This is what it took for Arizona Republicans to expel an election denier

[cigaretteman]

For 40 minutes, the witness before a joint committee of the Arizona legislature unfurled her theory: A Mexican drug cartel was secretly paying off state and local government officials as part of an election-fraud scheme. Everyone from the governor on down was implicated. Even senior-ranking Republicans.


When a GOP state senator balked at the outlandish claims and asked the witness, a local insurance agent, who had invited her to the February session, she identified a first-term Republican, state Rep. Liz Harris.
From the dais, Harris motioned her hand across her neck in a gesture commonly used to cue silence.
In the two and a half years since Donald Trump falsely claimed victory in the 2020 election, Republican officeholders have rarely held their fellow party members accountable for originating or spreading misinformation about the electoral system. In Arizona GOP circles, the false claims have run particularly rampant, eroding support for democracy and costing taxpayers millions of dollars as lawmakers hunted futilely for proof that the vote had been rigged.
But the case of the Arizona legislator who helped perpetuate the groundless belief that the Sinaloa drug cartel was orchestrating election fraud ended this month with an unusual twist: She was expelled from office by her colleagues, Republicans included.


The story of how Republicans decided to oust Harris — marking only the fourth time in history that an Arizona state House member has been expelled — illuminates what it takes for GOP lawmakers to police their own when it comes to election-related misinformation.



Even given the extreme nature of the false claims, those alone would not have been enough to merit expulsion from the Republican-led House, according to interviews with 18 lawmakers, staff, local leaders and political operatives.
Instead, they said, she was done in both by her dishonesty with colleagues about whether she knew in advance the substance of her witness’s planned testimony as well as her willingness to help spread conspiracy theories targeting her party’s own leaders.
“There’s a lot of election deniers out there,” said one key state House Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment of a GOP caucus in which election denialism is common. “If that’s what we were going to be doing, there would be, like, 10 people expelled by now.”

Harris has insisted she told the truth and denied the allegations against her. Her ouster came days after two Tennessee representatives were expelled for their role in protesting for stricter gun laws. In Montana, meanwhile, Republicans on Wednesday voted to bar a transgender lawmaker from the state House floor.


In each of those cases, Democrats condemned the decisions as inappropriate penalties for lawfully elected officials. But unlike in Tennessee or Montana — where votes fell along party lines — Harris’s ouster was bipartisan.
The April 12 vote to remove her came only after prolonged deliberation among Republicans about how to handle the first-term lawmaker, who narrowly won her 2022 race and had already earned the ire of GOP leaders by helping to block portions of the party’s legislative agenda during her brief time in office.

Harris, who is in her early 50s, was removed from her job following a finding by the GOP-led House Ethics Committee that she had lied to her colleagues about her knowledge of the testimony that a witness intended to give at the hearing on election fraud that she had helped to organize.


Like other Republicans, state Rep. Timothy Dunn said he voted to expel Harris because she deceived colleagues about her involvement in the testimony — not for the fanciful falsehoods that the witness delivered.
“You have to be truthful,” said Dunn, who has called for legal changes to enhance “election integrity” but has not embraced false fraud claims.
Democrats — who also supported Harris’s expulsion — said they believed another factor was at play in the GOP.

“If Liz Harris had only gone after Democrats and not Republicans, particularly the House speaker, perhaps they would not have begged us to proceed with the expulsion,” said House Minority Leader Andrés Cano (D).
Harris, who works in real estate, has drawn a following online for her stolen-election theories and was recently elected to a leadership position within the Maricopa County Republicans. After the 2020 vote, she helped organize door-to-door canvassing efforts to ferret out fraud. That effort came as state Senate Republicans commissioned their own initiative to uncover alleged vote rigging.


Her campaign for the legislature last year focused on supposed voter fraud, as well as tightening border security and keeping critical race theory out of schools.



Even before she was sworn in following her victory in a battleground Phoenix-area district in November, she posed a problem for Republicans. The party had eked out a bare, one-vote majority in the state House and suffered defeat in the marquee governor’s race. Upset with her party’s losses and suspicious of fraud, she threatened to abstain from voting unless a new election was held.
“As grateful as I am to be declared the winner after the recount, Arizona still needs a new election,” Harris posted in a statement on Telegram. If “an honorable and courageous judge” allowed further scrutiny on mail-in ballots, she wrote, “the need for this revote will become obvious to everyone.”
Under pressure from her GOP colleagues, Harris quickly relented and agreed to perform her duties as a legislator. She introduced a bill seeking a near-total ban on early voting, a method she has repeatedly used to cast her ballot since 2000, according to public records.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/28/arizona-republicans-expel-liz-harris/

 

[cigaretteman]

In February, she sank a bill that was part of her party’s spending package. Soon after, House Speaker Ben Toma asked the Republican Senate president for permission to hold a joint hearing, which would be organized in part by Harris, according to Capitol Media Services. The hearing gave Harris a prominent platform to help inject a previously unknown conspiracy theory into mainstream Arizona politics.
On Feb. 23, Harris appeared on the dais at the “special joint meeting” of the legislature. She called her witness, local insurance agent Jacqueline Breger, to a microphone.
Without offering reliable evidence and largely unchallenged, Breger accused Toma, Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, city judges and other leaders of money laundering, drug trafficking, public corruption and election fraud.



