 and today — has shaded into functionally acting as a dictator, despite the fact that he can rightly say he has been reelected several times by the Russian electorate, and by huge margins at that.

    What happened in the post-Soviet Russian political system is a case study in autocracy via the ballot box. People in the U.S. should take careful note of this case study because, to a large degree, it’s a similar model to what Donald Trump, and much of the GOP, appear open to trying to impose within the United States.

    Putin has used a state-controlled media and a largely pliant political, business, security and military elite to ruthlessly consolidate his power. Yet each step of the way, he has taken care to at least give the appearance of playing by democratic rules. He gets elected and claims legitimacy; no matter that he has jailed his opponents, shuttered the free press and gained total control over how the votes are counted. He proposes constitutional amendments allowing him to extend his rule, and, when those amendments pass, with the opposition largely silenced in their efforts to speak up against the changes, again claims that his tsar-like reign has the people’s stamp of approval.

    With that history in mind, let’s take a look at what Trump has done in the U.S. in the 16 months since he lost the 2020 presidential election. The brooding would-be-strongman helped launch an insurrection; tried in multiple ways to subvert the constitutional process for the peaceful transition of power; appealed to the courts time and time again in a failed effort to neutralize the votes of those who didn’t support him; and finally, after the fact, has begun building a powerful electoral machine to capture the very operating machinery of the electoral process.

    In state after state, Trump’s movement is now honing in on passing new legislation aimed at restricting the franchise and giving partisan officials power over the vote counting process. It is also looking to secure control of vital electoral positions — from the secretary of state downward — the capture of which would make it far easier for a determined Republican candidate to overturn the will of the people by limiting who can vote, corrupting the vote count, using the new legislation to remove independent local election officials, and, if all else fails, by empowering state officials to replace electors chosen by the populace with electors hand-picked by legislators. These are nuclear options against the very principles of democracy.

    Trump’s hope, it seems, is to do an end-run in 2024 around the various institutional protections that foiled his coup efforts in 2020.

    What’s happening in Arizona is a case study in the Trumpite effort to subvert the democratic system. Arizona is one of the five key swing states that went to Joe Biden last time around, and Trump hasn’t forgiven Republican state officials for not intervening on his behalf to somehow erase the Democratic margins there. Now, he’s trying to secure the election, this coming November, of Mark Finchem as secretary of state.

    Finchem, a state legislator from the Tucson suburbs, is a far right conspiracist who completely buys into Trump’s lies about a stolen election. He is on record as saying that tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in Arizona, despite no evidence surfacing to back up these claims. And, notwithstanding the implosion of the so-called “audit” of Maricopa County’s election results last year, as recently as last month, Finchem was telling anyone who would listen that he had evidence that would lead to the decertification of the results from three Arizona counties. He also introduced a resolution into the legislature — shot down as “un-American” by the Republican speaker — to try to decertify the results of those counties.

    There’s something almost quixotic in these efforts. Yet Finchem’s antics aren’t just those of an eccentric but harmless legislator. Film footage unveiled last summer shows that Finchem was among the insurgent crowd outside the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. This is a man who swore to uphold the Constitution, yet who journeyed across the country to take part in a mob effort to prevent the vice president and the Congress from completing the peaceful transfer of power from a defeated president to an incoming administration.

    Given this history, the notion that Finchem could soon be Arizona’s secretary of state is truly horrific.

    And because it’s so horrific, it’s tempting to simply assume that in practice, there’s no way that someone as extreme as Finchem could win statewide office. But Arizona, a purple state whose GOP often swings far to the right, continues to throw political curveballs, and it is naïve to assume he simply has no chance.

    In fact, over the years, a goodly number of far right extremists have won elections in Arizona, the state that, via Barry Goldwater, birthed the modern conservative renaissance. Witness the recent appearance by GOP State Sen. Wendy Rogers as a featured speaker at a major white nationalist event, the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC). AFPAC is led by Nick Fuentes, who various news outlets have described as a Holocaust denier. Rogers herself, with links to militias such as the Oath Keepers, is on record as calling white nationalists “patriots” and has called for her political enemies to be hanged.

    Or witness GOP Gov. Doug Ducey — who is himself deemed by Trump, Finchem and their ilk to be not nearly conservative enough, since he committed the cardinal sin of certifying Arizona’s election result for Biden — saying, in the wake of Rogers’s appearance at the white nationalist event, that she was better than her defeated Democratic opponent; and then doubling down and refusing to apologize for having showered copious amounts of money on her during her election campaign.

    All by way of saying that just because Finchem seems to be a long shot, that doesn’t mean he’s inherently unelectable in Arizona.

    We see in Putin the dangers of a fully flowered autocracy that claims a popular legitimacy. The vision of a Trump or a Finchem is no different. If Trumpite conspiracists seize control of the levers of the electoral system in 2022 in states such as Arizona, they could use that newly acquired power ruthlessly come 2024. It’s a prospect that should send anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy into overdrive working to ensure that Finchem can’t get anywhere near the position of power that he craves.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In a Victory for Activists, Lawsuit Against Arizona’s ALEC Lawmakers Can Proceed

    A protester carries a poster reading "I am Trayvon Martin"

    An appeals court in Arizona ruled this week that a coalition of racial justice groups can pursue a lawsuit against 26 Republican state lawmakers accused of breaking Arizona’s open meetings law at a 2019 policy summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

    ALEC is the powerful pay-to-play forum that brings hundreds of conservative lawmakers together with far-right activists and corporate lobbyists to craft conservative policies for state legislatures, many of which are actually passed into law. The Arizona ruling is a preliminary legal victory for racial justice activists who have long fought ALEC-sponsored legislation that they say disproportionately harms communities of color while safeguarding corporate power and white supremacy.

    A unique state open meetings law in Arizona provided an opening for the activists to challenge the 26 lawmakers who attended the 2019 national ALEC summit held in central Arizona — and test ALEC’s controversial policymaking process in court. The lawsuit argues that enough lawmakers from five committees in the Arizona state legislature attended the ALEC summit to represent a quorum, or the minimum number of committee members necessary to conduct official business and make decisions.

    Deliberating and drafting “model bills” at the ALEC summit — a process designed to “imitate” the actual legislative process — is essentially the first step toward introducing legislation in the legislative committees, the groups argue, and the fact that it happens behind closed doors violated a broad state law requiring that meetings of governing bodies be open to the public. The lawmakers’ move to dismiss the lawsuit was rejected by the appeals court this week, and the case was sent back to a state trial court, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.

    Natally Cruz, interim Director of Puente Human Rights Movement, another plaintiff in the case, said the ruling “marks the turning of the tide.”

    “For decades, ALEC and the captured lawmakers it associates with have corrupted the lawmaking process to advance a capitalist white supremacist agenda that has attacked Latinx, Black, Brown, Queer, and many other communities all across the U.S. without facing any form of accountability,” Cruz said in a statement.

    The lawsuit also asks the court to make all notes and materials from the 2019 summit public and enjoin lawmakers from attending ALEC meetings behind closed doors in the future. Jacinta Gonzalez, senior organizer at Mijente, a Latinx rights organization that is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the ruling confirms what communities have been saying for years: Corporate lawmakers must follow the law and let people enter the rooms where decisions are made “about the future of our lives.”

    “ALEC is really the place where the far-right and corporations can come together to create policy that is against human rights on multiple levels,” Gonzalez said in an interview.

    Activists in Arizona and beyond have clashed with ALEC since 2009, when a state senator with ties to white supremacists introduced model legislation at ALEC that would later become SB 1070, Arizona’s infamous “show me your papers” law. Protests erupted as the model bill became state law, and legal challenges largely defanged provisions that invited police to racially profile Latinx people as undocumented immigrants. However, Gonzalez said, “copycat” legislation popped up across the country and passed in several other states, bringing activists into the street and civil rights attorneys into the courtroom.

    ALEC has opposed efforts to strengthen labor unions and protections for workers, fought environmental and climate regulations, and worked with state lawmakers to punish Palestinian rights activists who support boycotts and divestment from Israel. While the group is more focused on economic issues than the culture wars, ALEC members in affiliated Christian groups have also launched legislative attacks on abortion rights and transgender kids in schools, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

    More recently investigative journalists have linked ALEC members to right-wing efforts to undermine public confidence in elections and mail-in voting, support former President Trump’s conspiracy theories and attempt at overthrowing the 2020 election, and pass voting restrictions in red states across the country. Civil rights groups say restrictions on voting pushed by Republicans — most famously the voter ID laws ALEC promoted in the past — disproportionately disenfranchise low-income people, students, people with disabilities and voters of color.

    Watchdogs say ALEC distanced itself from voter ID laws and disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force after losing corporate members to controversy over voter ID and “stand your ground” laws that became infamous after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. After 300 progressive groups urged corporations cut ties with ALEC for promoting a wave of GOP voter suppression bills last year, ALEC leadership has said the group “doesn’t work on voting issues.”

    However, critics on the left say this is a lie, and ALEC has worked with right-wing operatives and partner organizations to promote partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. In fact, secretive ALEC working group on redistricting and election law was meeting at least a year before the 2020 elections. The group was reportedly led by Cleta Mitchell, a controversial attorney who served as a legal advisor for Trump as the former president pushed officials to overturn election results in Georgia and spread disinformation about the 2020 election, according to the League of Women Voters.

    ALEC did not respond to a request for comment by the time this article was published.

    Gonzales said the chance to fight ALEC’s secretive process for crafting model policies in court is a victory for all the communities targeted by right-wing legislation.

    “It’s a fight that is connecting a lot of movements in different places and pushing back on far-right extremists and corporations that are trying to push a policy agenda,” Gonzalez said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about the Arizona election “audit” for the February 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: When there are people transparently, fervently invested in presenting election results they don’t like as endlessly arguable, ultimately bendable to the will of whoever yells loudest and longest, it’s important that there be some evidentiary anchor. But when that evidence is provided, it’s still largely up to news media whether or not it anchors public conversation.

    We are at a moment where corporate news media are unfortunately reflecting A.J. Liebling’s view of the press as the weak slat under democracy, narrating more than resisting the overt decision of Republicans to shore up power by suppressing the vote. Beyond all of what ought to be sufficient human rights reasons to talk up a fight for something like democracy in this country, there are also journalistic, interesting stories there to be told.

    Our guest is on that beat. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He joins us by phone from San Francisco. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.

    Steven Rosenfeld: Thank you, glad to be here.

    CounterSpin: ‘These Lawsuits Are Incredibly Rinky-Dink’

    CounterSpin (11/6/20)

    JJ: When we spoke in early November 2020, Donald Trump had already announced, “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” The contestations, the lawsuits, the Big Lie propaganda were not unexpected, and yet they’re somehow still startling.

    And an epicenter of that was Arizona, where we read about Trump loyalists demanding something called a “forensic audit” that did not go the way that people—hoping to convince or confuse a wider audience into thinking Trump really won the state—hoped it would. A lot of listeners might know that upshot, but they might not know why it happened the way it happened. You watched that all up close and personal, and I’d just like to ask you to talk us through it.

