Too often, we hear that constituents and politicians vote for something and then review the content afterwards. That appears to be the case with Prop 139. So, let’s take a look at what exactly is in this proposition.
An Associated Press article in the Ahwatukee news (last month) publicized that this abortion measure allows women to terminate a pregnancy without state interference until the point of fetal viability. This is incorrect. As the proponent’s attorney, Austin Yost, stated under oath in superior court, this amendment will allow abortions before and after fetal viability. In layman’s terms, Prop 139 will allow abortion, up to birth, which includes late-term abortion.
Did the press not read and understand the language? Or did they choose not to print its true intent? Polling showed that 90 percent of Arizonans would not support abortion up to birth, and yet Prop 139 still passed. But the legacy media focused on defining fetal viability at 22 or 24 weeks while ignoring that the proposition allows for abortion up to birth.
So, what else does Prop 139 do?
The proposition takes away parental consent for a minor to have an abortion. So, let’s get this straight. Minors no longer need parental consent to have an abortion, but they need parental consent to get an aspirin at school. Are we serious? Not only that, but this will also allow child traffickers and rapists to go unchecked and find a way to avoid prosecution for their crimes. All these traffickers and rapists would have to do is take their victim to have an abortion without their parents’ involvement. How can we exclude parents from this life-changing decision?
But perhaps most chilling is that the doctor and the requirement for an ultrasound have been eliminated from the abortion procedure. That’s right. The subject matter expert — a medical doctor — is no longer required for an abortion. Any “healthcare professional,” which is vaguely defined, can perform an abortion with no certification or hospital privileges. On top of that, the elimination of the ultrasound means that there is no way to tell the gestation of the baby or if there is an ectopic pregnancy. If the “healthcare professional” cannot detect an ectopic pregnancy and initiates an abortion, the woman’s life is at risk. This is not healthcare.
But why was the ultrasound eliminated? Because 60% of women who see their baby with an ultrasound choose life. And therein lies their end game. When women choose life, it’s bad business for abortion clinics.
Thanks to Prop 139, abortion providers stand to make millions more, especially by eliminating the need to pay for doctors. This is the reality of what our state just passed, not the fake ads on television telling voters that this is about women’s rights or that if you have a miscarriage, you cannot get medical help.
But the battle is not over.
As Chair of Arizona Right to Life, our team will continue to speak the truth about abortion. We remain committed to the protection of the unborn and the health and safety of women, because every human being is valuable.
The Honorable Jill Norgaard served in the Arizona State House from 2014-2018. She is the former First Vice Chairman of the AZGOP and currently serves as the Chair of Arizona Right to Life.
Hard to believe it was just four years ago that President Joe Biden was elected with a promise to unite the country. After the misery of COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns and the riots in the streets of major cities, Americans wanted to be united by a unifying national purpose.
Alas, it never happened. Instead, Biden and his leftist allies were drunk with power and swerved the Democratic Party even further to the left. This alienated half the country, with a ruinous and unpopular progressive agenda on every issue, from running up massive debts to rampant inflation to transgenderism to electric vehicle mandates.
The country was only further torn asunder.
Can President-elect Donald Trump learn from these blunders and be the president who unifies the country by embracing traditional American ideals? The Make America Great Again agenda has some rough edges for sure, but if presented right, led by a message of hope, not malice, Trump can deliver an idealistic policy that the vast majority of Americans can embrace.
The way to do this is for Trump, as we approach our 250th birthday, to strike up the theme of a New American Patriotism. This should be a red-white-and-blue message centered around a renewed appreciation and celebration of American virtue and greatness. What better way to pull the country together? It should be an extension of the Reagan message of America being a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world.
Which we are.
For at least a generation and maybe two, our schools and our universities have denigrated America’s moral standing. We have been lectured that we should be ashamed of our nation’s past, not proud of our founding and our achievements of spreading freedom and free enterprise across the planet.
