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Tag: rusty bowers
Arizona GOP Boots Top Legislator Over January 6 Panel Testimony

Arizona GOP Boots Top Legislator Over January 6 Panel Testimony

The Republican Party of Arizona has formally censured the Speaker of the Arizona House, Republican Rusty Bowers, declaring he is “no longer a Republican in good standing,” and “unfit to serve” one month after he was a “star” witness in a nationally-televised hearing held by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

Dr. Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona GOP and a Trump acolyte who attempted to have the vote counting stopped on election night, made the announcement late Tuesday. Ward posted the resolution that does not mention Bowers’ testimony but makes claims that accuse him of bipartisanship, and calls on “all registered Republicans to expel him permanently from office in the impending primary election.”

Last month Bowers testified that numerous top Trump allies, and Donald Trump himself, spoke with him after the election in apparent attempts to pressure him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, a state Joe Biden won. Among those he said spoke with him were Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), according to The New York Times.

“Mr. Bowers also recalled speaking to Mr. Trump, making clear to the president that he ‘wouldn’t do anything illegal for him,’ as one questioner, Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said,” The Times reported. “Nonetheless, another lawyer advising Mr. Trump, John Eastman, called Mr. Bowers in early January and urged him to schedule a legislative vote to ‘decertify the electors, because we had plenary authority to do so.'”

Bowers “also told the House Select Committee about the harassment he experienced outside his home from Trump supporters in the weeks before January 6, 2021, in which he was called a ‘pedophile’ and other epithets.”

The Times described Bowers as speaking “about the Constitution in reverential and spiritual terms,” saying he “had tears in his eyes as he described his gravely ill daughter enduring some of the harassment outside their house. (She died in late January.)”

The resolution censuring Bowers accuses him of “supporting a bill giving taxpayer-funded in-state tuition to illegal aliens at our state universities which is a direct violation of the Republican Platform and numerous resolutions passed by the State Committee which oppose policies that promote and reward illegal ‘sanctuary cities’ and lawlessness.”

It also charges that “Bowers joined Democrats to sponsor a one-billion-dollar education spending bill (HB 2039.) without a single committee hearing while simultaneously opposing and killing a bill to permanently reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in our childrens’ schools”

Other charges state: “Bowers was the only Republican opposed to the bill (HB 2294.) establishing that only two genders should be named on all government documents,” and “Bowers sponsored one of the most horrific attacks on the Republican Party Platform plank on religious liberty by sponsoring a bill with Democrats (HB 2802.) that makes sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class forcing public schools and businesses to allow men identifying as women in womens restrooms and locker rooms, removing parental rights preventing parents from identifying the help that their own child may need in accordance with their religious beliefs and a prohibition of religious-based resources on subjects of sexual identity and orientation.”

Before being censured, Bowers, who is now running for the state Senate, said Monday it will take a “miracle” for him to win the election.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

On July Fourth, Appreciation For The Truly Patriotic Conservatives

On July Fourth, Appreciation For The Truly Patriotic Conservatives

When the flags fly proudly on the Fourth of July, I remember what my late father taught me about love of country. Much as he despised the scoundrels and pretenders he liked to call "jelly-bellied flag flappers," after a line in a favorite Rudyard Kipling story, he was deeply patriotic. It is a phrase that aptly describes the belligerent chicken hawk who never stops squawking — someone like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.

Like many who volunteered for the U.S. Army in World War II, my dad never spoke much about his four tough years of military service, which brought him under Japanese bombardment in the Pacific theater. But eventually there came a time when he attached to his lapel a small eagle-shaped pin known as a "ruptured duck" — a memento given to every veteran. With this proof of service, he demonstrated that as a lifelong liberal, he loved his country as much as any conservative.

That gesture occurred during one of those periods when the political polarization now plaguing our country began to metastasize. It seemed important to my father -- and to me over these many years since -- to lay down a marker for liberals and progressives who love America, with her manifest flaws and conflicted past. Over these past two years, however, living through the pandemic and the insurrection, it has become equally important to recognize that patriotism can still bring us together across sectarian and ideological divides. And on this holiday, to celebrate the determined defense of democracy and law that brings together patriots of all partisan stripes.

On this Independence Day, it doesn't seem so important to argue, as I have in years past, that the liberal left is equally as devoted to American institutions and values as our compatriots on the right -- because so many of the latter have demonstrated, in their fealty to Trump, that they love their would-be dictator more than they love their country. Democrats have proved to be staunch and unified in their defense of the Constitution, with the party's elected officials leading the fight to uphold democracy both at home and around the world.

What feels vital today is to appreciate the allies from the other side of the political aisle who have rallied to the cause, at no small cost to themselves and their families. It is a list that grows longer by the day, starting with Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Republicans who broke with their party to demand truth and justice in the wake of Trump's attempted January 6 coup. Both have proved willing to sacrifice their promising political futures and to subject themselves to vile abuse as they stood up against their degenerating quasi-fascist party and its criminal leader. They have forged real friendships as well as strong working relationships with the Democrats on the House Select Committee, because that is what Americans do in a time of crisis.