    SR: Sure. The Arizona Senate Republicans basically hired people who were known election deniers. And some of them had worked in Michigan to create these reports that claimed that votes were stolen, reports that were basically later debunked. And they went in to try to manufacture a result or manufacture evidence where they could claim that Trump won.

    What ended up happening was you had some progressives who were trying to go on the inside and work with Republicans and basically convince them and sneak documents out, and that was one of my sources.

    But you also had some retired election technologists who figured out that they could basically box the Cyber Ninjas in, and show that they really didn’t know what they were doing. And the way that they did that was they turned to public records, which are different data sets that accompany different stages of the voting process, and they used them to try to basically rebut and confront the most common false claims or cliches.

    So if you think about how big lies are built from lots of little lies, a lot of those little lies are these kind of dumb cliches, like 40,000 voters were somehow manufactured out of thin air, and ballots were smuggled in while nobody noticed on election night, and of course they came from China. You know, stuff like that. There’s just lots of those types of lies, and they generally are: voters were illegal, or that local election officials are cheating somehow and they’re altering totals, or that the machinery is being secretly programmed to steal votes.

    So anyway, I ran into people who used public records to basically refute these. And it wasn’t the media, and it wasn’t the secretary of state, and it wasn’t the Democratic Party’s lawyers, and it wasn’t the election policy think tanks. And we could talk about literally what they did. But the point of all this is, they came up with explanations before anybody else.

    Now, it was after Biden got inaugurated. But they showed, for example, in March, but this could have been done in November, that there were tens of thousands of people who voted for majority Republican candidates, but they didn’t vote for Trump. And that was several times the statewide margin. And these were basically from the wealthy Phoenix suburbs.

    But nobody else did that. I could tell you how they did that. And they also found out that there weren’t tens of thousands of fraudulent or made-up voters. And they did this by using different public records. And that’s because elections have lots of little subsystems and lots of stages. And if you know what you’re doing, and you know how to work through this data—and these guys, because they were in this industry for years, knew that—they could produce these very focused and simple explanations. So that’s what I was reporting on.

    New Republic: Meet the Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy

    New Republic (1/27/22)

    JJ: There’s so many questions out of that, but let me start with the human beings. Because listeners may have heard of the Cyber Ninjas, this company which apparently has just shut down, but they were brought in as, supposedly, election experts. They were people who had no expertise in this. But they were brought in as Trump dead-enders who were basically charged with saying that Arizona had voted for Trump.

    But against these Cyber Ninjas, we have the Audit Guys. And I just love the story of who these folks were and what they did, and if you could just take a minute and say, because if folks google “Cyber Ninjas,” you’re going to get a lot of hits. Look for “Audit Guys”? Not so much. Who were these folks, and then a little bit about, you know, they didn’t do something that no one else could do; what they did was something that no one else did.

    SR: Right. That’s really, really true. And the thing is, you had a longtime Republican election data analyst from Tucson. His name is Benny White. And he ran for recorder, which is the county-wide local election official, and he lost last November. And he was the kind of person who always looked at voter lists of, were the registered voters up to date, and then list people who actually voted. And he tried to compare that, to make sure that there wasn’t any fraud going on. There were three of them. He was one.

    The second was this fellow, a Democrat, Larry Moore. And he created this company called Clear Ballot. They’re the only federally certified auditing company that looks at the digital images that are made after a paper ballot is scanned, and uses them to match it with the paper and match it with the final results, to see if everything lines up. And what’s great about that is you can, using computers, you can zero in on every single vote on every single ballot, and you can see if it’s sloppy and messy, and then you can grab the piece of paper and look at it and fight over the real thing, instead of something hypothetical.

    And then Larry’s chief technologist, Jim Halverson, who’s an independent libertarian, he was retired also. So the three of those guys knew election records. And what they did was Larry and Benny were talking, and Benny said that he was looking at his race in November, and he was seeing a lot of people in Tucson, Pima County, which is smaller than Phoenix, he noticed that a lot of these precincts with majority Republicans had an inordinate amount of votes for Biden.

    Steven Rosenfeld

    Steven Rosenfeld: “They knew where to look in all these election records to figure out how to debunk these small lies that become the big lies.”

    They didn’t do anything about it. And all you could do was, you could look at the subtotals, because that’s how things are actually generated at that level in the election results. But in March, he got together with Larry Moore, and he said, let’s really dig into this stuff and go after these Ninjas. Because what happens is, these guys are coming in, and they’re claiming that they’re experts. They have no idea what they’re doing. And literally, we saw that in the spring. They were recounting the second-largest jurisdiction in the country, Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and the suburbs, they were just ripping open boxes and trying to, you know, count stuff. We’re talking about 2.1 million pieces of paper.

    Anyway, what these guys did was they really, methodically, they knew where to look in all these election records to figure out how to debunk these small lies that become the big lies. So the first thing they did was, they took a look at the final, giant database or spreadsheet of every single vote in every single race. So if you think of a chart that has 2.1 million rows: It’s 2.1 million rows deep and it’s 800 rows across, because you have everything from school boards to presidents in a giant county, second-largest county jurisdiction in America, what you see on that spreadsheet, which is so critical, is you can see where people did not vote. The only record that shows what people did not vote for.

    So if you know how to do database searches, and these guys knew how to do this, you could figure out where people were voting for a majority of candidates from one party, but not from one person in particular. So they found something like 60,000 people in Maricopa County, Phoenix, who voted for majority Republicans but not Trump, and about 15,000 people who voted for a majority of Democrats but not Biden. So those are the Bernie Bros. And then you can go deeper, you can even figure out, you can’t identify people, but you can identify precincts or neighborhoods. So you can figure out where these people live. You can go talk to them.

    JJ: Right.

    SR: So that was the first thing that they did, they came up with these simple explanations that tens of thousands of people who were loyal Republicans voted for most of the Republicans on the ballot, but not Trump. Now that’s a non-technical explanation.

    JJ: Right.

    SR: Where all you’re hearing from election officials is trust us, you know, these technical explanations and things like that, our systems are accurate. This was a different, kind of common-sense thing. Republicans have been yelling and screaming about voter fraud as a big excuse, made-up voters, to pass all these restrictive measures for years. And the parties have the actual data that can prove that it doesn’t exist on any scale that affects election results. And they’re not using it.

    JJ: Yeah.

    SR: But these guys did. They accounted for every single voter, with the exception of people whose names are kept hidden because they’re judges, cops or domestic violence victims. So to me, this was unbelievably exciting and interesting. And it’s a template that could be used because, again, the big lies are built on top of lots of little lies, and these little lies are lots of dumb cliches.

    What are the dumb cliches? Oh, voters are being made up and somehow casting ballots, tens of thousands at a time. Or election officials are somehow altering totals, tens of thousands at a time. Or the systems are being secretly programmed and no one’s watching, even though everything is on video camera, especially after all the Russian hacking in 2016, or the attempts. So this is really low-lying fruit, if you’re willing to believe or look for hard data.

    Now, a lot of people are not going to believe this. But I think enough people in the middle, who are not cultists on the right or cultists on the left, would actually believe enough of this and lower the temperature in the room. But that’s always my hope as a journalist, that facts matter.

    NYT: Surprise! There's No Voter Fraud. Again.

    New York Times (12/17/21)

    JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, about news media’s focus, not on those fundaments, but on the shadows on the cave wall. And you address, in this recent piece, this New York Times piece that says that, when it comes to these baseless claims of voter fraud, debunking them was always a fool’s game. And it seems to sort of suggest that giving oxygen to these baseless claims, that somehow that’s the same thing as shining a scrutinizing or a disinfectant light on them. And those things are not the same; there is a role for journalists here. But it has to do with facts over narrative.

    SR: What ends up happening is that there’s a lot of resistance from election officials for a whole bunch of different reasons to having people look over their shoulders.

    JJ: Yeah.

    SR: They’re constantly aware of how partisans will take the smallest things and try to blow them up to make it sound like the sky is falling. But there’s also this resistance to releasing the data that they have, or working with it or presenting it, because they’re busy doing other stuff, and they think that their systems are good enough, and all you have to do is look at all the lawsuits that Trump lost to show that, yeah, they weren’t able to prove anything.

    But as one person said to me, a retired election official who I really admire: He said, that’s fighting the last war. The entire election administration establishment is so concerned with cyber security, and they’ve been so focused on preventing hacking and all that sort of stuff, at the expense of generating trust. So that the last war is fighting, is trying to stop Russia in 2016, that kind of stuff, instead of the disinformation that’s out there in the age of Trump. Right there, that’s the problem.

    So a lot of these folks don’t feel like you can convince anybody whose minds are made up, because they’re cultists. But the thing is, I’m not suggesting we’ve got to convince those folks. I am suggesting that there are lots of people in the middle who are intelligent enough to make up their own minds, and would welcome quickly produced, easily understood, focused, common-sense explanations right after election day.

    Imagine if in mid-November, in states like Arizona, people are able to understand or be shown that, hey, there were tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for most Republicans on the ballot, but not Trump. What would that have done to slow down the Big Lie? We don’t know, because it didn’t happen.

    JJ: All right, then; we’re going to continue this conversation going forward. But for today, we’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. His piece, “Meet the Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy,” first appeared on NewRepublic.com. You can find the Voting Booth project and their work at IndependentMediaInstitute.org. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SR: Oh, thank you so much. It’s always a treat.

    The post ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Steven Rosenfeld on Arizona ‘Audit,’ Sohale Mortazavi on Cryptocurrency

     

     

    CNN: An Arizona bill would empower state legislators to reject election results

    CNN (1/28/22)

    This week on CounterSpin: A New York Times opinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” But there’s a difference between airing such claims and training a scrutinizing, disinfectant light on them—and it’s really journalists’ choice which of those they do. The  spate of new election-meddling laws proposed in Arizona suggests that looking away is not the answer. But Trumpers’ loss in Arizona could also map a way forward, if you’re interested. Our guest is interested. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

          CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3

     

    Jacobin depiction of cryptocurrencey

    (image: Jacobin, 1/21/22)

    Also on the show: If you think the “little guy” is left out of Wall Street deals, you’re not wrong. But is Bitcoin the answer? Is “cryptocurrency” a leveling force—or just a different flavor of grift that plays on that not-unfounded little guy frustration? Our guest gets at what’s new and what’s old in his description of cryptocurrency as “the people’s Ponzi.” Sohale Mortazavi is a writer based in Chicago; his recent piece on cryptocurrency appears in Jacobin.

          CounterSpin220204Mortazavi.mp3

    The post Steven Rosenfeld on Arizona ‘Audit,’ Sohale Mortazavi on Cryptocurrency appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Democrats Are So Fed Up With Kyrsten Sinema They Are Funding a Primary Challenge

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on February 1, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

    Talk of a primary challenge to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is ramping up in the wake of the Arizona Democrat’s decision to protect the filibuster at the cost of passing voting rights legislation.