The findings she presented, she said, “are just the tip of the iceberg.”
Breger did not respond to a request for comment.
As the hearing barreled toward a close, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a far-right Republican who chaired the meeting, thanked Breger for her bravery: “You got my attention,” the senator said.
Many of the claims had been made previously by the insurance agent’s boyfriend during legal proceedings involving his family. A federal judge wrote they were “delusional and fantastical,” court records show.
Although the legislature had been the setting for far-fetched election fraud claims many times before, the backlash this time was immediate — even among Republicans.

Toma was furious, said one person familiar with discussions but not authorized to speak publicly. During phone calls with friends and public officials that weekend, the House speaker asked for patience as he considered his next steps.
Toma, through a spokesperson, declined to comment about his private deliberations.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy theory took root. Days after the hearing, Dunn, the Republican state representative, held a meeting in his Yuma County district. He couldn’t even get to his remarks about work at the state Capitol before the agitated audience pelted him with questions about the cartel’s alleged influence over state officials, judges and others.


“It had taken off like it was fact,” Dunn recalled.
Around the same time, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone (D) and his wife were at a social event when they were cornered by voters who clamored for an investigation.
Without fanfare, the sheriff assigned two detectives to review the allegations to determine if they merited a full investigation, according to records obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with those familiar with the review.
Detectives soon concluded there was no evidence of corruption.
“I believe I had an obligation to conduct some level of review,” said Penzone. “If there was a legitimate side to the allegations and we have a serious crime, that should be investigated. And if the allegations are erroneous, what is the potential impact on public perception?”
On March 6, after it appeared Republicans had moved on from the controversy, a House Democrat filed an ethics complaint. Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton wrote that the claims threatened “the heart of our democracy” and “elections themselves.”


Harris denied during an ethics hearing that she knew the witness would accuse government officials of crimes. But a probe conducted by the House Ethics Committee found otherwise. Citing evidence that included text messages between Harris, the witness and the witness’s boyfriend, the committee determined she “knew or at least was aware” of the witness’s plans.
Privately, Toma and other GOP leaders prepared for an expulsion vote, lawmakers recalled. Shortly beforehand, Toma and the majority leader gave Harris a chance to “fess up or resign before we voted,” one GOP lawmaker said. “She chose to do neither.”
As her colleagues prepared to pass judgment on her, Harris quietly sat at her wooden desk toward the back of the chamber. She told The Post, “I didn’t lie, and God knows the truth. The truth will come out.”
Rep. Alexander Kolodin (R) voted against expulsion, saying the public could perceive it as a message to lawmakers not to “rock the boat.”
But he was in the minority, even within his own party. The House expelled Harris by a 46-13 vote, with 18 Republicans supporting removal.
It now falls to the Republican-led governing board of Maricopa County, which helps administer elections and defied efforts by Trump’s allies to overturn the vote in 2020, to fill the vacant seat. But the board will have a limited set of options: State law requires it to pick a replacement for Harris from among a pool chosen by the local Republican Party.
That selection last week reflected where many of the party’s activists continue to stand on election denialism. Under the watchful eyes of law enforcement at a building in Chandler, a city east of Phoenix, Harris’ supporters wore Trump hats and carried signs that read “Reinstate Liz Harris.” Shouting through bullhorns, they accused lawmakers of usurping the will of voters and demanded she be reinstated — much as local authorities did for the two Tennessee state representatives who were also expelled this spring.
After two rounds of voting by precinct committee members that stretched late into the night, Republicans settled on three candidates. One was Harris, the top vote-getter. Another campaigned last year with Harris, while a third has a history of outspoken election denialism.
The county board has no deadline to name a replacement. But the GOP’s slim majority in the House adds a measure of urgency. County leaders are digging into the candidates’ backgrounds and social media posts to learn more about their views on elections.
County chairman Clint Hickman (R) resisted pressure from Trump’s allies to delay certification of his 2020 loss and spoke in January with investigators working with the special counsel’s probe into efforts to overturn that vote.
He would not say whom he will support to fill the open seat. But he said the choices for a Harris replacement represent the powerful influence that election denialism still has on the state Republican Party.
“Is this truly the best the party has to offer?” he wondered.

 

[BelemNole]

Something in the water in Maricopa county.

 

[peacehawk]

RN would vote for her if he could.

 

[Chishawk1425]

RN would vote for her if he could.

100%

 

[RNHawk]

RN would vote for her if he could.

I voted for her 4 times in this election

 

[peacehawk]

Had the crazy person who testified during the legislative hearing not made accusations against the AZ Speaker of the House and the Mormon church, Harris never would have been expelled and in fact the majority R caucus would have been praising her for bringing forth this important “stolen election” matter. Never F with the Mormons.