Separate efforts by Democrats to advance bills legalizing abortion were blocked by Republicans in both chambers of Arizona’s state legislature on Wednesday, with state Senate Republican leaders removing a bill from the daily agenda and the state House’s GOP leadership adjourning for the day after a panicked Republican member reversed and made a motion to bring up a Democrat’s bill repealing the 1864 ban that had been idling for months, the Arizona Republic reports.
We’d been considering doing a piece comparing the situation in Arizona to fat former President Trump whipping Congressional Republicans into killing the bipartisan border security package negotiated in the US Senate because he didn’t want to give Joe Biden a “win” and he wanted to continue campaigning on the “invasion”. The electoral parallels are obvious enough and the incentives for the side that has the perceived advantage on the issue to avoid handling it are high.
Except where Republicans have made it very clear they value being able to scream on Fox News about white girls getting murdered by crazed third world savages than they do preventing white girls from getting murdered by crazed third world savages, Arizona Dems actually want to fix this and prevent pregnant women from suffering and dying needlessly, even though it is very much in their interest to avoid doing Kari Lake, Donald Trump, and the rest of the MAGA Nazis a favor by keeping this ban on the books until November when a measure repealing it will likely be on the ballot.
Well no need to crank out 1,200 words pondering that difficult moral dilemma since Arizona Republicans were not moving Wednesday. The GOP have only 16R – 14D and 31R – 29D majorities in the state Senate and House, respectively, so it might just be a matter of time until they realize that holding out is not in their interest, especially if pressure builds from Trump and Lake. She’ll probably lose again anyway, but Donald REALLY needs Arizona to flip back to him. He doesn’t have a lot of paths to 270 without it. Likely sharing the ballot with the abortion referendum was bad enough before the state Supreme Court fucked everything up for him and turbocharged the pro-choicers.