Finding signs to worry about the future of American democracy is not hard, but few are quite so painful and acute as the cognitive dissonance displayed by Rusty Bowers this week.
Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona State House, was the star witness during yesterday’s hearing of the U.S. House’s January 6 committee. Bowers calls himself a conservative Republican, and he has the record to back that claim up. Like most Republicans, he supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election, but when Trump and Rudy Giuliani tried to pressure him to assist in their scheme to overturn the results of the election in Arizona, where Joe Biden narrowly won, Bowers refused. [snip]
And yet in an interview with the Associated Press published yesterday, Bowers also said he would back Trump if he runs for president in 2024. 'If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again,' Bowers said. 'Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.'” -- David Graham in The Atlantic, on the "depths of the Republican Party's moral collapse." Graham goes on to name some of the amoral Republicans who put careers over country, though it's a safe bet that if you see an "R" next to a candidate's or official's name, they too have no scruples about ditching democracy.
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