RUSTY BOWERS TURNS OUT TO NOT BE A "GOOD REPUBLICAN" - NOT YET
It turns out that Rusty Bowers lives up to President Truman’s 1948 definition of a “good” Republican: “The only ‘good Republicans’ are pushing up daisies.”
This week, Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers testified about how President Donald Trump wanted him to take illegal, immoral, unprecedented and unconstitutional steps to overturn the 2020 election results in his state, while never providing a shred of evidence for his false claims of voter fraud.
Bowers described Trump’s team as “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (except “tragic,” not comic) and detailed his first-person experience of a systematic campaign of pressure and harassment after he bucked the president.
And then, Rusty Bowers, lifelong Republican, who campaigned and voted for Trump, declared he would cast his ballot for the former president again in 2024. He did so in the same Associated Press interview in which he said Trump’s evidence-free attacks on the legitimacy of the election had proven “very destructive” to Americans’ trust in democracy.
Then, after describing a campaign against him and his dying daughter that to this day includes people coming to his home and proclaiming him a “pedophile” for his opposition to Trump’s coup, after being targeted in his re-election campaign by people who proclaim their willingness to do everything they can - legally or illegally - to return Trump to power in 2024, he said:
‘If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”
At this point, I am reminded of my father’s old explanation of how to understand Mormons - at least the ones like Bowers: “Remove the second ‘m’.”
Bowers’ statement is even more remarkable than the usual “Trump opponent will still vote for Trump” story because of all of the ways his testimony was damning for the former president.
He called Trump a liar. When asked by Adam Schiff about Trump’s claim Bowers privately assured him the Arizona election had been rigged, he replied: “Anywhere, anyone, anytime has said that I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”
He went on to speak in deeply personal, religious ways about how Trump’s actions ran “counter to my oath, when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it” and how he told them “I will not break my oath.”
“It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired, of my most basic foundational beliefs. And so, for me to do that, because somebody just asked me to, is foreign to my very being. I will not do it.”
But he will vote again for Trump, because of all the things he did that were “good for the country.” Because, before everything else in his life, he is a (bowel) “movement conservative” (hint: these people have no fucking clue what the meaning of the word “conservative” is).
He thinks Trump’s extortion of President Zelensky to get “dirt” on Joe Biden he could use in the campaign was “good for the country.”
He thinks Trump’s complete failure of leadership in the COVID crisis was “good for the country.”
Bowers read a passage from his diary: “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desire towards deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow God’s will as I believe he led my conscience to embrace.”
He went on to describe weekly protests outside his house by bullhorn-wielding people angry he didn’t do what Trump wanted, “proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician.”
Bowers said Trump and his co-conspirators “pressured me to take unconstitutional, unprecedented, illegal, immoral steps and their attacks have damaged faith in elections.”
But when 2024 comes, I’ll vote for him? Because he’s “good for the country”?
He must live on TrumpWorld, where the sky is green and the grass is blue.
Of course, Bowers is hardly alone.
Former attorney general William P. Barr said Trump seemed “detached from reality” when he made his “crazy” claims of voter fraud after Election Day 2020, piling up a mountain of “bullshit” stories that he’d been cheated out of a second term. Back in March, Barr told NBC News’s Savannah Guthrie he hoped someone else would get the Republican presidential nomination. But if Trump got it?
“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn't vote for the Republican nominee.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said immediately after the January 6 insurrection:
“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
Ten days later, McConnell said he’d vote for Trump in 2024. This past April, when interviewed by Axios’ Jonathan Swan, he denied he could choose otherwise. “I don’t get to pick the Republican nominee for president. They’re elected by the Republican voters.”
Mr. Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, must not have been listening last week when retired conservative legal scholar and star among conservatives (like Bowers) J. Michael Luttig testified:
“This very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”
If Bowers - and any other Republican - who knows how Trump attempted a coup against the Constitution he claims is “divinely inspired” votes for Trump in 2024, they will be voting in favor of having the event they opposed in 2020 happen.
