Republicans Are in Full Panic Mode Over Arizona Abortion Ruling

Arizona lawmakers were gung ho for banning abortion—until they got what they wanted.

On Tuesday, the state’s Supreme Court decided to revive a draconian ban on the medical procedure. But already, several prominent—and politically vulnerable—Arizona Republicans have come out against it.

Senate candidate Kari Lake, for instance, identifies as “100 percent pro-life” and had previously called the ban a “great law” but suddenly decided it wasn’t her cup of tea once the decision arrived.

“I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on [Governor] Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support,” Lake said in a statement. “Ultimately, Arizona voters will make the decision on the ballot come November.”

Two of the state’s GOP representatives, both of whom are facing fierce competition from Democrats in elections this year, also torched the decision. Representative David Schweikert—who has spent the better part of his career working to outlaw abortion with zero exceptions—wrote that he did not support the ruling and that the Arizona legislature should “address this issue immediately.” Representative Juan Ciscomani, a freshman lawmaker representing one of the state’s swing districts, called it a “disaster for women and providers.”

“In Arizona, our 15 week law protected the rights of women and new life. It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy—one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand,” Ciscomani wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “I oppose a national abortion ban. The territorial law is archaic. We must do better for women and I call on our state policymakers to immediately address this in a bipartisan manner.”

Just two years ago, Ciscomani described himself as “proudly Pro-Life” and cheered the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Former Republican Governor Doug Doucey also lamented the decision, even though he was responsible for appointing four of the justices who contributed to the court’s majority opinion.

“I signed the 15-week law as Governor because it is thoughtful policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on,” Ducey said in a statement. “The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.”

The flip-flopping is no coincidence, especially as abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nationwide abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans last November, resulting in major losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Postelection, those raw numbers turned into some stunning platform reversals for the conservative party, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

Ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has a theory as to the motivation behind the motion to vacate filed by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz. And it has little to do with policy differences.

In an interview Tuesday at Georgetown University, McCarthy, sounding Not Mad, said it was a “misnomer and a lie” that alleged concessions to congressional Democrats during debt-ceiling talks were behind his removal. He offered to set the record straight about why he was removed as speaker.

“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old. An ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker, and that’s illegal, and I’m not going to get in the middle. Did he do it or not? I don’t know, but Ethics is looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it,” McCarthy explained.

That one person? Gaetz, the ringleader of the successful effort to vacate the speakership.

It’s an explosive, if not exactly new, allegation by McCarthy. Gaetz, who is scheduled to be deposed in June as part of a civil defamation suit, is accused of several child sex crimes. One of the “other people in jail” to whom McCarthy is referring is convicted sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, who has alleged that Gaetz paid him via Venmo to have sex with a 17-year-old girl. Greenberg is cooperating with the House Ethic Committee, which is investigating the allegations. Gaetz is separately accused of paying another woman for her participation in alleged drug-fueled sex parties.

Gaetz, for what it’s worth, has corroborated McCarthy’s theory, at least behind closed doors. The Daily Beast reported that the Florida congressman has privately admitted that the move to oust McCarthy was revenge for McCarthy’s refusal to squash the ethics probe, not a stand against bipartisan negotiation.

McCarthy, who has endorsed convicted rapist Donald Trump for the presidency, became the first speaker of the House in American history to be removed through a motion to vacate. Still, he claims he’d “do it all over again.”

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personal reasons for wanting to defend the January 6 rioters: At least one of his staffers may have been among them.

The campaign has attempted in recent days to distance itself from its New York state director, Rita Palma, since she claimed the campaign’s real goal was to act as a spoiler to President Joe Biden.

“The only way that Trump can even, remote possibility of taking New York is if Bobby is on the ballot. If it’s Trump versus Biden, Biden wins. Biden wins six days, seven days a week. With Bobby in the mix, anything can happen,” Palma said in a meeting with New York Republicans.

But it has since become clear that Palma has deeper ties to Donald Trump. In social media posts analyzed by CNN, the staffer has repeatedly called the GOP presidential nominee her “favorite president,” said she would vote for him in 2024 while also suggesting a 2028 run, blamed the “rigged election” for the violence on January 6, and even admitted to being in attendance on the day that Trump supporters seized the U.S. Capitol.