    Over the weekend, James Carville, one of the doyens of Democratic Party strategy-making, averred that Sinema would lose if she were challenged by Rep. Ruben Gallego, a charismatic ex-Marine who represents Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. CNBC reported that Democratic Party donors were so fed up with the first-term senator that they were now planning to finance a primary run to unseat her.

    In 2018, Sinema won a squeaker of an election against Martha McSally. McSally was a particularly weak candidate who struggled to connect with Arizona voters, and who would go on to lose a second Senate race two years later, this time against Mark Kelly. The two victories were crucial to the Democrats in ultimately building a Senate majority.

    Yet, during the past few months, Sinema, along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, has made it all but impossible for the Senate to pass two crucial packages of legislation — the Build Back Better Act, and voting rights protections to counter state-level GOP efforts to constrict the franchise.

    Sinema protested Build Back Better’s high price tag, but when push came to shove, she actually seemed more concerned about its efforts to rein in Big Pharma. Where Manchin engaged in constant — albeit ultimately fruitless — negotiations with the White House over reshaping the bill in ways he felt he could get behind, Sinema was more of a cypher. Colleagues in Congress reported they simply didn’t know what she wanted and thus couldn’t really engage in negotiations with her.

    As for voting rights legislation, she delivered a spirited defense of the filibuster as a needed guardrail to protect bipartisanship, despite the fact that bipartisanship is largely a dead letter in this Senate, and despite the fact that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rammed through former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees without any allowance for filibusters against them.

    As a result, Sinema has handed veto power to a GOP that is determined to block any and all of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda for the coming years. She also made it all-but-impossible for federal laws to be enacted to protect voting rights in the face of an onslaught of restrictions being voted into state law around the country.

    But progressive anger at Sinema goes beyond her intransigent position on the filibuster. Grassroots activists in Arizona increasingly view Sinema as beholden to big money. Last week the New York Times reported that less than 2 percent of the $1.6 million the senator raised in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from small donations under $200. At least as damning in the eyes of the Democratic grassroots is the fact that large amounts came her way from GOP donors and from conservative PACs, including one affiliated with Fox News.

    As Democratic strategist Carville pointed out, this rage has accumulated over the last year, and is now reaching the point where it places Sinema on increasingly shaky political ground. While she has considerable support among Republican and Independent voters in Arizona, even back in September — before she stood in the way of implementing voter protections — fewer than one in five of the state’s Democrats had a very favorable view of her.

    That contrasted with her Democratic colleague, Senator Kelly, of whom 42 percent of Arizona Democrats had a very favorable opinion. That same poll showed that four out of ten of the state’s Republican voters looked upon Sinema favorably — which might bode well for her in a general election but won’t help her (and could well hurt her) if she faces a serious challenger in the primaries.

    Back in October, a Data for Progress poll found that a slew of candidates, including Representative Gallego, as well as the mayors of Phoenix and of Tucson, would beat Sinema in a head-to-head primary race, and that Gallego would beat her even in a multi-candidate race. There haven’t been similar polls since Sinema’s blockade of the voting rights legislation, but it’s hard to see how that will have improved her standing among Democrats in her home state.

    The prospect of a credible primary challenge against Sinema is, in the wake of her actions over the past months, increasingly likely. The newly formed Primary Sinema Project, part of the Change for Arizona 2024 PAC, is raising money to channel to local groups that are laying the groundwork for a primary challenge. Two other PACs, Nuestro and CrowdPAC, are also working on developing viable challengers to the senator, as is the grassroots group LUCHA, which is tapping into an ActBlue fundraising effort to primary the sitting senator.

    The blue-ing of Arizona didn’t occur in a vacuum. Sinema and Kelly won their Senate seats, and Biden won the state’s 11 Electoral College votes, at the back-end of years of organizing by unions, by immigrants’ rights activists, by racial justice organizers, by progressive groups like Indivisible, and others. Sinema has, in the past few months, squandered the good will of pretty much all of these groups.

    The senator is likely banking on the fact that two years is an eternity in politics, and that, by 2024, all will have long been forgiven and forgotten. She might be right; but it’s equally likely that these organizations, spurned and ignored by the senator they played a critical role in electing, will do everything in their power to replace her when the opportunity presents itself.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AZ Republicans Introduce Bill Allowing Legislature to “Reject” Election Results

    A supporter holds a "Trump Won" sign at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022, in Florence, Arizona.

    Arizona Republicans opened the legislative session this month with a slew of new voting bills, including legislation that would allow the GOP-led state legislature to “reject” election results.

    Arizona Republicans, who already approved numerous new voting restrictions last year, are turning many of the GOP’s conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s election loss into legislation even after their “forensic audit” of results in Maricopa County failed to turn up any evidence of fraud. Perhaps the most far-reaching bill was introduced by Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, whose legislation could open the door for the Republican-led legislature to overturn election results for no reason at all. The bill already has 15 Republican co-sponsors, including state Rep. Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed secretary of state candidate seeking to take over the state’s elections.

    Fillmore’s 35-page House Bill 2596 includes a section that would require the legislature to hold a special session to “review the ballot tabulating process” and then decide whether to “accept or reject the election results.” The legislature does not have to have a specific reason to reject the results. If the legislature rejects the election results, “any qualified elector” can go to court to “request that a new election be held.”

    “This bill is probably one of the biggest threats that we have seen here to our democracy,” Arizona House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, a Democrat, said in an interview with Salon. “Nearly half the [Republican] caucus believes that the legislature should be the final decider, which goes against everything that we stand for when we talk about election integrity, democracy and what it means to truly be a republic.”

    Fillmore, who backed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat in four key states, insisted that the bill was not partisan and had nothing to do with the former president.

    “I don’t care what the press says,” he said during a hearing on Wednesday. “I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me. This is not a President Biden thing. This is not a ‘the other red-headed guy’ thing.”

    Fillmore’s bill would also eliminate no-excuse early voting, which is used by more than 80% of Arizona voters, and would require that all ballots be hand-counted within 24 hours of polls closing, which election administration experts say would require thousands, if not tens of thousands, of additional election workers in a state with more than 3 million voters.

    Fillmore said on Wednesday that he wants elections to run the way they did in the 1950s.

    “We should have voting, in my opinion, in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day,” he said. “We need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

    Bolding said many Arizonans do not want to hear about “returning back to 1958.”

    “I think about the 1950s, where you had poll taxes, where you had literacy tests, where Jim Crow was the law of the land,” said Bolding, who is Black. “For a large portion of our country, when they hear things like, ‘Let’s go back to 1958,’ they think about when their livelihood and their life could have been threatened just for simply having the ability to participate in democracy.”

    Election administration has also made great strides since the 1950s and Arizona voters have increasingly moved away from traditional Election Day voting since the 1990s, said Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to the elections program at the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Democracy Fund.

    “For Arizona to introduce legislation to go back 70 years in the way in which we provide services to our voters is I think irresponsible,” she said in an interview. “If this bill were to pass, the vast majority of voters in Arizona would have to change the way in which they interact with the franchise. You will see massive confusion and I think some real drop-off in turnout and who’s going to participate on both sides of the aisle,” she said.

    Patrick said many lawmakers pushing voting bills are trying to “game the system by introducing legislation that they feel will benefit themselves and their party, when in reality it’s going to affect all voters across the spectrum.”

    Patrick, who served for over a decade as Maricopa County’s head of federal election compliance, said the bill would also violate federal law. The Help America Vote Act allows people voting on Election Day to have “second-chance voting,” which means they can correct errors on their ballots if the voting system rejects it. Voters would not have this opportunity if they drop their ballot to be hand-counted.

    Fillmore’s bill would create a logistical nightmare. The number of polling places in Arizona has been drastically reduced, from more than 11,000 down to fewer than 800 over the last two decades, as voters have increasingly moved away from Election Day voting. So to adjust to this proposed law, that the state would have to fund a massive expansion of polling locations and poll workers, Patrick said. Arizona ballots also typically include between 40 to 60 different items to vote on, including local elections and propositions.

    “The only way for them to complete a hand count of the full ballot within 24 hours, on millions of ballots in Arizona would be to hire literally thousands of people — in fact, it might be as many as tens of thousands,” she said. All these provisions would come with a huge cost attached, Patrick observed. “To date, this country has said we want cheap elections because we don’t invest in them, except episodically, every five to 10 or 20 years, the federal government kicks in some money. States are constantly cutting budgets, local offices, country boards, city councils. They have what they consider to be more pressing services to provide to the public. So the elections infrastructure is continually being depleted.”

    The most concerning part of Fillmore’s legislation is its attempt to allow the legislature to overturn the will of the voters, a growing trend in legislatures across the country, Patrick said. The bill’s language does not include any criteria or necessary requirements to reject election results.

    “What is the situation that would allow the legislature to step in and subvert the will of the people in a legitimate election outcome?” Patrick asked. “There’s that lack of specificity and there’s ambiguity around when the legislature can do this.”

    States already have laws and protocols if anything is amiss with elections. Any candidate, political action committee or individual voter who has evidence of wrongdoing has legal recourse to challenge elections.

    “But you have to have evidence. It can’t be merely conjecture,” Patrick said. “There were more than 400 court cases around the 2020 election and all but one of the federal court cases was thrown out. … In all other cases, they were thrown out for lack of evidence. It’s problematic because legislatures are introducing these kinds of bills as though there should be an additional channel outside the courts, and that it should go back to the legislature to decide whether or not they agree with their population.”

    Fillmore did not respond to a request for comment. He insisted earlier this week that the bill would not allow the legislature to overturn the election, and that only the court system could do that, according to the Arizona Mirror. It’s unclear what would happen if the legislature rejected the results under the new law and a court did not order a new election, or whether a court would have to order a new election for all races or individual ones.

    Fillmore’s bill would also allow the legislature to audit any election’s results, though it does not say if there are any criteria to trigger such an audit. State Senate President Karen Fann last year ordered an audit by Cyber Ninjas into the results in Maricopa County, which produced a report that was almost completely debunked by Republican county officials. Cyber Ninjas, which is planning to shut down, is being fined $50,000 per day by a judge after refusing to turn over records from the audit.

    Fillmore’s bill is one of dozens introduced by Republicans in Arizona, with many seemingly inspired directly by right-wing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

    “One of the most troubling aspects is that we see carryover from the conspiracy-theory language regarding the Maricopa County audit, in which there’s this view that hand-counting ballots is the only way to ensure that you have a free and fair election,” Bolding said. “We know that not to be the truth. I think that’s this long line of conspiracy theories that we’ll continue to see in 2022 all the way through the next election cycle as well.”

    The state Senate Government Committee advanced seven bills along party lines this week, including one that would require an audit of voting machines — despite the failed Cyber Ninjas audit of Maricopa County’s machines — and would mandate that all ballots use “anti-fraud” paper with holograms or watermarks. That comes after Republicans apparently hunted for traces of bamboo over a conspiracy theory that thousands of ballots had been flown in from China. Another bill advanced by the committee would also require all ballot images to be published online.

