The Free Agenda: History in the making
Like sausage, it’s ugly … Colleges become the frontlines … And we have serious trust issues.
Democratic state lawmakers repealed the near-total abortion ban yesterday with the help of a handful of rogue Republicans.
Gov. Katie Hobbs has pledged to sign the bill right away, and it will take effect 90 days after the legislative session adjourns. But considering there doesn’t seem to be any negotiated plan to solve the state’s budget crisis, adjournment could still take a while.
In the meantime, without judicial intervention, abortion will be outlawed in Arizona starting in late June.
Yesterday’s vote in the state Senate was the culmination of nearly a month of false starts and stops for opponents of the law, and one of the biggest legislative battles of the last decade.
So with the cameras rolling, many lawmakers used yesterday’s final vote to launch into a series of painfully long campaign speeches. You’d be forgiven for mistaking the monologues for an attempt to filibuster — luckily, there’s no filibuster rule in the state Legislature.
There were some truly wild moments in that two-and-a-half-hour debate! But if you didn’t have time to sit through the hours of grandstanding, we’ve broken the momentous day down into five key moments, complete with highlights.
You probably don’t have time to watch senators speechify all day.
That’s why you hire professionals like us to do it for you.
There’s battle lines being drawn: Police shot pepper spray balls and rubber bullets at protesters against Israel’s war on Gaza at the University of Arizona at about 2 a.m. Wednesday. This came after university President Robert Robbins ordered officers to “immediately enforce campus use policies and all corresponding laws without further warning,” the Daily Star’s Ellie Wolf reports in a liveblog of the night’s action. Police arrested two dozen protesters at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZFamily reports, and Arizona State University is facing a lawsuit for suspending anti-war protesters and banning them from campus, including their campus housing, after they were arrested at recent protests, the Republic’s Helen Rummel reports.
On art and war: The LA Times profiles artist Joel Coplin, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that forced the City of Phoenix to shut down a homeless encampment known as the “Zone.” Coplin is the owner of Gallery 119, his studio and home in the Zone. He said the (waning) homeless population is his biggest source of inspiration and frustration. And the Navajo Times interviews 107-year-old Navajo Code Talker and retired U.S. Marine Cpl. John Kinsel Sr. in the log cabin he built.
“It just ballooned into this incredible, like, barter town,” Coplin said of the Zone. “They built edifices out of the tents that were like three deep, and 50-gallon drums at night with flames coming out of it — you know, cooking and music and singing and dancing. It was just like an incredible street fair — 24/7.”
We’re building a barter community 10,000 strong. Wanna trade $12 per month for all the news you need and all the gossip you want on Arizona politics? Click the button!
And we only watched the first 25 minutes!: Republicans vying for their party’s nomination to replace U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko, who is attempting to demote herself to county supervisor, squared off in their first televised debate yesterday. It included all the sparks you might expect from a race including candidates like state Sen. Anthony Kern, House Speaker Ben Toma, disgraced former Congressman Trent Franks, and Blake Masters and Abe Hamadeh, the failed 2022 GOP nominees for U.S. Senate and the Attorney General’s Office, respectively. Franks owned up to that time he tried to get a staffer to act as a “surrogate” mother and said he learned from it. Kern, who has been charged with multiple felonies for his role in the fake elector scheme, threatened Attorney General Kris Mayes, while Masters called her a “deranged communist” and praised his indicted and disgraced opponents. Hamadeh declared he’s a “young man with a lot of testosterone” and he’s coming after her and the other crooks.
Coup number 2?: Meanwhile, in D.C., Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar is on team Marjorie Taylor Greene as she threatens to depose U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the New York Times reports. But it’s a very small team that faces “all but certain defeat,” per the Times. U.S. Rep. Eli Crane is still on the fence, per MSNBC.
“I don’t think it would pass. And furthermore, even if it did pass, I don’t have much confidence with the conference that we have that we could get a more conservative speaker for the American people,” Crane said.
Wet winter, dry ground: Last year’s thick snow in the Rockies is flowing into rivers and lakes throughout the southwest, which should mean a less-dry summer. But the ground is hotter and more parched and the temperatures are cranking up, so the water doesn’t go as far downstream, KUNC’s Alex Hager explains. Meanwhile, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed House Bill 2124, which would have stripped away the AG’s ability to sue “corporate farms whose groundwater pumping dries up the wells of their neighbors”, as Capitol Media Service’s Howie Fischer explains.
Brave new world: Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which aims to act as an interface between brainwaves and computers, did its first clinical trial at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona. The device was implanted in an Arizona athlete who was paralyzed in a diving accident, per the Phoenix Business Journal’s Amy Edelen. Speaking of high-tech upgrades, the two-truckstop town of Lordsburg, New Mexico, on the Arizona border, may become a critical electric truck station. The federal government doled out $63 million for a company to build an electric fueling station there, while another company is looking to build a fueling station for hydrogen-powered trucks, Politico’s Climate Wire reports.
The Arizona press corps had a good laugh at the fact that even the bosses of Arizona-based Gateway Pundit reporter Jordan Conradson apparently had “major concerns as to (his) professionalism, reliability and honesty.”
He wasn’t the only contributor or source who higher-ups thought were frauds, per the Guardian, which cited new filings in a defamation suit from Georgia election workers against the website. The Gateway Pundit recently filed for bankruptcy.
Also, this little detail makes us regret skipping the annual lobbyist-sponsored House/Senate softball game that we made fun of a few weeks back.
How did nobody report on this?!?!