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Tag: katie hobbs
Arizona Republicans Pushed Abortion Ban -- And Now They're Terrified

Arizona Republicans Pushed Abortion Ban -- And Now They're Terrified

The Arizona Supreme Court ruling that restores an 1864 law banning abortion at any stage has Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the archaic law. The result is some textbook examples of hypocrisy and Republicans screaming in frustration over the results of getting exactly what they insisted that they wanted.

The best example of what happens when a dog succeeds in catching the car may be found in a statement from Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake. Lake now says she “opposes” the ruling and is asking Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs—who defeated Lake in the 2022 gubernatorial election—to pass “an immediate common sense solution” to block the court’s ruling.

But just two years ago, when an appeals court ruled against the law in the exact same case, Lake declared that the ban passed when Arizona was still a territory was “a great law.” During a debate with Hobbs, Lake insisted that she would enforce the 1864 law if elected.

Now Lake is begging Hobbs to bail Republicans out of the disaster they supported and caused.

Lake is far from alone in her frantic backpedaling. Other Arizona Republicans are attacking the ruling and the effect goes far beyond one state.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, the Arizona decision blows up the pretense behind Donald Trump’s claim that he can both destroy Roe v. Wade and somehow remain neutral. It even has Republicans in Florida quaking as they look at how the Arizona law threatens their political security.

As much as Republicans would like to pretend that the Arizona Supreme Court just happened to glance at the Big Book of Ye Olde Laws and randomly weigh in a century and a half ago, that is not how this happened. Republicans did this.

This case was brought in 2022 by Arizona’s Republican attorney general at the time, Mark Brnovich, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Attorneys general in 17 other states, led by Arkansas’ Tim Griffin, filed an amicus brief in support of reinstating the ban. It was also supported by Republican Speaker of the Arizona House Ben Toma by Republican President of the Arizona Senate Warren Peterson.

At every level, this ruling is exactly what Republicans said they wanted. What they told their supporters they wanted. It is literally what Lake and other Arizona Republicans campaigned on. There are reportedly enough votes in the House and Senate to overturn the law, but Toma is blocking a vote.

Also signing on in support of the case were half a dozen big right-wing groups, including the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Pediatricians, and the Charlotte Lozier Institute, all of which also filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe.

Republicans can lie about it all they want, but the Arizona Supreme Court acted because Trump ended Roe, and Republicans persuaded the Arizona court to enforce a law made when Arizona was only about half a territory.

This is the promise Republicans made to radical anti-abortion forces to secure their funds, fervor, and support in every campaign since Roe. Like Pontius Trump trying to wash his hands of the results he bragged about, Republicans are finding that getting what they asked for isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Meanwhile, organizers said earlier this month they have collected enough signatures to put the Abortion Access Act on the ballot this November, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. Voters in seven states, including some that are regarded as dark red, have sided with reproductive rights, and as many as 13 more could see the issue on the ballot in 2024. In Arizona, such a ballot measure—especially in light of the recent ruling—could bring voters to the polls in a way that would be very unfavorable to Republicans this November.

That’s also why DeSantis and other Republicans are shaking in Florida. That state will also have a similar ballot measure this November. Actions like the IVF ruling in Alabama and this latest ruling in Arizona are a wake-up call for Florida voters to remind them that they need to get out and fix this in a way Republicans can’t easily reverse.

Every time this issue is in the news, it increases the chance that voters in those states will want to ensure their abortion rights. And it increases the chance that Republicans lose more elections. That includes increasing the chance that Trump goes down hard.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

'Enough Really Is Enough': Maricopa County Officials Seek Sanctions On Lake

'Enough Really Is Enough': Maricopa County Officials Seek Sanctions On Lake

Republican Kari Lake, who recently identified “as a proud election-denying deplorable” and joked that her pronouns were “I/Won,” may be heading for a fresh round of court sanctions after losing a last-gasp bid to overturn her defeat in November’s Arizona gubernatorial election.

Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest city, demanded the sanctions against Lake in a filing Monday, barely two days after an Arizona court tossed out the Republican nominee’s latest election-subverting lawsuit, aptly branded “a hodgepodge of allegations” by the New York Times.

Just days before Lake launched her last-ditch attempt to salvage her electoral loss, a U.S. district judge sanctioned her legal team for filing an “entirely frivolous” lawsuit in April — demanding the use of paper ballots and banning the use of voting machines — based on false charges of election fraud.

Lake, a loud election denier prominent in the MAGA community and backed by former President Donald Trump, shot to far-right stardom for peddling such unfounded allegations — of course, without evidence — in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

“Enough really is enough,” read the Maricopa County court filing. "It is past time to end unfounded attacks on elections and unwarranted accusations against elections officials. This matter was brought without any legitimate justification, let alone a substantial one.”