    Other bills would increase voter ID requirements to include fingerprints or special security codes; impose a ban on same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration, both of which are already illegal in the state; expand the election recount threshold from 0.1% to 0.5%; and enact bans on drive-through voting and drop boxes.

    A bill by state Sen. Wendy Rogers, one of the most ardent election conspiracy theorists in the state, would create a Bureau of Elections that answers to the governor and is empowered to investigate allegations of election fraud, a proposal similar to those floated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue. Voter fraud is exceptionally rare, despite numerous anecdotal reports of Trump supporters illegally voting, and there are numerous laws on the books criminalizing it.

    Bolding said he is particularly concerned about the “constant attacks” from Republicans on the vote-by-mail system. “Because you’ve seen Arizona move from a ruby-red state to one that is shifting purple and moving blue, I think you see politicians now are trying to implement power grabs,” he said.

    Patrick said that when she was Maricopa County’s federal compliance officer, her main job was to submit every policy to the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act, which required the DOJ to pre-clear any voting changes in states with a history of racial discrimination.

    Because the legislature knew that egregious voting-law changes “would never be pre-cleared by the federal government,” such changes were not enacted or even introduced, she said. But since the Supreme Court gutted that provision of the law, “it gives everyone carte blanche ability to implement any kind of voting legislation, irrespective of whether or not it’s retrogressive or hurtful to all voters or even to specific voting populations.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Asks Labor Board to Stop Ongoing Union Election in Mesa, Arizona

    A Starbucks drive-through sign is pictured on January 18, 2022, in Cardiff, Wales.

    Starbucks is seeking to stop or pause an ongoing unionization vote at a store in Mesa, Arizona, in order to overturn a regional labor officials’ ruling that the election would be conducted on a store-by-store basis, rather than region-wide.

    On Monday, the company filed an appeal with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to overturn an earlier ruling, hoping to incorporate workers in other parts of the region that haven’t necessarily been involved in unionization activities in the union vote, Bloomberg reported. Starbucks has requested that the election be stopped or that the ballots be impounded while the NLRB considers the appeal.

    Earlier this month, the company requested that the union vote be region-wide in order to dilute the votes, but an NLRB regional official ruled that only the Power and Baseline store in Mesa be included. Ballots have already been sent out and are due next week.

    “Trying to prevent our votes from being counted is so undemocratic,” Michelle Hejduk, an Arizona employee, told Bloomberg in a statement from Workers United. “But the partners will win.”

    This is the second time that Starbucks has filed a request to interrupt a unionization vote. In November, the company filed a last-minute request to delay the mailing of ballots to Buffalo workers. The company’s request was the same: Starbucks wanted the NLRB to include all 20 Starbucks locations in western New York in the election instead of the three organizing stores.

    The NLRB ultimately rejected the request, and the vote went on at the three stores as planned. That election resulted in two unionized stores in Buffalo, the Elmwood and Genesee Street locations. The union, Starbucks Workers United, has disputed the results of the election from the third location at Camp Road.

    It’s unclear why Starbucks is filing such similar requests over and over. But it is an indication that the company may be intimidated by the organizing workers in Mesa; Monday’s filing may be a last-ditch effort to stop the unionization.

    As More Perfect Union reported, Arizona workers say that the company is flooding the stores with managers who are surveilling workers and trying to find reasons to fire organizing employees. According to Starbucks Workers United, the company has already fired one employee, Brittany Harrison, after she spoke out about union-busting practices like holding mandatory anti-union meetings for unionizing workers.

    The company has disputed that Harrison was fired. Retaliating against workers for participating in union activities is illegal, and companies like Amazon have faced discipline from the NLRB for taking such actions.

    Even if the company is successful in interrupting the Arizona vote, Starbucks workers are now filing for union elections at a rate that may be difficult for the company to combat individually. As of Tuesday, over 30 stores have filed to unionize, with new election petitions being filed nearly every day this month.

    The latest to file are two stores in Seattle, where the company is headquartered. Seattle workers have noted that they face poor working conditions even with preferential treatment from corporate.

    Sarah Pappin, a shift supervisor at one of the unionizing Seattle stores, told Vice that Seattle workers have the same complaints as other Starbucks employees across the country: stores are often understaffed, workers don’t make a fair wage and the company has ignored COVID concerns.

    “We see the best side of the company because we have such visibility to corporate. [Former CEO] Howard Schultz is a regular at some of our stores,” Pappin said. “We get the best experience of anyone in the country. But we’re still saying this is not enough for us to be successful.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Says Arizona Democrats’ Decision to Censure Sinema Was “Exactly Right”

    Senators Bernie Sanders and Kyrsten Sinema

    Over the weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) praised the Arizona Democratic Party for censuring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) over her obstruction of federal voting rights.

    In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders called Sinema’s vote in the Senate last week against filibuster changes to allow the passage of voting rights legislation “terrible.”

    Certain Republican states “are moving in a very, very anti-democratic way,” he said. “It was absolutely imperative that we change the rules so we could pass strong voting rights legislation. All Republicans voted against us, two Democrats voted against us – that was a terrible, terrible vote.”

    “I think what the Arizona Democratic Party did was exactly right,” Sanders concluded.

    Last week, Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) voted against a proposal to enact a talking filibuster for Democrats’ voting rights bill, which would allow the Senate to pass the measure with a simple majority vote. It was a last-ditch effort to protect voting rights as Republicans shred them to pieces.

    The Arizona Democratic Party announced that it had voted to censure Sinema on Saturday after months of frustration with the senator’s obstinate defense of the filibuster.

    “[T]he Arizona Democratic Party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements,” party chair Raquel Terán said in a statement. “[H]owever on the matter of the filibuster and the urgency to protect voting rights, we have been crystal clear.” Terán said that, while the party supports Democratic candidates, the consequences of Sinema’s “failure” to protect voting rights are too dire to ignore.

    The state party has expressed frustration over the senator’s obstruction before. Last year, it threatened to hold a vote of “no confidence” for Sinema’s filibuster defense, which has caused a near-absolute deadlock in the Senate over Democratic priorities.

    A censure is largely a symbolic ruling that does not carry formal consequences in this instance. However, it is a strong rebuke to Sinema, as her own party essentially rules to stand against her, and will likely fuel a primary campaign to unseat her when she’s up for reelection in 2024.

    In October, a poll found that, if the election were held soon, Sinema would easily be defeated by Democratic challengers. In a head-to-head race against Ruben Gallego, an early favorite to primary the senator, Sinema loses 62 to 23 percent, according to the poll.

    Sanders told reporters last week that he would be open to supporting a candidate who ran against her. In a video posted to his Twitter, he said that it was “pathetic” that Sinema and Manchin would vote to obstruct voting rights during such a crucial time for the country.

    However, with Sinema and Manchin not up for reelection for another four years, Sanders is saying that it’s crucial for their stances to be made clear now. In interviews and an op-ed in CNN last week, Sanders has made it clear that he thinks more Democratic agenda items should be put to a vote so that voters can clearly see what the conservative Democrats oppose.

    “Funny things happen when a bill gets to the floor,” Sanders said on “Meet the Press.” “Let’s put a strong bill on the floor. And if Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema want to vote against it whatever, Republicans want to vote against it – we can go from there. But what we cannot continue to do, in my view, is these endless backroom negotiations. The American people have got to see where we are.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Revealed His New Electoral Strategy in Arizona, and It Is Horrifying

    Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022, in Florence, Arizona.

    This past weekend in Arizona, Donald Trump ratcheted up his inadvertent impersonation of Freddy Kreuger — the villain of Nightmare on Elm Street — in a political horror show designed to infiltrate our dreams and then warp our reality.

    For the past two years, Trump has flirted with, cajoled and egged on extremist anti-vaxxers. He did so, despite having signed off on his administration’s huge investments in vaccine development, most likely because he saw that political hay could be made from tapping into the anger and frustration that a significant proportion of the American public felt over school and business shutdowns, and, by extension, the suspicion of science and of experts that animated the growing anti-vaccination movement.

    Over the last couple of weeks, however, as his political battle against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for control of the GOP has intensified, Trump seems to have realized that DeSantis — who has gone to bat against vaccine mandates, masking in schools and a host of other public health efforts — has outflanked him on anti-vaccine extremism. And so, the disgraced ex-president, never one to let principle or political coherence stand in the way of opportunism, has pivoted, apparently hoping to head DeSantis off at the pass before he picks up enough wind in his rather unpleasant tail to make him become a viable contender for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024.

    Trump formerly urged his armed supporters via Twitter to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN! … LIBERATE MINNESOTA! … LIBERATE VIRGINIA” from public health mandates (in his tweets he named states that at the time were all controlled by Democratic governors). Now, however, he seeks to occupy slightly different political terrain: he has intensified his spat with DeSantis by going onto One America News Network to deride the Floridian for not publicly stating whether he has been vaccinated and boosted. Perhaps to the surprise of his interviewer, the ex-president, who once mused aloud about whether the injection of bleach could serve as a counter to COVID, stated that vaccines worked, that he himself had been boosted, and that he viewed as “gutless” conservative politicians who themselves were vaccinated, but who refused to publicly acknowledge their vaccine status for fear of alienating conservative voters. He didn’t mention DeSantis by name, but the object of his derision was clear.

    Having come out on the side of vaccinations, however, Trump couldn’t resist adding his own particularly toxic racist bile into the mix.

    On January 15, at a political rally in the southwestern Arizona town of Florence — a town that has, for decades, been defined by its large number of state and federal prisons, as well as immigration detention facilities, but which is slated to soon lose one of its two state prisons, and, with it, hundreds of jobs — the demagogic Trump lobbed a racial Molotov cocktail into the vaccination conversation.

    New York State has recently issued guidelines for treatment of COVID and for vaccination priorities that suggests providers take medical vulnerability into account when allocating scarce treatments. The guidelines note that some groups have been systemically excluded from medical coverage and from equitable health care efforts over centuries of U.S. history, leading to deeply ingrained health disparities between races. Thus, the guidelines note, Black and Brown Americans are disproportionately likely to die from COVID, and so race becomes one factor among many when deciding how and when to allocate treatment.

    Trump ran with this, and twisted these guidelines into something entirely different, into something approximating a deliberate, murderous onslaught against whites approved by Democratic state legislatures.

    As the Associated Press reported, Trump told his audience at the grotesquely named “Save America Rally” that, “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating … white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”

    The utter falseness of these claims is abundantly apparent: when the New York Times fact-checked the story, it found no evidence that white New Yorkers were being denied either vaccines or therapeutics, and found that white people in the state were vaccinated at a higher rate than were Black residents of New Yorker state. Even the UK’s Daily Mail, a bulwark of conservative opinion-writing noted the myriad falsehoods in Trump’s speech.

