Arizona Republicans are lying about abortion rights
Arizona Republicans are lying about abortion rights
A deep dive into their deceptions and plans
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
Tonight we’ve got a deep dive into the GOP’s multi-layered deception on abortion in Arizona, with context and vital information that you won’t find in the national media. But before we get to that, here are a few quick news updates:
Following up on last night’s story about the battle between college students, hysterical posters can’t stop comparing Jewish undergrads to Auschwitz guards, and cynical politicians using the situation to distract from genocide:
Protests are expanding to a growing number of colleges, with tenured professors increasingly defying school administrators on behalf of the expelled and arrested.
House Speaker and Christian nationalist Mike Johnson will meet with Jewish students at Columbia on Wednesday. Protecting Jews now means setting them up for advances from politicians who see them as hell-bound tools for the rapture.
As politicians blasted protestors as “blatantly anti-semitic,” those same students — many of whom are Jewish — were holding Passover seders on the quad.
On a more positive note, Rep. Summer Lee, a progressive who called for a ceasefire very early on, trounced a well-financed challenger in tonight’s PA primary elections.
Today was also a good day for working people thanks to several major new policies announced by the comrades in the Deep State. Under a new Department of Labor rule, four million salaried workers will become eligible for overtime pay by January. At the FTC, members voted 3-2 to enact a long-awaited ban on non-compete clauses.
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Arizona state Rep. David Cook has spent the last few weeks being quoted extensively in local newspapers and appearing on national TV news broadcasts, an impromptu multimedia press blitz during which he’s repeatedly cast himself as an opponent of the state’s total ban on abortion and promised that the law would soon be struck from the books.
“The bottom line is that the 1800s law will be repealed,” Cook told ABC News during a primetime broadcast last week. “We are making progress in our caucus and I think that you’ll see some action possibly next Wednesday to go ahead and get that law repealed.”
Cook presented a rational figure during that interview, drawing an implicit contrast between himself and the conservative state Supreme Court that recently reinstated a blanket ban on abortion based on a law passed in 1864, when Arizona was not yet a state. Sitting at his desk, as if the precisely timed remote TV interview had taken him by surprise while he was hard at work, Cook counseled patience with the chaotic legislative process and bipartisanship.
“Let’s come to get together and get it fixed,” he added. “Let’s make sure that the abortion law in Arizona is something that Arizonans can live with.”
Left unsaid was that Cook has repeatedly voted to kill attempts to repeal the 1864 abortion ban, including once just hours before that interview. He also conveniently omitted the fact that his idea of an abortion law that “Arizonans can live with” is still very much a ban on abortion, which polls indicate is wildly unpopular with Arizonans.
Instead of reality, the state GOP has instead spent its time plotting to confuse the public, as revealed by a memo that leaked last week.
With progressives on the verge of qualifying a constitutional amendment that would guarantee reproductive choice up until the point of fetal viability, which is generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy, Republicans have discussed flooding the ballot with other proposals that would allow for far more limited access.
The state Supreme Court’s decision has been described as a political disaster for the GOP, whose leaders are said to be tearing their hair out with anxiety ahead of the November elections. Since April 10th, there have been countless articles written about how they intend to mitigate the political damage, giving credence to disingenuous Republicans who pretended to be upset over the ruling and echoing Cook’s imaginary distinction between lawmakers and the court.
The reality couldn’t be more different — in fact, it was a series of deliberate decisions made by Republicans that led to this moment.
Courting Disaster
In 2016, the Arizona GOP voted to expand the high court by two spots, which then-Gov. Doug Ducey promptly filled with far-right justices. This month, those two additional seats provided the entire margin of victory in the 4-2 decision, which Ducey obnoxiously condemned in a statement sent from the purgatory where past governors dream of a return to relevance.
Escaping blame won’t be that easy for Ducey, as his appointees will play a major role in the state’s critical November elections. Associate Justice Clint Bolick, one of the justices that Ducey installed when the court expanded, will be on the ballot in a retention election, which asks voters whether they want to give justices another six-year term.
