who resisted an enormous amount of pressure to overturn the Arizona 2020 presidential election results or decertify the electors or any of the other ways MAGA-its including Trump personally and Rudy Guiliani personally tried to get him to do to keep Arizona's Electors from voting for Biden on Jan 6.
I read about it in "The Last Word" in the Sept 9 issue of "The Week", which came from The Guardian. Just a tiny exceprt:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/20/rusty-bowers-interview-trump-arizona-republicans
As January 6 approached, and the cries of stolen election reached fever pitch, the attacks on Bowers became personal. A “Trump train” of angry fanatics blaring their horns in pickup trucks festooned with Maga flags turned up at his home in Mesa, some bearing digital boards proclaiming him to be a pedophile.
To protect his family, he would step outside the house and confront the protesters. One man had three bars on his chest, signalling he was a member of the far-right militia group the Three Percenters. The man was screaming obscenities and carrying a pistol. “I had to get as close to him as I could to defend myself if he went for the gun.”
I never had the thought of giving up. No way. I don’t like bullies
The worst of it was that during several of these menacing protests, his daughter Kacey was inside the house mortally ill in bed with liver failure. “She would say, ‘What are they doing out there?’ She was emotional. She told me, ‘I’m going to die.’ I said, ‘Honey, you’re not going to die.’ So she had feelings, we were trying to keep her positive.”
Kacey Bowers did die, on 28 January, three weeks after the insurrection at the US Capitol.
And the situation today is scary:
Then on 2 August, Bowers was effectively turfed out of the Arizona legislature when he was defeated in the primary by the Satan-evoking Farnsworth. That same night, the slate of election deniers standing for statewide positions won a clean sweep.
Republican nominations for governor, a US Senate seat, state attorney general and secretary of state all went to enthusiastic backers of Trump and his 2020 attempted coup. They included Mark Finchem, who was present at the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 and who continues to try to decertify Biden’s presidency to this day.
Finchem is now the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Should he win in November, he would be in charge of Arizona’s election administration through the 2024 presidential contest, in which Trump has indicated he is likely to be competing.
The ascent of election deniers across the board marks the final transformation of the Republican party in the state. Trump’s grip is now complete; the strain of constitutional conservatism epitomized by Bowers is in the wilderness.
... In February, a mega “election integrity” bill was introduced into the Arizona legislature that was the culmination of the anti-democratic drift of the party. House bill 2596 would have given the Republican-controlled legislature the power to reject any election result that the majority group didn’t like.
It's hard for me to understand how someone who votes for tax cuts for the wealthy and control of women and climate denialism and all the other awful things Republicans stand for could also be a Profiles In Courage person in standing for democracy and rule of law.
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