    The speech was largely ignored by the media, and by the political leadership in D.C., but it oughtn’t to have been. This was racial fearmongering of the most naked sort, the covert dog whistle of racism replaced by the overt bullhorn of fascism.

    There should have been a coordinated denunciation of Trump’s attempt to put a lit match to a fuse here. But President Biden, who has spent much of the last few weeks on the attack against Trump, didn’t specifically call him out on this speech. Nor did senior Republicans in Congress. There was not even a perfunctory denunciation from Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy of the sort that McConnell, at least, used to be able to muster following, say, Trump calling the Nazi mob at Charlottesville “very fine people.” Perhaps the GOP leaders — having seen the political mischief they could unleash, particularly in majority-white suburbs, through waging a war against what they’re inaccurately referring to as the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” — are standing by to see whether Trump’s racist bomb-throwing on vaccines and COVID treatments will curry similar suburban favor. There was silence, too, from so-called moderates such as Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins.

    Yes, we’re tired of Trump, and yes, it would be a blessed relief if we never had to listen to his vile rhetoric again. But Trump’s out there, and millions of Americans are still taking their cues from him. When he spouts the kind of inflammatory lies that he did in Florence, Arizona, his statements get picked up and amplified by conservative television, radio and internet personalities, and, left unchallenged, his lies are embraced by the consumers of conservative media as their new truths.

    As President Biden’s administration flounders in response to the hyper-contagious Omicron variant, and as DeSantis outflanks Trump on the right with his anti-vaccine, anti-public health jeremiads, Trump is attempting to reinvent himself as the visionary proponent of vaccines, the leader who saw earlier than anyone else the need for a warp-speed effort to develop a variety of vaccines as a way to beat back the pandemic. But he is also taking care to energize his white nationalist, conservative base, many of whom are fervently anti-vaccine, as he makes this pivot. And so, he has settled on a compromise: He now is pro-vaccine, but he’s also ever more explicitly positioning himself in George Wallace territory, tapping into racial resentment and spreading lies about whites being deliberately denied life-saving medical interventions.

    In so many ways, this country is already a powder keg. Trump thrives amid this chaos. He has always relied on a politics of racial resentment: He made clear his ambitions in the 1980s when he took out newspaper ads urging that the African American and Latino teenagers falsely accused of gang-raping a white jogger in Central Park be executed, and who refused to apologize once those teenagers were exonerated of the crime. This is also the man who opened his presidential campaign with a dramatic accusation that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and “drug dealers”, and the man who attempted to impose a travel ban against Muslims. So it should be no surprise that in 2022 this same man is spreading explosive lies about Democratic politicians supposedly stymying efforts by white people to get vaccines, in an attempt to distract from the oddity of his sudden attempt to get his supporters to embrace the value of vaccinations.

    It’s classic Trump-deflection. After a year of the ex-president pandering to anti-vaccine sentiment, he’s now working on a rewrite. As de facto head of the Republican Party, Trump appears to be trying to head into the midterms able to lambast Biden for his mishandling of the Omicron surge, while also finding a baseless way to blame Democrats and their public policy priorities for the large number of white conservatives who remain unvaccinated and who are, on a daily basis, still dying of the disease. It’s a wild attempt to downplay the fact that the low vaccination rates within Trump’s base are actually due to the miasma of misinformation on vaccines that his own allies have aggressively been spreading.

    Against such a propagandist, silence doesn’t work. However exhausting the project, he must be called out again and again, and once more again so that his lies are never accepted as the truth.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressives Rail Against Sinema For Choosing Filibuster Over Voting Rights

    Voting rights advocates march in Phoenix, Arizona, on January 15, 2022.

    On what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday, voting rights advocates and progressive lawmakers rallied in Arizona on Saturday to target the first-term Democratic senator blocking legislation aimed at strengthening ballot access amid growing GOP-led suppression efforts.

    In attendance at Saturday’s demonstrations in Phoenix were members of the King family, which is planning to lead a march to Washington, D.C. on MLK Day with a simple message to lawmakers: “No celebration without legislation.”

    Referring to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Ariz.) Thursday speech defending the 60-vote legislative filibuster, Martin Luther King III argued Saturday that “what she said is, ‘I support voting rights, but not as much as I support the ability of someone to take those rights away.’”

    “The filibuster is a meaningless Senate rule,” he added. “It’s a remnant of slavery used to block civil rights for generations.”

    Sinema’s opposition to changing Senate rules means that the House-passed Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act — new legislation that combines Democrats’ two major voting rights bills — is likely to fall victim to a Republican filibuster when the majority party attempts to move to a final vote on the measure Tuesday.

    If the Senate GOP filibusters, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expected to try to alter the chamber’s 60-vote threshold — an effort that is also doomed to fail unless Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) drop their support for the rule.

    The Arizona Democrat’s refusal to consider even a voting rights exception for the filibuster has infuriated Arizona residents who’ve watched the state’s Republican-controlled legislature ram through voter suppression measures along party lines, making a mockery of Sinema’s purported desire for bipartisan cooperation.

    “I want the Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the only way that will happen is if we carve out the filibuster,” Tessa Williams, an Arizonan who attended Saturday’s demonstrations in Phoenix, told the local Arizona Republic. “It’s critical to protect the right to vote. It’s under threat right now, and I think it’s much more important that Senator Sinema gets behind this legislation than hold on to the filibuster.”

    Williams said she feels “betrayed” by Sinema’s decision to prioritize the Senate filibuster over voting rights, a sentiment that other Arizonans have expressed in recent months as the Democrat has repeatedly obstructed her own party’s agenda.

    Sinema’s speech Thursday—delivered just before President Joe Biden addressed the Senate Democratic caucus in a closed-door meeting — intensified calls for her ouster in 2024, the end of her first six-year term. A recent Data for Progress survey showed that 70% of likely Arizona Democratic primary voters disapprove of Sinema’s job performance.

    “She is really disappointing a lot of Arizonans,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who is believed to be gearing up for a primary challenge against Sinema, said in an interview Friday. “The fact that she’s using a very archaic rule that’s not even found in the Constitution to stop voting rights is very problematic for a lot of Arizonans.”

    During a rally in Phoenix on Saturday, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) — who implored Arizonans to “vote her the hell out of office” if Sinema doesn’t budge on the filibuster — introduced Gallego as “the next senator from the great state of Arizona.”

    In the wake of Sinema’s floor remarks Thursday, more than 70 women involved with Arizona’s Democratic Party signed an open letter urging the reproductive rights political action committee EMILY’s List — a leading contributor to Sinema — to “immediately make a public demand to Senator Sinema to support ending the filibuster now.”

    The Daily Poster reported last week that anti-abortion groups have been pushing Sinema to uphold the legislative filibuster, which is standing in the way of House-passed legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.

    Sinema is a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, just as she’s a co-sponsor of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

    About an hour from where voting rights advocates marched in Phoenix on Saturday, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Florence, Arizona that underscored the threat he and the Republican Party pose to democracy.

    As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on January 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.”

    The Times added that when Trump “took the stage in the evening, he lavished praise on the slate of election-denier candidates in attendance.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fake GOP Elector Refuses to Explain Involvement in Electoral College Plot

    Trump supporters attend a Stop The Steal rally just hours after Joe Biden was named President-elect on November 7, 2020, at the State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona.

    A Republican lawmaker who helped forge election paperwork in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has refused to answer questions about how he was recruited to participate in the plan.

    In a video captured by KPNX in Phoenix, Arizona, this week, Arizona Republican State Rep. Jake Hoffman was asked why he agreed to sign a forged document in which he and others falsely purported to be the true electors for the state. In the document, the fake electors cast their votes for Trump, even though President Joe Biden won the state by a slim margin.

    Hoffman claimed he participated because he believed that there had been fraud in the 2020 election — disinformation that has been repeatedly proved false.

    “In unprecedented times, unprecedented action occurs,” Hoffman told a reporter. “There is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing, which is why we felt it appropriate to provide Congress and the vice president with dueling opinions.”

    Although Trump and his allies have filed dozens of lawsuits to block election results from being certified in a number of states that Trump lost — including Arizona — judges haven’t sided with the former president in a single case. Arizona certified its election results in early December, well before Hoffman and other Republicans produced the forged document.

    When asked whether he and the other fake electors had been recruited to take part in the scheme, Hoffman said that he was not “in charge” of the electors who took part. “You would need to ask the party chair that,” he said.

    “How did you know to show up that day?” the reporter pressed on.

    “As I said, you can go ahead and ask the party chair,” Hoffman said.

    “Do you not know how you arrived at a place?” the reporter asked. Instead of answering the question, Hoffman promptly walked away.

    Hoffman’s evasion of local reporters in Phoenix follows reporting from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow earlier this week, when the host detailed how fake Republican electors in at least five states produced forged documents alleging that they were the true electors. The fake electors submitted these documents to the National Archives in hopes of securing additional Electoral College votes for Trump, Maddow noted, even though the fake electors were all from states that Biden had won.

    “It’s not like they created these documents to like, hold close to their chest and fantasize that this had been the real outcome. It’s not like they created these documents just to keep [for] themselves as keepsakes,” Maddow said on her show. “They sent them into the government, as if they were real documents.”

    The actions appeared to be coordinated, as the documents “all match, exactly,” and have the “same formatting, same font, same spacing, almost the exact same wording,” Maddow went on.

    Several documents released over the past year have revealed schemes by Trump and his allies — some within the Department of Justice — to use “forged slates of electors” in order to create confusion in the Electoral College, Maddow noted. Had these measures gone as planned, the House of Representatives would have decided on the election, likely resulting in Trump being appointed as president for another four years.

    Maddow then speculated whether there was coordination to overturn the election results among Trump’s White House and Republicans elsewhere.

    Did the Trump DOJ help “Republicans in those states do it?” Maddow asked on her program, referring to the forgeries. “We don’t know, but somebody helped them do it, because they all filed the exact same document.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Students in Arizona Launch Hunger Strike to Pass Freedom to Vote Act

    People walk around the entrance of a polling place

    Election reform legislation is stymied in the U.S. Senate, where three major voting rights bills this year have been blocked from advancing to a debate by Republican filibusters.

    In Arizona, a group of activists has launched a campaign to break through Senate obstruction and protect access to the ballot box. On Nov. 5, 20 college students and young people at the Arizona Capitol began an indefinite hunger strike to compel the Biden administration and Senate Democrats to change the Senate’s rules in order to pass the Freedom To Vote Act before the end of the year. The action is being organized by Un-PAC, a nonprofit that employs student organizers to educate their peers on democracy reform issues.

    A key opponent to changing Senate rules in order to overcome the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold is first-term Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who says she supports the bill but continues to resist a change to procedures. Last month, Republicans blocked debate on another bill that would restore some protections under the Voting Rights Act.

