Rusty Bowers, An Arizonan Profile in Courage i
Feb 6, 2022 10:20:53 #
slatten49
Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam...Sat, February 5, 2022, 9:31 AM
It is a dark time in the life of the American experiment. The world’s oldest democracy, once assumed to be unbreakable, often appears to be coming apart at the rivets.
From his Florida exile, a defeated leader, whose efforts to overturn the last e******n are still coming into view, is working to place loyalists in key offices across the country, and his followers are racing to install themselves at the controls of future e******ns.
Yet in Arizona this week, the unlikeliest of characters just stepped forward with a palm raised to the forces of Donald Trump.
When right-wing lawmakers there pushed a bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an e******n and force a new one, Rusty Bowers said no.
For decades, Bowers, the unassuming speaker of the Arizona House, has represented die-hard Republican beliefs, supporting the kinds of low-tax, limited-government policies that made the state’s Barry Goldwater a conservative icon.
Bowers could have sat on the bill, letting it die a quiet death. Instead, he k**led it through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.
“The speaker wanted to put the wooden cross right through the heart of this thing for all to see,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant who has known Bowers for some 30 years.
A line drawn
The bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona state Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’ tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”
But to the 69-year-old Bowers, a Mormon and father of seven who first entered politics in 1992, it was clearly a matter of something bigger than parliamentary procedure.
By sending Fillmore’s legislation to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it, he was also sending an unmistakable message about the direction of his party — a GOP that is unrecognizably different from what it was back when Goldwater-style conservatism itself represented an insurgency.
Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early v****g altogether and mandated that all b****ts be counted by hand.
V****g Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks e******n laws, called it “one of the most comprehensive attacks on nonpartisan e******n administration and v**er access that we have seen.”
Most troubling, to v****g rights advocates and independent experts, was a provision that would have empowered the Arizona Legislature to “accept or reject the e******n results” and given a single e*****r the power to demand that a fresh e******n be held.
And while the bill was never likely to become law, it was an expression of what Barnes called a “cathartic moment” for the Republican Party. “And I think Rusty is not excited about that,” he said.
‘We gave the authority to the people’
The Arizona dispute comes amid a national convulsion within the Republican Party, which has split into two unequal factions — the pro-Trump forces, who have rallied behind the former president’s calls to overturn the 2020 e******n, and a dwindling establishment, which has either avoided the subject or faced the wrath of Trump’s allies.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee moved to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the congressional committee investigating the J*** 6 r**t at the U.S. Capitol. In so doing, the RNC officially declared that the attack was “legitimate political discourse.”
Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about e******n f***d and have pushed legislation that v****g rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.
“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’
Among Arizona political insiders, Bowers is known as a Renaissance man — an artist who’s equally comfortable rolling up his sleeves to fix a broken vehicle in the middle of the desert as he is painting landscapes in watercolor. A 2015 profile describes him as “a beekeeper and an orchardist” who once trekked to Mexico to live with a remote native tribe.
“He has always struck me as independent, his own man,” Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, told us. “He’s a doctrinaire conservative on some things, but a pragmatic, conservative problem-solver on others. Very principled, straight-shooter, full of integrity.”
Bowers, a libertarian-style conservative who came of age in Goldwater’s Republican Party, backed Trump in 2020. But he resisted calls after the e******n to overturn the results — dismissing his colleagues’ claims, which courts and independent experts have said are unfounded, that President Joe Biden did not win Arizona fair and square.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the p**********l e******n,” he said in December 2020. “I v**ed for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified e******n.”
Bowers’ resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.
Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.
“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a p*******e over a loudspeaker.
He is term-limited, but his stance could revive efforts to oust him from the speakership — a move that would have national reverberations.
Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.
But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in v****g practices that, in his view, have gone too far.
“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican v**ers are solidly in line with me.”
Arizona political observers told us it was unlikely that the right wing of the Republican caucus could find a suitable replacement for Bowers, who has survived thus far through a combination of inertia and disorganization among his critics.
Fillmore, who said he did not support Trump in 2016 and hadn’t spoken with him, said he had received death threats over the bill from people who accused him of r****m for wanting, as he put it, to restore Arizona’s v****g laws as they were when he grew up in the 1950s.
He expressed his own fortitude pithily. “You know what, people?” he said. “Kiss my grits.”
It is a dark time in the life of the American experiment. The world’s oldest democracy, once assumed to be unbreakable, often appears to be coming apart at the rivets.
From his Florida exile, a defeated leader, whose efforts to overturn the last e******n are still coming into view, is working to place loyalists in key offices across the country, and his followers are racing to install themselves at the controls of future e******ns.
Yet in Arizona this week, the unlikeliest of characters just stepped forward with a palm raised to the forces of Donald Trump.