“Jan 6 was not a riot. A small group of people were trouble. It was 99.9 peaceful, respectful. I was there,” she wrote.

Over the last week, Kennedy’s campaign has flip-flopped more than once on its January 6 messaging. On Thursday, the independent presidential candidate issued a fundraising email referring to the rioters as “activists.” The next day, Kennedy claimed that particular language was made in error but he still didn’t believe the event amounted to a “true insurrection” since the rioters didn’t wield weapons—though that is completely false, since the rioters did wield weapons and can be seen doing so in mountains of recorded video from the day.

The rioters attacked Capitol Police officers with firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even used hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen officers to the hospital.

Then, on Monday, Kennedy appeared to backtrack again on the correction. Appearing on NewsNation, the 70-year-old claimed that his campaign had made “a couple of mistakes” in issuing the revised statement while again insisting that the events weren’t an insurrection.

“I think that there were people who were there who wanted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another. I would say it was a very traumatic day in our nation’s history and people committed criminal acts. Those people deserve to be in jail,” Kennedy said.

Donald Trump’s financial house of cards is beginning to collapse.

The Republican presidential nominee, who’s made his personal wealth central to his candidacy since 2016, has fallen off the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The list is a daily ranking of the 500 richest people in the world, and as of Tuesday, Trump no longer qualifies.

The blow comes just days after the price of Trump Media stock plummeted and two main investors behind the merger between Trump Media and Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company, were charged with insider trading.

Trump has already been struggling to prove his wealth following the revelation that the surety firm backing the $175 million bond in his civil fraud trial is insolvent, unlicensed in New York, and may not have actually agreed to pay the penalty if Trump cannot come up with the money.

Originally valued at $8 billion, Trump Media has lost half its value since it debuted in March. The drop in value does little to dispel allegations that the stock is a potential pump-and-dump scheme concocted by Trump to funnel credulous supporters’ money toward his mounting legal debts. He cannot sell or borrow against his shares in Trump Media for six months, so while this latest embarrassment is mostly a cosmetic hit to his net worth, it’s still possible that he’ll have suckered enough of his voters into paying off a chunk of the judgments against him when all is said and done.

In the meantime, though, Trump has become just another temporarily embarrassed billionaire.

Alabama’s secretary of state claimed Tuesday that, according to state law, the Democratic National Convention is taking place too late for the party to get its nominees for president and vice president on the state’s November ballot.

Wes Allen, a Republican, said Alabama has an August 15 deadline for political parties to present a certification of nomination for president and vice president. The Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago on August 19.

“If this Office has not received a valid certificate of nomination from the Democratic Party following its convention by the statutory deadline, I will be unable to certify the names of the Democratic Party’s candidates for President and Vice President for ballot preparation for the 2024 general election,” Allen said in a letter to Randy Kelley, chair of the Alabama Democratic Party.

Alabama state law says parties must certify their candidates “no later than the 82nd day preceding the day fixed for the election.” This year’s election is on November 5, making August 15 the eighty-second preceding day, Allen said in the letter. His office claims that the 82-day deadline has been in Alabama’s election law since 1975.

This is the second red-state election chief to claim that the Democrats are holding their nominating convention too late. Last week, Paul DiSantis, the chief counsel for Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, said that state law required presidential candidates to be certified 90 days before a general election.

Both the Ohio and Alabama secretaries of state said that the problem could be fixed if the respective legislatures passed a one-time exception, or if the Democratic National Committee moved its convention to within the allowed time frame.

While both Allen and LaRose could well be trying to simply uphold state laws, the moves seem remarkably suspicious given recent lawsuits regarding Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The Colorado state Supreme Court attempted to kick Trump off the 2024 ballot due to his role in the January 6 insurrection, which the justices determined violated Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In March, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s decision, and by extension similar decisions in two other states, in an expedited, unanimous ruling that said states couldn’t individually enforce the clause against federal officeholders. Five of the court’s conservative justices even said that the clause only applied if Congress passed a law to affirm it.

Based on that ruling, if Ohio and Alabama dig their heels in and refuse to allow President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on their ballots, the Supreme Court will have to swiftly reinstate them, since states don’t have the authority to remove federal officeholders, right? But that would require consistency from John Roberts’s Supreme Court, whose values are in question.