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The Arizona House of Representatives got on the expel-a-member bandwagon started by Tennessee last week, voting Wednesday to expel first-term Republican state Rep. Liz Harris for inviting a loonypants election denier to testify before a legislative committee in February. Harris no doubt thought that would be fine, since she herself is a loonypants election denier who insisted that her own election last fall was full of fraud and needed to be rerun.
Previously, On The Expulsion Chronicles:
Arizona Republican Demands Election She Won Be Overturned
TN House GOP To Expel Democrat Terrorists Who Called For Saving Kids’ Lives Without Permission
Forgive Them Lord They … Oh Wait. They Do. Tennessee House Lets Its Racist Freak Flag Fly.
OK, so maybe the only thing Harris’s situation has in common with the travesty in Tennessee is that it ended with expulsion. Unlike the Kafkaesque railroading of Democrats for a minor decorum violation in Tennessee, Harris was only removed — by a bipartisan vote — after an investigation by Arizona’s House Ethics Committee, which allowed Harris to present a defense. It probably didn’t help her case that the committee’s nine-page report determined that Harris had fibbed when she told the committee she absolutely did not know what her invited guest would say.
So no, not at all like the Tennessee expulsion, where the Republican supermajority ignored due process and just made things up as it went along. That said, we do think “Kafka Railroad” would be a really good name for a band.
And hoo boy, the Tennessee Three’s brief, unrecognized protest for gun control sure can’t hold a candle to Harris’s decision to invite a fellow election denier to testify in February before a hearing held by Arizona’s joint House and Senate Election Committee. Harris’s guest witness, Scottsdale insurance agent Jacqueline Breger, managed to out-crazy the average run of the mill election conspiracy tale, even in a state where the loser of the 2022 gubernatorial election, Kari Lake, insists she’s actually the governor.
Here’s the Arizona Republic’s summary of Breger’s testimony:
Breger shocked officials with accusations that Gov. Katie Hobbs, House Speaker Ben Toma, lawmakers, judges, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others conspired with a Mexican drug cartel and received bribes through a scheme using property deeds.
Breger failed to mention that two women she claimed were key players in the scheme were the ex-wife and former mother-in-law of her boyfriend, John Thaler, a lawyer with a suspended license, who was the source of the claims. Thaler had previously outlined the same bribery scheme in court proceedings related to this divorce and child custody case; two separate judges in federal and Maricopa County Superior courts called the narrative “delusional.”
That brief overview barely scratches the surface of what a clownshow the February hearing was; the committee report also notes that Breger claimed the bribery scheme involved elected officials at every level of government in the state, from city court judges to the state supreme court, as well as members of the Legislature, city and county prosecutors, and “mental health providers as in court-appointed advisors, and related specialists.”
She also insisted that the LDS church secretly controls Arizona government agencies and is “integral to the laundering activities” that got the cartel bribes to what sounds like half the people in government jobs in Arizona. The weird fear of Mormons certainly fits with a lot of Evangelical folk belief, in which Mormons are a dangerous cult, almost as bad as Unitarians.
At one point during Breger’s testimony, a member of the elections committee asked how Breger had been invited to testify. When Breger said she’d been invited by Harris,
Representative Harris made a gesture moving her hand across her neck and mouthed something to Breger. […] Representative Harris subsequently stated that she hoped that the hearing was being presented by all national networks.
Harris got at least part of her wish. Breger’s claims blew up in righting media and, as the Arizona Republic reports,
Hundreds, if not thousands, of Arizona constituents and social media users apparently believed Breger’s testimony. Calls for the arrest of the governor spread on social media immediately afterward.
Later, Harris insisted she was simply helping a constituent voice concerns about the possibility of election integrity issues, in hopes of preventing “mal-administered elections.” When the Ethics Committee asked if she was aware what Breger would present to the Elections Committee, Harris replied, “Absolutely, positively, 100 percent no.”
Big surprise: The investigation found text messages between Harris, Breger, and Thaler, and they even consulted with each other on coming up with a title for Breger’s presentation that would be vague enough to not tip off anyone that it was a load of conspiracy cacadoody.
The Ethics Committee found that Harris “committed disorderly behavior, thereby violating Rule 1 of the Rules of the Arizona House of Representatives and damaging the institutional integrity of the House,” and referred the case to the House for discipline. The vote to expel her was 43-13, with 18 Republicans voting to remove her. All 13 votes against expulsion came from Republicans.
Before the vote, one Republican, state Rep. Alex Kolodin, defended Harris, saying that if she were expelled, the public “will perceive that they don’t have a true voice in this body,” presumably because the bugfuck nutso parts of the public need representation too. Kolodin explained that Harris’s constituents had chosen “somebody to rock the boat,” only to see her expelled, and what a sad day for democracy etc. He did at least acknowledge that Harris’s boat-rocking was “admittedly in the wrong way … a way that should have been better considered.”
As for Harris, TV journalists caught up with her as she was taking stuff from her office to her car, and she insisted the Ethics Committee report was “a lie,” and muttered that Republicans had taken her down to “make an example” of her to make members “toe the line.”
Also one of her supporters yelled that they loved her, and that now she’s been “set free from the vipers” in the Legislature. When a reporter asked Harris how she’s feeling emotionally, the same voice interrupts, “aren’t you relieved to not to deal with these vipers?” No word on whether these vipers are also RINOs, which would make for a cool chimera in a medieval bestiary.
Now that she’s returned to private life, Harris is ready for the wingnut welfare circuit. This morning, in fact, she’ll be doing an interview show at 10 EDT on Rumble with a couple of wingnut “journalists,” so that might generate some quotable lunacy about Mormons and vipers.
[CNN / MSNBC / Arizona Republic / Arizona House Ethics Committee Report]
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