“The constitution is hanging by a thread,” he told me. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”
quote:
“It’s not like I’m alone in the wilderness. There’s a lot of people from all over the United States thanking me.”
But for now, he accepts that things are likely to get much worse before they get better. I ask him, at this moment, is the Republican party in Arizona lost?
“Yeah,” he said. “They’ve invented a new way. It’s a party that doesn’t have any thought. It’s all emotional, it’s all revenge. It’s all anger. That’s all it is.”
He held the thumb and digit finger of his right hand so close together that they were almost touching. “The veneer of civilization is this thin,” he said. “It still exists – I haven’t been hanged yet. But holy moly, this is just crazy. The place has lost its mind.”
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37941 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
On 22 November 2020, two weeks after Biden had been declared the next president of the United States, Bowers received a call from the White House. Trump and Giuliani were on the line.
After exchanging niceties, they got down to business. Giuliani said they had found 200,000 illegal immigrants and 6,000 dead people who had voted in Arizona. “We need to fix that,” Giuliani told him, cajoling him to call a special committee of the Arizona legislature to look into the supposed fraud.
Bowers remembers vividly how Trump and Giuliani played good cop and bad cop on that call. “Trump, you know, he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t threatening. He never said to me, ‘I’m going to get you if you don’t do this.’ Giuliani, he was the bulldog.”
In return, Bowers was polite but firm. He told the duo that they had to provide hard evidence. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything like this until you bring me something. Let’s see it. I’m not going to have circus time at the house of representatives.’”
That’s when Trump and Giuliani unveiled their second, even more incendiary, proposal. They had heard that there was an “arcane Arizona law” that would allow the Republican-controlled legislature under Bowers to throw out Biden’s electors and send Trump alternatives to Congress in their place.
It took a moment for the penny to drop. Bowers was being asked to overturn the election through diktat.
“I’m not a professor of constitutional law, but I get the idea. They want me to throw out the vote of my own people,” he recalls thinking. “I said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. So now, you’re asking me to overthrow the vote of the people of Arizona?”
Bowers’s response to the good cop, bad cop routine was categoric. He told them: “I took an oath to the American constitution, the state constitution and its laws. Which one of those am I supposed to break?”
I've been hearing Trump apologists explain that people like Bowers and Cheney didn't do what their constituents wanted and as a result they're not being re-elected. That they supported everything else their constitutents want doesn't seem to count. And of course they're both giving up a lot professionally and personally.
But I digress.
Elected office holders take an oath, they pledge to uphold laws and to defend the constitution, don't they?
Seems like that's not important anymore if it means your side might not win...
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37941 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
Bowers has a word for that kind of thinking. “The thought that if you don’t do what we like, then we will just get rid of you and march on and do it ourselves – that to me is fascism.”
That is exactly right.
Big Al
-------------------------------- Money seems to buy the most happiness when you give it away.
Why does everything have to be so complicated, all in the name of convenience. -ShiroKuro
A lifetime of experience will change a person. If it doesn't, then you're already dead inside. -MarkJ
Posts: 7412 | Location: Western PA | Registered: 20 April 2005
Originally posted by Steve Miller: As a data point if one, my formerly Republin friend in Tucson will be voting the straight Democratic ticket this time around.
He thinks the Republican candidates are all crazy.
Hope that is contagious.
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25711 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
