Though she could not (legally) vote in Arizona, Liz Cheney declared on Wednesday, October 6th, at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University, "For almost 40 years now, I've been voting Republican. I don't know that I have ever voted for a Democrat. But if I lived in Arizona now I absolutely would … for governor and for secretary of state."
Katie Hobbs (D) is running for governor against Kari Lake (R), while Adrian Fontes's (D) opponent is Mark Finchum, a current republican lawmaker. Trump has endorsed both candidates. Finchum attended the January 6th insurrection. At a Trump rally in Iowa in 2021, Finchum declared, "The Maricopa County 2020 election must not be allowed to stand. It must be decertified and set aside." As Secretary of State, he could legalize a re-made Jim Crow regime, limiting who could vote and having unilateral power to change an undesired outcome from a presidential election to a people's ballot initiative.
On the same day, Cheney declared her new political position, 38 miles southeast of Phoenix, in Queen Creek, AZ, Ted Cruz's comrade-in-votes was his foil to jab at Democrat Mark Kelly, running against Trumpite Blake Masters. "I'm here to tell you right now that Kyrsten Sinema has a lot bigger balls than Mark Kelly," Cruz told the crowd.
In case you're wondering, Masters is a self-identified "…Christian, husband, father, gun owner, and businessman. I grew up in Arizona, and I hate what is happening to it. Masters – supported by out-of-state money, wants to privatize everything, especially the bodies of people he disagrees with or who disagree with him. But his political genealogy reminds us that Arizona had Trumpian politicians before America had Trump: from Barry Goldwater to Joe Arpaio, Tom Horne, and Russel Pierce, to name a few.
More of a dig at Kelly, but it is Arizona, where Cruz and Sinema can throwback some fancy wine together as the hauntings of colonial settler violence and the rebirth place of law and order politics after WWII clash with Prada Socialists and Republican Democrats, so who knows, perhaps Liz Cheney could run as a Democrat to replace Sinema. Yawn.
Though Lake and Finchum have some especially worrisome campaign ads, for some extraordinary acting, check out the campaign video of Blake Masters playing the victim, blaming media, teachers, and corporations, and lamenting the privileges of a Jim-Crowed past. The dizzying contradictions and ironies of political grifting.
Laws, walls, exclusion, and nationalism, magnified by dog-whistle histrionic propaganda about "losing the country" and the "invasion of immigrants," historically have been portending dark and violent logics of intentional and policy-driven social abandonment and legalized eugenics.
In a state governed more and more by Civil War Era logics and Territorial Laws, abortion is almost entirely illegal in Arizona.
As reported in Ms., "On Saturday in Arizona, a 15-week abortion ban—signed into law on July 6 by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey—was set to take effect. But before it could, a late Friday ruling from Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson green-lighted an anti-abortion law from 1864 that supersedes all other bans…."
The revised statute of the criminal code from 1864 reads, "A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years."
In January, the grassroots civic engagement organization Voto Latino announced their campaign, "¡Adiós, Sinema!"
"A thriving democracy is dependent on equal access to the voting booth regardless of color or creed," said Maria Teresa Kumar, founder, and president of Voto Latino. "Efforts to suppress the vote–and Senator Sinema's opposition to suspending the filibuster for legislation to protect Arizona voters' rights–run directly counter to our mission. Senator Sinema's vote to allow opponents of voting rights to abuse Senate rules in order to rig elections in their favor is a line crossed. We're going to make sure her voters never forget."