    The Freedom to Vote Act was a compromise negotiated with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who joined as a cosponsor. The bill would address voter suppression efforts by expanding voting access, banning partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, increasing disclosure of “dark money” spending in elections, and more. To bring it to a vote, Senate Democrats could employ “reform by ruling” with a majority by unanimously agreeing that the filibuster is a violation of Senate rules and create a “carve-out” for certain types of bills, like ones that address election access. Sinema and several other Democrats disfavor such a step.

    The hunger strikers in Phoenix tell Sludge that their goal is to push back against the influence of Big Money in the political system and secure a meeting with the Biden White House to confirm that the passage of democracy protections is a top priority. They plan to hold news conferences every day highlighting community members impacted by issues like dark money in elections and the erosion of voting access.

    “As a 20 year old, we as a generation believe it’s time to do something about protecting democracy, especially if our leaders in D.C. are not going to take a stand,” said Lauren Dorn, an Arizona State University student and spokesperson for Un-PAC. “I grew up in a post-9/11 era, where extremism and volatile rhetoric on the part of our political leaders is something I’m familiar with.”

    Dorn, who is participating in the hunger strike, says that the cross-partisan Arizona group has been planning to start their action for weeks, and have medical staff available for protestors. The Senate has a state work period scheduled to start next week and the group is pressing for a meeting with Sinema and her office.

    “We need Sen. Sinema and the Biden administration to understand that protecting democracy is not a partisan issue. Our democracy should represent the people and not dark money and special interests — voters should pick politicians and not the other way around, and I hope our voices do not go unnoticed,” Dorn said.

    Sinema’s office released a statement to local news saying, “I appreciate all Arizonans engaging in our public discourse and policy and encourage young Arizonans to stay engaged in ways that protect their health and safety.”

    Allie Young, a voting rights activist in Arizona, told The Guardian last month that she and other longtime colleagues of Sinema in state politics have been flummoxed by the senator’s unreachability in D.C., especially on voting rights issues. This year, Sinema has ducked questions from constituents and public forums while packing her schedule with corporate fundraising events.

    So far this year, at least 19 states have enacted 33 new laws that restrict access to voting, the nationwide survey from the Brennan Center found, and in over 20 states more than 245 similar bills stand to be brought into next year’s legislative sessions.

    The Freedom to Vote Act, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee member Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), is a revamped attempt to reach the 60 vote threshold for consideration of a voting rights and election reform package. Many of the bill’s reforms were included in the Democrats’ signature For the People Act, which was full of Democratic campaign pledges and passed by the U.S. House in March, but was twice blocked this summer by a Republican filibuster.

    “Arizona has had independent redistricting since 2011,” Dorn said, praising it as a model for other states. “This bill is focused on getting big money out of politics and eliminating dark money, and that’s what’s attracting young people to this movement, we’re not oblivious to what’s going on,” Dorn said. Among its provisions to expand voting, the Freedom to Vote Act would make Election Day a national holiday, a reform that Dorn highlighted as cross-partisan in its support. An April Pew poll found that sizable majorities of Americans favor several policies designed to make it easier to register and vote, though registered Republicans increasingly oppose some ideas like automatic voter registration.

    “Without getting dark money out of politics and protecting our freedom to vote, our democracy will crumble,” said University of Arizona student Georgia Linden in a statement. “Our futures hang in the balance of the Senate’s decision to restore their rules and pass this bill this year. Our senators must meet their responsibility to represent us, not be swayed by the broken, partisan divide in D.C.”

    Last month, a Brennan Center report outlined the ways that the Freedom to Vote Act would take away the ability for partisan operatives to suppress votes, including by establishing clear national standards on early voting, vote by mail, and the counting of ballots.

    Also last month, a group of 150 scholars of U.S. democracy published a letter urging the Senate to carve out a majority rule to pass the Freedom to Vote Act ahead of the midterm elections. A Washington Post survey last updated in August found that Manchin and Sinema are the lone Senate Democratic caucus members who oppose weakening the filibuster rule.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Christina Swarns Exposes Risk of A Right to Fair Trial in New York Times on SCOTUS Case Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones

    On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether two Arizona men, David Ramirez and Barry Jones, should be executed even though federal courts have ruled that they received inadequate legal representation which led to a wrongful conviction (Jones) and a wrongful death sentence (Jones and Ramirez).

    The Supreme Court’s decision will have a huge impact on everyone’s right to a fair trial and adequate legal representation.

    Since 1989, almost 3,000 wrongfully convicted people have been exonerated in this country — that includes 186 innocent people who were condemned to death. One of the leading causes of wrongful conviction is bad lawyering, including poor preparation, inadequate investigation, and intrinsic bias. The road to proving innocence after wrongful conviction is already incredibly convoluted and filled with obstacles, but Arizona is trying to make it all but impassable.

    I shared my thoughts on this case and what the outcome could mean for the wrongfully convicted in a new opinion piece for The New York Times — I’d appreciate if you took a moment to read it.

     

    Arizona is arguing that the Supreme Court should send both David Ramirez and Barry Jones back to death row, despite federal court rulings that they received inadequate legal representation.

    Barry Jones lost the lawyer lottery twice. He was convicted of murder even though he consistently asserted his innocence. Unfortunately, he was represented at trial by a lawyer who did no meaningful investigation into the case. Five years later, Mr. Jones was assigned post-conviction counsel who failed to challenge the adequacy of trial counsel’s representation.

    Defense attorneys are required to rigorously test the prosecution’s case to ensure the accurate adjudication of guilt or innocence and to protect the right to a fair trial. Indeed, a federal judge that reviewed Mr. Jones’s case concluded that if he had been represented by competent counsel, “there is a reasonable probability that [Mr. Jones’s] jury would not have convicted him of any of the crimes.”

    Arizona asks the federal courts to turn a blind eye to this profound injustice.

    As the Executive Director of the Innocence Project, I’m deeply concerned about the impact that this case could have on wrongly convicted people and their ability to prove their innocence and regain freedom.

    Take a moment today to read through my New York Times opinion piece, learn more about the case, and share it on social media.

    The post Christina Swarns Exposes Risk of A Right to Fair Trial in New York Times on SCOTUS Case Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Arizona Supreme Court Rules That Mask Mandate Ban Is Unconstitutional

    A mother and young student wear masks while leaving school

    On Tuesday, the Arizona state Supreme Court ruled that a ban on mask mandates in school districts across the state was unconstitutional. For the time being, a stay on the ban will remain in place, meaning that schools can continue enforcing mask mandates to protect children against the spread of coronavirus.

    The court deemed the ban unconstitutional because it was included as part of a series of budget bills. The Arizona constitution bars policies unrelated to such bills from being included in the legislation.

    The court’s ruling, which was unanimous, came just two hours after deliberations between the two sides wrapped up on Tuesday. But the final opinion has not yet been issued; in the court’s brief order, Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said the opinion would come “in due course.”

    The court will next determine whether the ban should be stricken entirely, considering the unconstitutional way the ban was passed. During arguments, justices of the court asked both sides what kind of remedy should be enforced if they ruled the ban unconstitutional. Lawyers for the state, who supported the ban on mask mandates, said that the ruling should simply acknowledge that the bill was passed in error, but allow the ban to remain in place. Plaintiffs who sued against the ban, including education and child advocate groups, want the ban tossed entirely.

    The ruling is a blow to Gov. Doug Ducey (R), a proponent of the ban who appointed five of the seven justices currently sitting on the bench.

    “We are extremely disappointed in the ruling… We respect the role of the judiciary, but the court should give the same respect to the separate authority of the Legislature,” a spokesperson for Ducey said.

    Phoenix Union High School District, one of over two dozen school districts to issue a mask mandate in spite of the state’s ban, praised the ruling.

    “Phoenix Union is grateful for the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling this afternoon,” the district wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “Arizona’s classrooms are now safer places for students and educators.”

    For now, the ruling allows 29 Arizona districts that issued mask mandates before the ban was put in place to continue enforcing their rules. Polling from September shows a majority of residents in the state believe that districts should have the ability to enforce mask mandates.

    According to that poll, 59 percent of Arizonans opposed the state ban on mask mandates in schools, while only 37.5 percent said they were in favor of it. Fifty-seven percent felt that masks should be required in schools, the poll found.

    Evidence has shown that mask mandates work to prevent the spread of coronavirus — including a study that was based in Arizona. According to that study’s findings, schools without mask mandates in place were 3.5 times more likely to have a COVID-19 outbreak than schools that had mask requirements in place.

    Arizona is still considered a coronavirus hotspot in the U.S. The state currently ranks ninth-highest in terms of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents. This rate is increasing, up 50 percent from two weeks ago — even though the country as a whole has seen its overall case rate decline by 8 percent during that same period.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Opponents of Voting Rights Compete in GOP Primary for Arizona Secretary of State

    A woman wears "Trump Won" stickers as people gather to show support at a watch party regarding the results of the Arizona State Senate report of an audit of the 2020 election at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 24, 2021. Trump lost.

    The leading contenders for the GOP nomination for Arizona secretary of state, whose agency oversees elections and certifies election results in the state, are both members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing corporate lobby group that backs voter suppression legislation. And one of the two has fully embraced former President Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen and received his endorsement.

    Arizona’s presidential election was close, with Biden winning by 10,457 votes, and even a controversial sham audit initiated by ALEC’s president elect, Sen. Karen Fann, recently confirmed the outcome and found no evidence of voter fraud in the election.

    Trump’s preferred candidate, state Rep. Mark Finchem, nonetheless believes the election was stolen, attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that led to Trump supporters’ deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and has called for the 2020 presidential election to be decertified.

    In a news release endorsing Finchem, Trump said, “In addition to his incredibly powerful stance on the massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, he is strong on Crime, Borders, our currently under siege Second Amendment, and loves our Military and our Vets.”

    Finchem is one of three Arizona legislators speaking at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas on Oct. 22-25. Democracy reform group Rural Arizona Action spearheaded a campaign to recall Finchem this summer based on his ties to the insurrection, but the effort fell short of the 24,775 signatures required to make the ballot.

    The other leading candidate, state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, is also an ALEC member. The Phoenix Republican co-chairs ALEC’s secretive elections working group, which develops policy on voter suppression and gerrymandering.

    Bolick also sponsored radical legislation this year to allow the Arizona legislature to overturn presidential election results and choose its own electors. The bill, HB 2720, is still pending in the House Rules Committee.

    Her husband, Clint Bolick, was vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and a member of the right-wing State Policy Network before being appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court by Gov. Doug Ducey.

    Running in the Democratic primary for secretary of state are Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes and State Rep. Reginald Bolding.

    The candidates have not yet filed any campaign finance reports for next year’s Secretary of State election.

    Finchem, in his past runs for state representative, has received contributions from the PACs of utility Pinnacle West, the Arizona Association of Realtors, mining conglomerate Freeport-McMoran, Raytheon, and Pfizer, as well as Gov. Ducey’s Arizona Leadership Fund and many other donors

    In her past campaigns, Bolick has raised considerable sums from individuals, as well as money from the PACs of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Pinnacle West, Freeport-McMoran, Southwest Gas, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, and utility Salt River Project.

