quote:
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...
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When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