A far-right litigator who previously worked for the Goldwater Institute, Bolick will be joined on the ballot by another Ducey-appointed judge who voted for the ban, Associate Justice Kathryn King. If they lose those elections, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs would get to appoint their replacements, which would represent a watershed change in Arizona politics.
It’s rare for voters to decline a sitting justice another term, but earlier this year, the GOP foresaw a potential shift and put in motion a scheme to protect its anti-choice majority. In February, the state Senate passed a resolution to create a constitutional amendment that would eliminate those retention elections and give all current and future justices lifetime appointments.
The bill already passed through one House committee, and if it gets the blessing during a full floor vote, it’ll also be on the ballot in November. That would give Republicans yet another initiative intended to wrest control of government from the public.
Some Republicans have been better than others at pretending to care just a smidge about bodily autonomy. Kari Lake, the Trump acolyte who lost the 2022 gubernatorial election and is now running for Senate, lasted less than two ten days before she snapped under the pressure of having to seem empathetic.
Lake’s statement condemning the decision was very clearly the work of a political consultant, whose efforts went up in flames on Saturday with Lake’s reversion to her previous support for the 1864 ban.
Weak Excuses, Obvious Lies
Others have been a bit more canny, but their sincerity still doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In the state Senate, three Republicans have earned regular mentions for voting to move ahead with bills that would repeal the 1864 law. But two of them, Sens. Shawnna Bolick and T.J. Shope, also happen to have co-sponsored of the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which contained language explicitly stating that it not override the 1864 ban.
During an interview with a local radio station last week, Shope stuttered through an explanation for his support of that ban, which he ultimately chalked up to not thinking that the Supreme Court would actually overturn Roe v Wade. That the vote in Arizona happened well after SCOTUS heard oral arguments in Dobbs and just a little over a month before the draft decision leaked out suggests that either he’s lying or simply has some of the worst political instincts in history.
Shope made an even bigger mess of his attempt to explain why, as pro tempore of the state Senate, he made the decision to literally block an attempt by Democrats to repeal the 1864 law just last week.
As for Sen. Bolick, she’s the wife of Justice Bolick and shares his absolutist opposition to abortion, which she was touting to the public as recently as this past February, when when she read a very explicit proclamation on the Senate floor.
"The undersigned Arizona legislators urge every person to refuse to sign a signature to put the Arizona Access Act on the ballot, as it an assault on God's value and sovereignty regarding the sanctity of human life,” Sen. Bolick read into the legislative record. Her appeal to find “common ground of common sense” is exactly the kind of statement you’d expect from someone running for the first time — she was appointed to her seat — in a swing district with a significant Democratic opponent.
Another legislator who voted to repeal the law last week, State Rep. Matt Gress, was just last year the lead sponsor of a bill to enshrine fetal personhood in the state constitution.
Cook, meanwhile, has been happily accepting the bait and using it to build up his profile amidst a bruising primary battle against state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who he’ll paint as too extreme to win another general election. Yet when confronted by the Arizona Republic after voting to stop a repeal from receiving a hearing in the House, Cook claimed that he did so out of deference to some arcane legislative rules and his Republican colleague.
"I’ve never rolled my leadership or my speaker,” he told the newspaper. And that presents a bit of a hiccup, because Cook’s speaker, Republican House Speaker Ben Toma, is adamantly against repealing the ban — even thought he promised, in a joint statement he released with other GOP legislative leaders, to “listen to constituents” in order to “determine the best course of action on the matter.”
Republicans may well ultimately repeal the 1864 law, and the once-a-week legislative schedule means that it could theoretically begin to move forward as soon as tomorrow. That would be an ideal scenario, because this is bigger than politics. But there should be no illusions about their true intentions.
The conservative lawmakers who may vote for the repeal will be fighting for their political lives and the GOP’s majority in November, when the party will also be doing its best to confuse voters into acceding to a giving up control over both their bodies and the highest reaches of state government. All they have now is a bit of institutional power, a bottomless reserve of shamelessness, and cheap legislative tricks. The media should know better than to hand them any credibility or good faith coverage when their lies are so blatant.
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