    Finchem and Bolick both sponsored Arizona’s bill HB 2905, signed by the governor in July, which makes it a Class 5 felony for a county election supervisor to deliver an early voting ballot to a person who did not make a request for the ballot. The bill exempts mailing a ballot to a person on the county’s active early voting list.

    A Class 5 felony carries a presumptive sentence of two years and is often used in prosecuting those profiting from the prostitution of others.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sinema Is “Obstacle to Progress,” Say 5 Vets Who Quit Her Advisory Panel

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema departs from a caucus meeting with Democratic Senators at the U.S. Capitol Building on October 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Five military veterans who served on an advisory panel for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) abruptly resigned on Thursday, writing in a letter addressed to the senator that she was “hanging [her] constituents out to dry” by refusing to support the progressive ideals she espoused as a candidate for office.

    In the letter sent to Sinema, which was obtained by The New York Times and featured in an advertisement by a progressive veterans group called Common Defense, the vets said they were disappointed by Sinema’s refusal to support reforming or abolishing the filibuster rules in order to pass President Joe Biden’s agenda. They cited Sinema’s opposition to Biden’s $3.5 trillion social safety net, climate and tax plan as a reason for their decision, condemning the senator’s willingness to accept big-money donations from lobbyists.

    “You have become one of the principal obstacles to progress, answering to big donors rather than your own people,” the veterans wrote. “We shouldn’t have to buy representation from you, and your failure to stand by your people and see their urgent needs is alarming.”

    The five veterans who wrote to Sinema said she was using them as “window dressing” to appeal to voters in a state where more than 6 percent of residents have served in the armed forces.

    “Are you choosing to answer to big donors rather than Arizonans? These are not the actions of a maverick,” the veterans wrote.

    In a separate statement, Sylvia González Andersh, one of the veterans who signed the letter, said that Sinema’s frequent intraparty clashes with other Democrats have demoralized constituents who fought to win her seat.

    “Democrats were out desperately trying to help her win the seat, and now we feel like, what was it for?” Andersh said. “Nobody knows what she is thinking because she doesn’t tell anybody anything. It’s very sad to think that someone who you worked for that hard to get elected is not even willing to listen.”

    Sinema responded to the resignation of the five veterans from the advisory panel in a statement released by her office, saying:

    While it is unfortunate that apparent disagreement on separate policy issues has led to this decision, I thank them for their service and will continue working every day to deliver for Arizona’s veterans who have sacrificed so much to keep us safe and secure.

    The letter’s signatories aren’t the only ones who are frustrated with Sinema’s actions since taking office. In fact, in a hypothetical primary race against the senator, most Democrats in Arizona would likely support a more progressive candidate.

    A Data for Progress poll published earlier this month found that, even in a crowded primary, Sinema would likely lose to another Democrat running to unseat her. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) — one name that has been suggested as a possible replacement for Sinema — would win a five-person primary race with 23 percent of the vote, the poll found. Meanwhile, Sinema would win just 19 percent of the vote if the election happened today.

    In a head-to-head matchup between just Sinema and Gallego, the latter would win by nearly 40 points, Data for Progress found. However, Sinema is not up for re-election until 2024.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AZ Gov Can’t Restrict Money From Schools With Mask Rules, Treasury Dept Says

    Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey speaks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on June 7, 2018.

    The United States Treasury Department has told Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) that he must stop restricting school districts with mask mandates in place from receiving federal funding.

    School districts that have implemented masking rules to reduce the spread of coronavirus were not allowed to receive any of the money the state had established through two federally-funded grant programs.

    Such restrictions, the Treasury Department said in a letter to Ducey, were “not a permissible use” of the funds that were sent to the state.

    In an attempt to incentivize schools to lift mask mandates, the Ducey administration created two grant programs through the federal assistance the state received — one that sought to allocate $163 million in funds to schools without mask mandates, the other a $10 million grant to assist parents of children whose schools required masks or required students to quarantine after COVID-19 exposure.

    Ducey reacted to news of the Treasury Department’s letter by lashing out at President Joe Biden, claiming on Twitter that the president is “focused on taking power away from American families by issuing restrictive and dictatorial mandates for his own political gain.”

    The vast majority of Arizona residents disagree with the Republican governor’s response to the pandemic, particularly with regard to schools reopening while the virus continues to run rampant in the state. Last month, a poll found that nearly 6 in 10 Arizona voters (57 percent) believed masks should be required inside all public school buildings.

    “The data confirms the conversations that we have with parents as we’re teaching,” said Marisol Garcia, vice president of the Arizona Education Association. “Everyone wants to keep their kids safe, and we want to use everything in our tool belt to do so.”

    Recent studies showcase that masking mandates do work to slow the spread of coronavirus in school settings. A study observing districts in Arizona, which was published last month, found that schools without mask mandates in place were 3.5 times more likely to have a COVID-19 outbreak than schools that had established rules requiring masking of students and staff. That same study noted that nearly 60 percent of all outbreaks observed happened in schools without mask mandates.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ASU Students Fight To Defend Multicultural Center

    Students have risen up to protect and defend the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition under the hashtag #DefendMSC. The Black African Coalition, one of seven institutionalized student coalitions on campus, released a statement in support of the MSC. It said ASU had told them it will be implementing increased security measures to protect marginalized students. In addition, the BAC is hosting a town hall at the MCC to address ASU’s failures to safeguard marginalized students on campus.

    The post ASU Students Fight To Defend Multicultural Center appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Activists Who Helped Elect Kyrsten Sinema Launch CrowdPAC to Fund Challenger

    Isela Blanc and Martin Quezada smile and raise their hands during an interview as Wendsler Nosie Sr. laughs beside them

    Arizona activists have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a potential 2024 Democratic primary challenger to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema if she does not vote to end the filibuster or continues to obstruct President Joe Biden’s agenda.

    A committee of Arizona organizers who have helped turn the state blue since 2018, when Sinema narrowly won her seat, launched the conditional fundraiser to pressure the senator to stop undermining her party’s agenda. Sinema opposes the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill, balking at both the price tag and key measures like drug pricing reform and tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations. She has also vehemently defended the filibuster, which has prevented any progress on the Democrats’ voting rights legislation as well as a minimum wage increase, immigration reform, gun violence measures, police reform, LGBTQ protections, protections for workers’ right to unionize and other bills that have already passed the Democratic-led House.

    “It’s time to send a message that she can’t ignore,” the group’s CrowdPAC page says. “Either Sen. Sinema votes to end or reform the Jim Crow filibuster this year or we fund a primary challenge to replace her with someone who will.”

    State Sen. Martin Quezada, a Democrat who is backing the effort, told Salon that for sitting lawmakers, “the only thing that really gets you motivated to start seriously considering changing your views on things is if you are facing a threat to your seat.”

    Quezada stressed that he hopes “we wouldn’t ever have to actually fulfill a primary threat and that she will ultimately take the steps that are needed to protect our state from the many threats we’re facing right now.”

    Belén Sisa, one of the organizers behind the campaign and the former national Latino press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, said she hopes the primary threat will serve as a “wakeup call.” Sisa, who in 2018 worked for NextGen America, the largest youth vote mobilization organization in the country, said she expected Sinema to “be more of an ally” but instead the senator is acting more like a Republican.

    What the CrowdPAC is meant to do, said Kai Newkirk, a lead organizer in building the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster, is to “paint the picture of the threat to [Sinema’s] political future if she stays on this course” and show clearly “that Democrats and left-leaning independents in Arizona and across the country will provide the resources necessary for a competitive and successful primary challenger.”

    Supporters can now pledge donations to back the effort. The campaign is not endorsing a specific potential challenger for a primary that is still almost three years away. But if Sinema does not vote to end or reform the filibuster or continues to obstruct Biden’s agenda, pledges will be converted to donations and the money split between a “credible Democratic primary challenger” who opposes the filibuster and “has a strong record of accountability to all of the communities that make up Arizona” and organizations in the state that “will provide the independent grassroots organizing to power a successful primary challenge and a general election victory.”

    The entire progressive agenda is being held “hostage” and Sinema has the opportunity to advance it, said Karina Ruiz, one of the CrowdPAC organizers and an immigrant rights leader. “We can’t continue to support a candidate that is not going to deliver for the people.”

    The crowdfunding effort comes amid widespread scrutiny of Sinema’s corporate ties. The senator reportedly told colleagues that she would not support a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs, even though she campaigned in 2018 on doing just that. Sinema has received more than $750,000 from pharmaceutical and medical firms. She has also balked at the Democratic proposal for tax increases on big corporations and wealthy individuals after taking more than $900,000 from industry groups and companies who are leading a massive lobbying blitz to defeat the bill. On Tuesday, Sinema held a pricey fundraiser with five business lobbying groups that largely back Republicans and have opposed the tax increases.

    Ruiz, who helped register thousands of voters ahead of Sinema’s 2018 election, said it was “disappointing” and “saddening” to see a candidate who campaigned on helping the middle class and people who are economically unstable reverse positions “because they’re getting money from corporations.”

    Sisa said that if “fundraising and campaign fundraisers are what [Sinema] cares about, then that is what we will use to hold her accountable.

    “If you don’t do what the people are asking you to do, then we are going to hit you where it hurts,” she said. “And that is bankrolling your opponent.”

    Progressive activists have tried for months to pressure Sinema to support elimination or reform of the filibuster in hopes of advancing legislation that Republicans are blocking from receiving a floor vote. But Sinema’s opposition to Biden’s spending agenda, which includes an expansion of health care benefits, child care, family care and measures to combat climate change, has led to widespread frustration with the senator among mainstream Democrats.

    “The general public is starting to see that we’re not making progress on a number of issues and those issues are getting so broad that there’s an issue for everybody to be upset about,” Quezada said. “There’s no excuse for not making progress if Democrats have the House, Senate, and the White House. So that frustration is going to continue to build the more that we see progress failing to be made on all these important issues.”

    Newkirk argued that the issue has been “misrepresented” as a break between progressives and Sinema when it’s “actually about essentially the entire Democratic Party” feeling alienated from Arizona’s senior senator.

    “Biden was elected as a moderate, he’s pushing a moderate compromise agenda that’s been shaped by progressives and all parts of the party and it’s very popular. Sinema is standing in the way of that,” he said. “It doesn’t represent any part of the voters who elected her, it doesn’t represent any part of what the Democratic Party has been fighting for. If anything, it appears to represent the interests of corporate donors that are backing her.”

    Last Saturday, the Arizona Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted to back a resolution threatening a vote of no confidence against Sinema if she does not reverse her support for the filibuster or “continues to delay, disrupt, or votes to gut” the Democrats’ spending plan. More than 90% of the Arizona Democratic Party State Committee previously voted in the spring to back ending the filibuster.

    “This is an official public expression that the positions she’s taking are not in line with the party that she represents in the state of Arizona and the people who are a part of that party,” said Quezada, one of the members who introduced the resolution.

