January 30, 2024 10:28 AM UTC

At Least It's Not Your State Senator Proposing The End of Democracy

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• by: Colorado Pols

The latest in our long-running “At Least They’re Not Your Legislator” series, Arizona Public Radio’s Bree Burkitt reports on a measure that Republican state Sen. Anthony Kern has introduced that would, if somehow approved by what would need to be extremely masochistic voters, allow the Arizona legislature to appoint presidential electors without worrying about pesky inconveniences like the popular vote:

Currently, the candidate who wins the popular vote gets Arizona’s electors.

They then cast their votes on the same day in December alongside all the other electors across the country.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 1014 would override that process entirely.

Instead, the Arizona legislature would have the sole authority to appoint the presidential electors — regardless of which candidate actually received the most votes. [Pols emphasis]

Sen. Anthony Kern was one of the slate of fake electors chosen by Arizona Republicans to substitute for the state’s real electors as part of the failed plot to swing the state’s election in 2020, and was reportedly in the crowd outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. It can be deduced from both of these facts that to Sen. Kern, the rules of our democratic process are just speedbumps when they prevent Republicans from winning. Such a brazen assault on the authority of voters to decide elections seems unthinkable, but considering that’s what Donald Trump’s rejection of the outcome of the election was all about, it’s really not. Former CU scholar and Trump (and Colorado GOP) attorney John Eastman promoted the crackpot “independent state legislature” theory to argue that legislatures had the power to defy the results of elections if they felt like it in 2020.

Is just a rude shock when they spell it out so plainly. Their solution is to give politicians the power to ignore the voters in presidential elections.

You don’t want to live in a state (or nation) where that’s the law of the land.