Both Kinzinger and Cheney still profess what I would consider misguided views or worse on many issues, and have adopted some positions -- on voting rights, for instance -- that contradict their professed love of democracy. So have other Republican and former Republican officials and leaders who have nevertheless proven their independence from Trump's authoritarian mob. Rusty Bowers, the Arizona Republican legislator who refused to bow to that mob, has even said he would vote for Trump again -- a truly bizarre statement.

And yet we must be grateful to Bowers, and to Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sperling of Georgia, as well as the eight other Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January 2020, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him, and the many conservatives who have chosen law and liberty over chaos, lies, and tyranny. Yes, that even includes Mike Pence, the former vice president who merely did his duty but performed that constitutional task under threat of death from the leader to whom he had shown such obsequious loyalty.

I cannot help but hope that all of these good people, forced to turn away from their party and many of their friends, will reconsider their reactionary views on all kinds of matters. Some conservatives, including a few whom I've gotten to know better in these moments, are indeed looking back and questioning rigid perspectives from the past. In many cases that is what their intelligence and ethics will eventually require of them.

Yet on this July Fourth, any such considerations matter much less to me than their willingness to set aside our differences in a common cause. Disagreements about the best way to fulfill our nation's promise will endure -- and I look forward to the day when we can again debate those matters in a democratic society secure from authoritarian threats.

Meanwhile, we ought to appreciate all the leaders, thinkers, and activists who have joined America's united front against fascism. We will be struggling together to preserve our common birthright for years to come.


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How QAnon Smears Honest Republicans As ‘Pedophiles’

How QAnon Smears Honest Republicans As ‘Pedophiles’

On Tuesday, June 21, Rusty Bowers — the conservative Republican who serves as speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives — testified at one of the hearings being held by the January 6 select committee. Bowers recalled his refusal to promote the Big Lie following the 2020 presidential election and the abuse from MAGA extremists that he suffered because of it — abuse that included being falsely accused of being a “pedophile.”

Journalist Ali Breland, in an article published by Mother Jones on June 21, points to Bowers’ experiences as a prime example of the type of tactics that QAnon extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists will resort to if a politician stands up to former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in any way. And Breland emphasizes that QAnon won’t hesitate to go after Republicans as well as Democrats.

“For years, ‘pedophile,’ often shortened to ‘pedo,’ was used as semi-ironic 4Chan shorthand for anyone internet trolls thought was a weirdo,” Breland explains. “More recently, QAnon’s misplaced ‘save the children’ paranoia has helped this sentiment germinate among the non-4Chan normie masses. For a bit, the pedophile accusations were reserved for elite, liberal gatekeepers — the high-profile Democrats featured in John Podesta’s hacked e-mails, for example. But now, literally anyone who stands even slightly in the way of the right’s agenda might be called a pedophile.”

Breland continues, “Testifying Tuesday before the January 6 committee, Rusty Bowers — the Republican speaker of the Arizona Statehouse — somberly explained how this happened to him after he refused to help Donald Trump overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state. In response, right-wing protesters began showing up at his home, where he lives with his wife and daughter.”

Bowers is a prime example of the fact that QAnon extremists will not cut a politician any slack simply because they are a conservative Republican. If they consider them disloyal to the MAGA movement or a RINO (Republican In Name Only), they are a target for a false accusation of pedophilia. And Bowers has not been a Never Trumper.

“These kinds of often-unfounded accusations have become increasingly common weapons wielded by conspiratorial right-wingers who believe the election was stolen from Trump,” Breland observes. “But they also fit into a longstanding framework of weaponizing children as a part of far-right political projects. In 2019, while QAnon was gaining steam but had not yet gone fully mainstream, I wrote about the history of political movements baselessly portraying children as being in grave danger, as in the moral and Satanic panics of the 1980s.”

Breland notes that QAnon’s influence asserted itself this year when Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri made “attempts to smear Biden’s Supreme Court Justice nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, as a pedophile sympathizer.”

QAnon believes that the United States’ federal government has been hijacked by a sinister international cabal of pedophiles, child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was elected president in 2016 to fight the cabal. And QAnon, Breland warns, has “normalized” such thinking.

“QAnon, and the ‘80s moral panics that preceded it, established a more elaborate and convoluted mythos,” Breland writes. “Children were being kept in tunnels for a sprawling child sex trafficking ring run by elite pedophiles, and the proof was sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to do the research. This has become so normalized that people attacking Bowers might not even waste their time concocting fabulous stories. They just cut straight to the chase and call him a pedophile. They don’t explain any further, because they don’t need to.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.