Bowers will be voting in favor of destroying that Constitution and that constitutional democratic republic he claims to love more than life.
When I first heard him say how much he revered the Constitution and how his own personal sense of morality would never let him win by cheating, I thought I had seen an actual Good Conservative, a person whose belief in democracy I could applaud.
No.
Russell “Rusty” Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, is a fucking moron and a worthless piece of shit.
Go to hell, Rusty Bowers, you traitor.
And now we know how much value we can place on any member of that party being anything other than the “clear and present danger” to the Constitution and our democratic republican constitutional system of government.
They are all The Enemy, even when they say things we want to hear. They cannot be trusted further than you can see them with your eyes shut.
They are the greatest threat this country has ever seen in all its history.
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Robert Hubbell published an even more thorough indictment of Bowers:
At Tuesday’s hearing of the January 6th Committee, Rusty Bowers earned the admiration of a grateful nation for his principled refusal to surrender to Trump’s demands to overturn the 2020 election. On Wednesday, Bowers revealed that his principles and “faith” will not prevent him from voting for Trump in 2024. According to Bowers, he will vote for Trump because
"what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great."
Of course, Bowers skips over the part where Trump incited a violent insurrection to overturn two centuries of constitutional rule in America. That pesky fact is apparently less important to Bowers than what Trump did in his first term as president before losing the November election.
Bowers is apparently referring to Trump’s signature legislative achievement—reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1
That tax cut resulted in a loss of revenue that propelled the budget deficit to near-record levels ($1 trillion) before the Covid stimulus packages. Setting aside the efforts of Bush and Obama to save the economy from collapse in the Great Recession of 2008, Trump owns the largest deficit of any US president.
Other Trump achievements include:
* Legislation ending an Obama-era regulation that prevented coal-mining companies from dumping debris and waste into nearby streams;
* Legislation ending financial disclosure requirements for energy firms;
* Legislation repealing an Obama-era regulation requiring internet service providers to seek customers’ consent before sharing private data;
* Legislation prohibiting the Department of Education from adopting the Common Core curriculum (which was created by agreement among the states, not the federal government);
* Imposing protectionist tariffs on China that were paid for by US consumers; and
* Pardoning Jared Kushner’s father (Charles Kushner), Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
https://www.startribune.com/bills-passed-by-congress-and-signed-by-the-president-so-far-this-year/432015273/
And let’s not forget the ban on travel from Muslim countries, separating children from parents at the border, and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on a “wall to nowhere.”
Ah, yes, Rusty Bowers! Those were the “good old days” when government favored business over the people’s interest in privacy, the environment, education, and financial transparency, and when the president’s “cronies” received a “Get Out of Jail Free” card!
As discussed in The Atlantic’s article, The Comment That Reveals the Depths of the Republican Party’s Moral Collapse, Bowers is not the only allegedly “principled” Republican who has opposed Trump in the past but who is now happy to vote for Trump in 2024. Susan Collins? Yup! Brad Raffensperger? Of course! Mitch McConnell? Need you ask? Bill Barr? Faster than you can say, “Vladimir Putin”!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/rusty-bowers-and-republican-trump-2024-conundrum/661352/
The fact that “principled” Republicans can overlook the stray coup and occasional insurrection so long as businesses receive tax cuts is worrisome, to say the least. It highlights the fact that there is no substitute for putting Trump behind bars for the rest of his life. If we don’t, faux patriots like Rusty Bowers will campaign for Trump in 2024 without regard to the threat he poses to our democracy.
Bowers: 1/2 a step forward, and a giant leap back. Demagoguery and propaganda have a devastating effect on people at every level of society. Education, wisdom, years of service, are no insulation to the loss of reason, erosion of both personal and professional ethics, and growing levels mass cognitive dissonance. We observe it in the Supreme Court. We observe it in former AG Barr, and at every level and layer around TFG. Demagoguery makes people stupid. It celebrates the corrupt with a mystic like hero status. This is a growing cancer that weakens democratic institutions, and hastens their decay.