Lake, as the court papers noted, “publicly stated that she would accept the results of the gubernatorial election only if she were the winning candidate,” referencing Lake’s October interview with CNN, during which she refused to commit to accepting a loss in the midterms.

The statement continued: “But she has not simply failed to publicly acknowledge the election results. Instead, she filed a groundless, seventy-page election contest lawsuit against the Governor-Elect, the Secretary of State, and Maricopa County and several of its elected officials and employees (but no other county or its employees), thereby dragging them and this Court into this frivolous pursuit."

The county’s motion — officially joined by Hobbs, per NBC News — asked that Lake hand over $25,050 in attorney fees to Hobbs and the populous jurisdiction, noting that the courts “should not be used to harass political opponents and sow completely unfounded doubts about the integrity of elections.”

According to Reuters, Hobbs submitted a separate motion asking the Arizona Superior Court to award her $600,000 in legal fees.

In a response Monday, Lake’s legal team decried the sanction requests as an effort to punish the Republican for bringing forth “legitimate” electoral allegations.

"Plaintiff’s claims were neither legally groundless nor were they brought in bad faith or for purposes of harassment as is required under Arizona law to justify sanctions," Lake’s response stated.

However, around the same time as the response, Lake accused Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, who will rule on the sanctions filings, of soliciting ghostwriting services to draft his ruling that denied her election subversion gambit, screenshots posted to Twitter by Lake’s critics allege.

[Tweet]

Freshly Sanctioned By Judge, Lake Lawyers Still Seeking To Overturn Election

Freshly Sanctioned By Judge, Lake Lawyers Still Seeking To Overturn Election

Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake celebrated a judge’s decision Monday to grant a sliver of her election lawsuit passage to trial — where it will be argued by a crackpot legal team sanctioned just weeks ago for filing “entirely frivolous” election lawsuits.

Lake’s lawyers — MAGA attorneys Alan Dershowitz, Kurt Olsen, and Andrew Parker — were chastised and sanctioned by a federal judge on December 1 for filing a garbage lawsuit in April to compel Arizona to use only paper ballots going forward, which the state already did.

U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi, who issued the sanctions, acknowledged “concerns expressed by other federal courts about misuse of the judicial system to baselessly cast doubt on the electoral process in a manner that is conspicuously consistent with the plaintiffs’ political ends.”

The sanctions, the judge said, were to “penalize specific attorney conduct with the broader goal of deterring similarly baseless filings initiated by anyone, whether an attorney or not.”

Lake, who no doubt was privy to the ruling word for word, told a different story to a crowd of supporters at far-right Turning Point USA’s America Fest on Saturday, claiming, “The powers that be are trying to silence them.”

"Can you pray for our legal team?" she asked the crowd. "They're telling these attorneys: 'If you dare try to fight these stolen, corrupted elections, we're going to take away your license to practice law, we're going to take away your ability to feed your family.’”

On Tuesday, Lake admitted to fringe-right podcaster and TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk that the court sanctions had spurred what was left of her shambolic legal team to flee in droves, a development she likewise blamed on the “left.”

“We had attorneys who did walk away because the left is threatening them with their ability to make a living and practice law,” she told Kirk. “And some of our attorneys said, ‘Look, I got mouths to feed, I can’t do this case, I don’t want to be sanctioned.’”

“I got to a point where I said, ‘I’ll take anybody,’” Lake added, unwittingly verifying the quality of her legal counsel and admitting to the dead-on-arrival nature of her electoral allegations.

Lake, who lost November’s Arizona gubernatorial race to Gov-elect Katie Hobbs by over 17,000 votes, alleged in her new 70-page complaint that “the number of illegal votes cast in Arizona’s general election… far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin.”

The lawsuit contained a hodgepodge of allegations untethered to reality, including a new right-wing hoax — based on Elon Musk's selectively released “Twitter Files” — that Hobbs, in her capacity as then-secretary of state, had engaged in censorship and election interference by flagging tweets with election misinformation for removal.

In a stinging rebuke of the electoral conspiracies on which Lake’s campaign stands, Maricopa County Superior Court judge Peter Thompson struck out all but two of ten of the dubious claims made by Lake and her lawyers.

The two surviving claims in her lawsuit — unfounded allegations Hobbs attorney Marc Elias said Lake would find impossible to prove in court — comprise the wild allegation that Republican Maricopa county officials sabotaged Election Day printers to disenfranchise Lake voters.


Despite the daunting challenge of corroborating such a claim, Lake cheered the ruling in a tweet Tuesday, asking the American public to “buckle up.”

Prior to the ruling, Lake hinted over the weekend about what awaited her opposers should her election subversion efforts fail: violence.

“They have built a house of cards here in Maricopa County,” she told Kirk during a Turning Point USA conference over the weekend. “I think they’re all wondering what I’m gonna do. I’ll tell you what: I’m not just gonna knock that house of cards over. We’re going to burn it to the ground.”