Arizona Republicans in the state legislature sent a clear message Wednesday: They are ecstatic that the state Supreme Court outlawed virtually every abortion a day earlier when it ruled that an abortion ban written during the Civil War must be implemented.
There is no other conclusion to draw after they thwarted an effort to repeal that 160-year-old ban, which was adopted at a time when doctors didn’t believe in washing their hands and didn’t know how women became pregnant, by a territorial legislature that at the same time approved laws allowing girls as young as 10 to consent to sex and barring non-white people from testifying in court against white people.
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When lawmakers returned to the state Capitol on Wednesday for their sole day of work this week — we’re literally paying them to do nothing — a GOP legislator tried to force a vote on a Democratic bill to repeal the 1864 abortion ban. That bill had been quietly killed by the Republican majority, led by House Speaker Ben Toma, who assigned it to three committees in a move that is universally seen as a death knell for legislation.
Rep. Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican who swiftly denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling and called on the territorial-era law to be repealed, made a motion to bring the bill to the floor of the House of Representatives for an immediate vote. Republican leaders responded by calling for the chamber to take a break instead of voting on Gress’ motion, over the objection of Democrats.
When the chamber resumed its work a couple of hours later, Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, the Tucson Democrat who sponsored the repeal of the Civil War law, made her own motion to force an immediate vote on the bill. This time, GOP leaders called for an immediate end to the day’s work, and a roll-call vote on the Republican countermotion passed 30-29. Gress voted with the 28 Democrats (one of their seats is vacant following a resignation last week), but he was the only Republican willing to do so.
Their goal is not to actually address the issue, because they won’t. Implementing a ban written at a time when doctors thought good health came by balancing the four humors in your body is a feature of Republican policy, not a bug.
Rep. Teresa Martinez, the No. 3 Republican in the House, explained why Republicans weren’t willing to vote on the one-sentence-long bill: They need more time to understand the issue. You see, the Supreme Court ruling was barely 24 hours old, and it won’t go into effect for 60 days, so there’s no need to rush.
It’s a laughably pathetic excuse, and one worthy of derision.
The issue isn’t a difficult one to comprehend. The Supreme Court said a law the legislature passed in 2022 can’t override a near-total abortion ban that was first passed in 1864, and then recodified in 1977, because lawmakers explicitly said they didn’t want it to.
That means lawmakers have a binary choice: Repeal the 1864 ban so that the 2022 15-week limit on abortions can go into effect or do nothing and force Arizona women to give birth, even if their pregnancies are dangerous, unviable or unwanted.
Apparently, those choices are too complicated for Republicans, who would have us believe that they’re just now learning about this near-total abortion ban’s existence, and they haven’t been aware of it since at least June 2022, when prosecutors said they planned to enforce it, or in the nearly two years since as litigation has been ongoing and grabbing headlines.
This will be the abortion election, and Republicans are bracing for voter retribution
The simple truth is that Republicans wanted this outcome. They voted in 2022 for a severe limit of what was then a constitutional right when they passed the 15-week abortion law, including a provision explicitly saying that lawmakers didn’t want it to overrule the 1864 law. The top two Republicans, House Speaker Ben Toma and Senate President Warren Petersen, urged the Supreme Court to do exactly what it did on Tuesday. The far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus called Gress and others murderers for criticizing the court.
These Republicans stand arm in arm with the anti-abortion Center for Arizona Policy — the group wrote the 2022 law and demanded it include the language deferring to the 1864 ban — which works every day to create a world in which fetal cell tissue is given more consideration and granted more rights than living and breathing women.
Their goal is not to actually address the issue, because they won’t. Implementing a ban written at a time when doctors thought good health came by balancing the four humors in your body is a feature of Republican policy, not a bug.
What they want is to avoid actually having to vote to explicitly implement that ban, because they know it’s horrible politics and wildly out of line with what Arizonans want.
But there’s nowhere to hide on the campaign trail. Voters will realize that electing Republicans leads to more of this, and they’ll have the final say.
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