Arizona offered up an exceedingly rare moment of Republican sanity this week when GOP House Speaker Rusty Bowers buried a bill that would have given the GOP-led state legislature the authority to reject any election result it found distasteful.
Normally, the House Speaker would refer such a bill to a single committee for consideration before it reached the House floor. But according to CNN, "Bowers took the unprecedented step of ordering all 12 House committees to consider the elections bill, virtually ensuring it will never reach the floor."
Good riddance.
Naturally, the GOP sponsor of the bill, state Rep. John Fillmore, managed to find the most offensive objection possible to the maneuver, calling it a "12-committee lynching" in an interview.
The bill outlined a process where state lawmakers would hold a special session to review the tallies of both primary and general elections and then vote on whether to "accept" or "reject" the results. In other words, state lawmakers could effectively veto the will of the voters, and then anyone would have the ability to file suit for a new election.
Bowers explicitly objected to that provision, telling Capitol Media Services, "We gave the authority to the people."
Bowers rejected the idea that lawmakers could simply throw out results because they were somehow suspicious of the tabulation process.
"The point is, when we gave a fundamental right to the people, I don’t care if I win or lose, that right was theirs,’’ Bowers said. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’
What really stands out here is how perfectly reasonable Bowers' argument is and yet how perfectly shocking it is to hear any Republican making such a reasonable argument on behalf of the American people.
The bill also would have also ended nearly all absentee and early voting in the state and required hand counts of every election be conducted within 24 hours of when polling sites closed. So basically, scaling back Arizona elections to in-person, same-day voting on Election Day only, with paper ballots, no machines.
None of that seems like it will come to pass—all because there's a Republican in Arizona who appears to still believe in democracy. Who knew?