Incumbent Dalessandro won reelection in 2016 by 18 percentage points, so I’m hoping the non-zero probability isn’t too substantial.
I grew up in Arizona, and my parents are still there, helping to elect the crazies, so I won’t argue. Here’s a piece on some legislation that passed the state senate in early 2017. Fortunately, the House actually had enough sense to let it drop without consideration. The GOP senate believed that the danger posed by something that doesn’t exist (people who are paid to plan and participate in violent protests) justified punitive measures prohibited by something that does exist (the First Amendment) :
Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened.
SB1142 expands the state’s racketeering laws, now aimed at organized crime, to also include rioting. And it redefines what constitutes rioting to include actions that result in damage to the property of others.
But the real heart of the legislation is what Democrats say is the guilt by association — and giving the government the right to criminally prosecute and seize the assets of everyone who planned a protest and everyone who participated. And what’s worse, said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, is that the person who may have broken a window, triggering the claim there was a riot, might actually not be a member of the group but someone from the other side.
Wouldn’t Trumpp love to have that power at the Federal level.
As horrified as I was at the abuse of power the bill represented, and the boneheaded false beliefs used to justify it, I had to laugh when I read this:
Sen. Sylvia Allen, R-Snowflake, said the new criminal laws are necessary.
