Arizona

The U.S. Senators who objected to the Electoral College results were almost all evangelicals

/ johnfea

For the record, the following United States Senators objected to the Electoral College vote in Arizona last night:

Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Josh Hawley (R-MO)

Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS)

Roger Marshall (R-KS)

John Kennedy (R-LA)

Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)

They are all Republicans. They are all Trump supporters. But they are also, in one form or another, evangelical Christians. Cruz is a Southern Baptist and a Christian nationalist. Hawley is a member of an Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Cindy Hyde-Smith is a Southern Baptist. Roger Marshall is a “non-denominational Christian” who has the support of the Christian Right Family Research Council, the organization run by court evangelical Tony Perkins. Tommy Tuberville attends a Church of Christ congregation. The former Auburn football coach believes that “God sent us Donald Trump.” John Kennedy is a founding member of North Cross United Methodist Church in Madisonville, Louisiana and is a big Billy Graham fan.

The following Senators objected to the Electoral College vote in Pennsylvania last night:

Josh Hawley (R-MO)

Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)

Roger Marshall (R-KS)

Rick Scott (R-FL)

Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)

Cindy Hyde Smith (R-MS)

John Kennedy objected to Arizona, but he did not object to Pennsylvania. Rick Scott and Cynthia Lummis did not object to Arizona, but did object to Pennsylvania.

Lummis is a Lutheran and has not made Christian faith a central part of her political identity. Scott is a founding member of Naples Community Church, an independent evangelical church that “affirms the necessity of the new birth.”

Of course there were many evangelical Senators, including Ben Sasse (R-NE), Tim Scott (R-SC), John Thune (R-SD), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) who did not object to the Electoral College votes. Other evangelical Senators, including Jim Lankford (R-OK), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), originally said that they would oppose the Pennsylvania results, but changed their minds after the insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol.

Arizona GOP: We are “never going back” to the party of John McCain

/ johnfea

Both the U.S. senators from Arizona, Krysten Sinema and Mark Kelly, are Democrats. The last time Arizona had two Democratic senators was 1953 when Ernest McFarland and Carl Hayden represented the state in Washington D.C. That was sixty-eight years ago.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, editor Gerald Seib has a piece on the potential Republican Party civil war. Here is a taste:

Two years from now, after this week’s attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election has long since played out, here is a plausible scenario:

A Republican senator or House member, one party leaders are eager to see retain his or her seat, will be challenged in a primary by a disciple of President Trump. The incumbent, after being attacked as a member of a disparaged party establishment, will still win the primary. But that outcome will be challenged by Republican rebels, who, taking a cue from what is happening right now, will charge that the election was “rigged” by the establishment, and go to court to try to overturn it.

Such are the forces being unleashed this week within the GOP, where the prospect of a virtual civil war suddenly feels real. This internal struggle engages the president and his family; lawmakers courting the support of Trump loyalists; and a conservative Republican establishment embodied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Part of the struggle is ideological, part is simply about power. In any case, it figures to roll through the next two years and into the 2022 mid-term election.

The irony is that Republicans might instead be uniting in celebration over what actually was a good outcome for them in the 2020 vote, and allowing attention to focus on Democrats’ own considerable internal ideological schisms. Instead, the party is being pulled apart in the last days of the Trump term.

Read the rest here. The piece also mentions this tweet:

Seib adds:

As that tweet shows, there is an important ideological struggle lying beneath the skirmishing. Mr. Trump essentially ran for president in 2016 as an independent populist, with no use for a Republican establishment that largely opposed him. Upon prevailing, he turned the party away from traditional conservative principles of free trade, lower government spending and limited executive authority and toward more of a working-class agenda.

Here are a few more tweets from the official Twitter account of the Republican Party of Arizona:

The rush to build Trump’s border wall

/ johnfea

Here is National Public Radio:

In the Coronado National Memorial — where conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado entered what is now Arizona — contractors are pulverizing the wilderness in a rush to put up as many miles of border wall as possible before the Trump administration vacates Washington.

They’re dynamiting mountainsides and bulldozing pristine desert for a barrier the incoming Biden administration is expected to cancel.

“Wow! This is almost like busy work they’re doing,” exclaims biologist Myles Traphagen as he drives his truck up to the construction staging area and beholds the destruction for the first time. He specializes on the Arizona borderlands for the Wildlands Network.

“They’re cutting roads into a place where no vehicle could go, not a four-wheeler,” he says. “But now they’re cutting into the mountain to create access to build a wall.”

This is one of 29 construction projects being performed by 13 different contractors from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. In Arizona, contractors have added shifts — they’re working all night long under light towers to meet Trump’s goal of 450 miles of new barriers before his term is over.

“There’s no doubt they’re accelerating the rate of construction,” says ecologist Ron Pulliam, who has been monitoring the wall’s progress on the Arizona border. “They’re trying to do as much as they can in the next 50 days. And Trump wants to fulfill his promise that he’s securing the border.”

Landowners and conservationists are irate. Gary Nabhan, a longtime author and ethnobotanist in the region, says Trump’s wall is forcing an unplanned experiment on the deserts of Southern Arizona.

Read the rest here.

What do John Glenn, Jack Swigert, Harrison Schmitt, Bill Nelson, and Mark Kelly have in common?

/ johnfea

Here is Marina Koren at The Atlantic:

In November 1969, Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, told reporters that he probably wouldn’t seek reelection. Once the Republican Party’s pick for president, Goldwater would leave big shoes to fill. And he already had a successor in mind: Frank Borman, an astronaut who, a year earlier, had flown to the moon and back on Apollo 8. Borman, who grew up in Arizona, wasn’t interested, and anyway, Goldwater ended up running again. But now, decades later, Congress is getting its Arizona astronaut.

Read the rest here.

Why is Biden getting most of the mail-in votes?

/ johnfea

Several people are asking me why the mail-in ballots are trending heavily toward Joe Biden. I am a teacher, so I thought I would do a quick post for the record:

First, Democrats tend to believe doctors and scientists (like Anthony Fauci) when they say that COVID-19 is spread in crowds. They thus want to avoid the long lines on Election Day and take advantage of the mail-in option. Republicans and Trump voters also believe the scientists and doctors, but they do so in smaller numbers.

Trump told his followers to vote on Election Day. He does not trust mail-in ballots. This is ironic in light of the fact that the mail-in-ballots are helping Trump in Arizona right now, a state with a tradition of mail-in ballots and where Republicans are more comfortable voting this way.

A Historian’s Saturday Morning Twitterstorm on Trump and Arpaio

/ johnfea

Arpaio Joe

Joe Arpaio

Seth Cotlar, who teaches American history at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, weighs-in with an informative twitterstorm on the Arpaio pardon.

Thanks, Seth.

The Arpaio Record

/ johnfea / 1 Comment

Arpaio

The Phoenix News Times has been covering Joe Arpaio for a long time. For those of you have not been following this guy’s career, the paper has tweeted some of the highlights. And yes, this is the guy who Donald Trump pardoned last night.  It was a message to his base and an endorsement of what you can read in the tweets below.

So far the court evangelicals, including Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, have been silent.