    The party vote and the CrowdPAC are part of a “multi-pronged effort,” he said. “We’re not just putting all our eggs in one basket. We want to continue to pressure her. We want to continue the public displays of pressure. We want to continue the financial displays of pressure.”

    Sinema did not respond to a request for comment from Salon. Her spokesman has said that she is committed to “working directly in good faith with her colleagues and President Biden on the proposed budget reconciliation package.”

    Sinema defended her filibuster stance in a July Washington Post op-ed, arguing that Democrats have more to lose than gain by ending the filibuster.

    “I’m not impressed by that argument,” Quezada said. “I think it’s an argument that we’ve seen often from politicians who are comfortable with the status quo.”

    Sinema argued in the Post op-ed that if Democrats eliminate the filibuster, Republicans could later use a simple majority to pass voting restrictions, attack women’s health and gut popular aid programs.

    “She seems to be blind to the fact that all those things that aren’t happening at the federal level are happening at the state level,” Quezada said after Republican legislators rolled out an extreme agenda including new voting restrictions and an illegitimate election audit. “They are not hesitating for one second to pass radically extreme legislation that hurts us on each and every one of these issues,” he said.

    The CrowdPAC is modeled in part after a similar effort led by activist Ady Barkan to fund a 2020 challenge against Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, over her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That campaign ultimately raised $4 million that helped fund Collins challenger Sara Gideon, a Democrat and the former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. Collins ultimately defeated Gideon by nearly 10 points but organizers say their campaign is different and built on the lessons learned from the 2020 effort.

    “We’re raising money for a potential primary challenge, not a general election one,” said Newkirk. “It’s over the question of whether someone will vote with their party rather than against it.”

    Organizers say they hope that they won’t have to back a Democratic challenger to Sinema, but point to polling data showing that about two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters in Arizona would support a challenge if Sinema continues to preserve the filibuster. A July poll from Data for Progress showed that Sinema has a net approval rating of +23 among Democrats, compared to +89 for Biden and +76 for Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.

    Kelly “has been a lot smarter in his calculations in how he’s dealt with all of these issues,” said Quezada. “He’s setting the example for how perhaps Sinema could be playing this if she were a little smarter about it.”

    Kelly, a former astronaut and the husband of former Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords, has supported the party’s agenda, which explains why he is “more popular than Sinema among Democrats and is in a much better position in his upcoming reelection campaign,” Newkirk said. But the biggest issue in 2022 and 2024 will be what the Democrats have done for the American people under Biden, he argued. “And right now, Sinema is a threat to Kelly’s re-election if she doesn’t change course.”

    Arizona is undeniably a purple state, however, and it’s unclear how a more progressive Democrat would fare in a general election. Sinema is “playing the long game” since she’s not up for re-election until 2024 and is betting that a progressive candidate would have a tougher time winning her seat, Kim Fridkin, a political science professor at Arizona State University, told Salon.

    “In my opinion, Sinema’s position on the filibuster is strategic,” Fridkin said. “However, I am not sure whether the strategic decision is a wise move electorally. What I do know is that Sinema was not always the moderate that she is displaying right now. Her earlier record in the legislature was much more progressive than moderate. Her movement to the middle, I believe, is more strategic than authentic. I think it’s the same with her position on the filibuster.”

    Quezada said there was some validity to Sinema’s political strategy but “she’s way, way overplaying that calculation.”

    “Arizona is trending bluer and I think the reality is that it’s going to be hard for her to hold on to that seat no matter what,” he said. “So why not do some good things while you have that opportunity? And she’s not acting with urgency to hold on to it.”

    Sisa argued that the CrowdPAC is “ultimately an opportunity to get a better candidate, which will give us better chances ultimately in the general election.”

    “The demographics in our state are consistently changing, and throughout the past 10 years we’ve seen a consistent progression towards Arizonans wanting more progressive candidates,” she said. “We’re going to continue to see that: The voting bloc is younger, more brown and Black, and more diverse. Right now, I don’t see Sinema really catering to those people or listening to their concerns, which is a huge mistake.”

    Although Sinema has tried to appeal to independents and conservatives, the July poll showed that her favorable rating was just 38% among independents and 34% among Republicans. Organizers say that while an unprecedented surge of activism helped power Sinema to a narrow victory over then-Rep. Martha McSally in 2018, that same coalition will not be eager to knock on doors again if she stays the course.

    “Turning Arizona blue didn’t happen out of nowhere,” Ruiz said. “That progress happened because there’s organizations on the ground that are walking the streets, under 100-plus degrees, to talk to voters, to make sure that new voters have all the information they need to participate in the process. And I think Sen. Sinema is underestimating this power.

    “Our goal may sound ambitious,” she added. “We believe that the power of the people is going to beat the power of corporations, because there’s more of us.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Arizona Dems Threaten Sinema With “No Confidence” Vote Over Filibuster Defense

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema heads back to a bipartisan meeting on infrastructure in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building on June 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Democrats in the state of Arizona are threatening to hold a vote of “no confidence” against Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) over her steadfast support for the filibuster rule in the United States Senate. The filibuster has been used by Republicans to block a number of key policies this year, which will likely continue unless it is reformed or abolished.

    A resolution from the Arizona Democratic Party (ADP) State Committee also warned that it would hold a no-confidence vote on Sinema if she continues to obstruct a number of bills being pushed by party leaders in Congress, including legislation on voting rights, workers’ rights, health care and infrastructure.

    “The Arizona Democratic Party State Committee will go officially on record and will give Senate [sic] Sinema a vote of NO CONFIDENCE” if she doesn’t back these bills, the resolution read.

    The party is at a “critical crossroads,” the ADP noted. Both houses of Congress (the Senate and the House of Representatives) could be lost in the 2022 midterms — and with that possible outcome, the ability to make laws meant to benefit the American people could also be lost.

    If the filibuster has to end in order to expand rights, so be it, the party said, calling the legislative rule a “Jim Crow relic” and noting that the vast majority of ADP members have long been in support of ending it outright. The state party also decried Sinema’s attempts to keep it in place, ostensibly to preserve some fictional semblance of bipartisanship with Republicans, who are pledging to block a number of legislative items offered up by Democrats.

    “While we want Senator Sinema to be SUCCESSFUL, her argument that the filibuster protects the rights of minorities has become laughable in the face of Republican state legislators’ actions on voting rights, public health during the pandemic, and abortion rights,” the resolution added.

    Beyond the ADP, most of Sinema’s constituents (including a plurality of Republicans in the state) are fine with ending the Senate rule. In a Data for Progress poll conducted earlier this year, 61 percent of Arizona voters said they were in favor of ending the filibuster if it meant major legislation could be passed.

    Democratic criticism toward Sinema for defending the filibuster goes beyond her own state. In June, after the senator wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post defending the legislative rule by arguing that its abolition could lead to Republicans simply undoing any new laws that are passed, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) blasted Sinema, characterizing her argument as defeatist.

    “It’s essentially an argument of saying, ‘Well, why do anything at all, in case something in the future may change it,’” Ocasio-Cortez said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Opens 2020 Audit Despite GOP-Backed Arizona Probe Debunking Trump’s Claims

    Donald Trump peers at the back of the conference room at television cameras at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, Texas, on July 11, 2021.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration announced a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four of that state’s biggest counties on Thursday even as a similar effort in Arizona showed President Joe Biden winning with an even larger margin.

    The Texas secretary of state’s office announced the probe hours after former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly pushed debunked lies about the election, demanded that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott add an election audit bill to the state legislature’s special session. Trump won Texas comfortably, but for unclear reasons is unsatisfied with that result.

    There has been no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in the Texas election but Trump wrote in his letter to Abbott that Texans “don’t trust your election system, and they want your leadership on this issue, which is the number one thing they care about.”

    Hours later, the Texas secretary of state’s office issued a statement announcing that it has “already begun the process in Texas’ two largest Democrat counties and two largest Republican counties — Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin — for the 2020 election,” calling for the legislature to fund the effort.

    The office is currently led by an interim chief after former Republican Secretary of State Ruth Hughs resigned amid Republican acrimony over her office confirming that the state’s election was “smooth and secure.”

    The statement did not say what prompted the move but Democrats said the state was clearly bending to Trump’s will.

    “Let me be the first to congratulate the disgraced former president, Donald Trump, on his apparently becoming the new governor of Texas,” tweeted state Rep. Chris Turner, a Democrat. “Pitiful yet predictable that [Abbott] has capitulated to Trump yet again.”

    Trump has continued to push baseless allegations of fraud in last year’s election even though his own Justice Department investigated at the time and found no evidence. Trump has called for so-called “audits” similar to the one in Arizona in other states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.

    But leaked draft copies of audit results from Maricopa County, Arizona, on Thursday showed that Trump lost by a wider margin than the county previously reported. Though the draft audit report still attempts to push questions about the election process, which experts say are misleading, the document also debunked various of Trump’s conspiracy theories, including “Sharpiegate” and claims that the county received tens of thousands of absentee ballots that had not been sent out. Trump insisted after the leak that the audit “uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD” even though a spokesman for the review told reporters that “it doesn’t look like it” uncovered evidence of a “massive fraud or anything.”

    “If Trump and his supporters can’t prove it here, with a process they designed, they can’t prove it anywhere,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The New York Times.

    Though the audit failed to show evidence of Trump’s fraud and vote-switching conspiracy theories, it is expected to cost taxpayers millions after Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, decertified the voting machines handed over to Cyber Ninjas, the Trump-linked firm behind the audit, because election officials had no idea what the company did with them after taking them into custody.

    While the Maricopa County audit was largely paid for by private donations from Trump supporters, the Texas secretary of state’s office expects that the legislature will use taxpayer funds to fund its effort.

    Isabel Longoria, elections administrator for Harris County, the state’s largest, told the Austin American-Statesman that the audit is “another attack by officials on our communities’ trust in elections.”

    “Our office has been focused on running fair elections with innovative, equitable approaches during an unprecedented pandemic,” she said.

    Texas lawmakers, who already passed a slew of new voting restrictions in response to alleged concerns about “election integrity” — almost entirely the result of fear-mongering by Trump and his allies — earlier this year passed a law empowering the secretary of state’s office to audit two years worth of election results of up to four counties at a time.

    Republicans in Wisconsin, where there have already been multiple audits and recounts of the results that confirmed Trump’s loss, have launched an investigation into the election led by a former state Supreme Court justice who spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies. He said this week that the probe “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”

    Pennsylvania Republicans last week subpoenaed personal information, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, of every voter in the state as part of a similar investigation. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit seeking to block the subpoenas on Thursday, calling the request “illegal, unconstitutional, and unenforceable.”

    Texas Democrats say the state’s “audit” is the latest example of the Republicans bowing to Trump despite no evidence to back up his allegations.

    “This is all an organized effort to overturn the will of the people,” Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, told the Times, “in an effort to fuel the ‘Big Lie’ and stroke Trump’s ego.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.