When right-wing lawmakers there pushed a bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an e******n and force a new one, Rusty Bowers said no.
For decades, Bowers, the unassuming speaker of the Arizona House, has represented die-hard Republican beliefs, supporting the kinds of low-tax, limited-government policies that made the state’s Barry Goldwater a conservative icon.
Bowers could have sat on the bill, letting it die a quiet death. Instead, he k**led it through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.
“The speaker wanted to put the wooden cross right through the heart of this thing for all to see,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant who has known Bowers for some 30 years.
A line drawn
The bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona state Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’ tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”
But to the 69-year-old Bowers, a Mormon and father of seven who first entered politics in 1992, it was clearly a matter of something bigger than parliamentary procedure.
By sending Fillmore’s legislation to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it, he was also sending an unmistakable message about the direction of his party — a GOP that is unrecognizably different from what it was back when Goldwater-style conservatism itself represented an insurgency.
Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early v****g altogether and mandated that all b****ts be counted by hand.
V****g Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks e******n laws, called it “one of the most comprehensive attacks on nonpartisan e******n administration and v**er access that we have seen.”
Most troubling, to v****g rights advocates and independent experts, was a provision that would have empowered the Arizona Legislature to “accept or reject the e******n results” and given a single e*****r the power to demand that a fresh e******n be held.
And while the bill was never likely to become law, it was an expression of what Barnes called a “cathartic moment” for the Republican Party. “And I think Rusty is not excited about that,” he said.
‘We gave the authority to the people’
The Arizona dispute comes amid a national convulsion within the Republican Party, which has split into two unequal factions — the pro-Trump forces, who have rallied behind the former president’s calls to overturn the 2020 e******n, and a dwindling establishment, which has either avoided the subject or faced the wrath of Trump’s allies.
On Friday, the Republican National Committee moved to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the congressional committee investigating the J*** 6 r**t at the U.S. Capitol. In so doing, the RNC officially declared that the attack was “legitimate political discourse.”
Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about e******n f***d and have pushed legislation that v****g rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.
“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’
Among Arizona political insiders, Bowers is known as a Renaissance man — an artist who’s equally comfortable rolling up his sleeves to fix a broken vehicle in the middle of the desert as he is painting landscapes in watercolor. A 2015 profile describes him as “a beekeeper and an orchardist” who once trekked to Mexico to live with a remote native tribe.
“He has always struck me as independent, his own man,” Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, told us. “He’s a doctrinaire conservative on some things, but a pragmatic, conservative problem-solver on others. Very principled, straight-shooter, full of integrity.”
Bowers, a libertarian-style conservative who came of age in Goldwater’s Republican Party, backed Trump in 2020. But he resisted calls after the e******n to overturn the results — dismissing his colleagues’ claims, which courts and independent experts have said are unfounded, that President Joe Biden did not win Arizona fair and square.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the p**********l e******n,” he said in December 2020. “I v**ed for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified e******n.”
Bowers’ resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.
Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.
“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a p*******e over a loudspeaker.
He is term-limited, but his stance could revive efforts to oust him from the speakership — a move that would have national reverberations.
Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.
But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in v****g practices that, in his view, have gone too far.
“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican v**ers are solidly in line with me.”
Arizona political observers told us it was unlikely that the right wing of the Republican caucus could find a suitable replacement for Bowers, who has survived thus far through a combination of inertia and disorganization among his critics.
Fillmore, who said he did not support Trump in 2016 and hadn’t spoken with him, said he had received death threats over the bill from people who accused him of r****m for wanting, as he put it, to restore Arizona’s v****g laws as they were when he grew up in the 1950s.
He expressed his own fortitude pithily. “You know what, people?” he said. “Kiss my grits.”
Feb 6, 2022 11:31:24 #
Feb 7, 2022 17:51:04 #
Oldsargeant
Loc: SW Florida
So exactly what is the problem with requirements for v**er ID and v****g in person? Mexico and Colombia require a national ID with picture and finger print, E******n Day is a national holiday, people line up and v**e, after v****g the dip their finger in ink that stops them from v****g multiple times. If v****g is such a sacred right why is it not guarded as such? It’s so much BS to hear the i***ts like pelosi and schumer rant like fools.
Feb 7, 2022 17:55:38 #
slatten49
Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
Oldsargeant wrote:
So exactly what is the problem with requirements for v**er ID and v****g in person? Mexico and Colombia require a national ID with picture and finger print, E******n Day is a national holiday, people line up and v**e, after v****g the dip their finger in ink that stops them from v****g multiple times. If v****g is such a sacred right why is it not guarded as such? It’s so much BS to hear the i***ts like pelosi and schumer rant like fools.
Wow, it's as if you didn't even read the article. 
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