The hard left magnifies America’s failures — particularly slavery and segregation — not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the United States often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.
Biden was particularly guilty of this, when he falsely accused the United States of being a systemically racist country.
Wrong, Joe.
A strong case can be made that America is today the world’s greatest and perhaps only multiracial success story. The melting pot isn’t just a history-book fantasy. It is real. The rapid increase in interracial and intercultural marriages is making racial distinctions almost obsolete. The rapid rise in incomes of Asians, Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Blacks should be celebrated.
Recent polling suggests that our citizens do appreciate American greatness. The only group that doesn’t is the ideologically isolated cultural and “highly educated” elite. The vast majority of Americans of every race and income category believe America is “the greatest country on Earth.” But many white liberal elites reject this notion.
Another example: White conservatives and Hispanics soundly reject the idea that America is systemically racist. According to Pew Research Center, “about six-in-ten Black adults say racism” is a problem in America today. But it is telling that many white liberals also believe this.
Is there still racism in America? Of course, yes. But it is not “systemic,” and the nation is becoming less racially polarized with every passing year.
America’s inventiveness, our innovation and our technological prowess, which propelled the world into the modern age and helped reduce poverty rates by 90%, are somehow sinister. Damn those fiends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Fortunately, these are views of a class of modern-day intellectuals who never produced anything but instead sow the seeds of miscontent and division. They certainly have the right to hold these blame-America-first ideals, but we don’t have to allow them in our classrooms to pollute the minds of our kids.
This is an extension of the Reagan metaphor of America as a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for all the world. It’s truer today than ever before, and Trumpnomics will make it all the more true.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
On Nov. 5, Oakland, California residents voted overwhelmingly to recall the city’s far-left mayor Democratic Mayor Sheng Thao, who was elected two years ago using ranked-choice voting. Since then, she has been blamed for increasing crime and disorder in the city. This was the first successful recall of a mayor in Oakland’s history, with 61.6% of voters in favor of removing Mayor Thao and only 38.4% opposed.
The recall wasn’t just an indictment of the failures of progressive governance; it was an indictment of ranked-choice voting, or RCV.
Thao’s win in 2022 was made possible by RCV. The novel election system creates winners out of losers by allowing a candidate who received more second-place (or third-place, fourth-place, etc.) votes to win even if another candidate had more first-place votes. This is exactly how Thao squeaked out a 677-vote win.
Her opponent, former Democratic Oakland City Councilmen Loren Taylor, received the most first-place votes but was under 50 percent in the initial round. Because of that, Thao was able to win in the ninth round. And while she had 50.3 percent of the remaining votes, that total was just 45.6 percent of the votes cast in the first round (11,787 “exhausted” ballots were excluded by the final round).
Taylor criticized the complex election process in his concession speech. “Ranked-choice voting as it is isn’t working,” Taylor told a reporter. He noted the high number of discarded ballots, pointing out that this went against the promises made by advocates when they convinced the city to adopt RCV.
Since then, the quality of life for Oakland residents has decreased dramatically. Reports of violent incidents increased 21% last year compared to 2022, and robberies jumped 38%. Instead of aggressively targeting violent gang members, Mayor Thao focused on “ceasefires” and misleading crime statistics to take the heat off herself.
Thao’s entire mayorship can be blamed on the complexities of ranked-choice voting. A system that allows a candidate to win by receiving the most second place votes and disenfranchises voters by eliminating their ballots should be outlawed in state, local and federal elections.
One of the last mayors elected before Oakland made the switch to RCV was former California Gov. Jerry Brown — a ranked-choice voting critic. As governor, he vetoed a bill to allow all cities in the Golden State to use RCV. And while he was mayor of Oakland, Brown reduced crime, grew the city’s population and expanded charter schools, a far cry from what Thao has done.
Last June, Thao’s home was raided by the FBI. Her failures led to the campaign “Oakland United to recall Thao,” which collected more than 40,000 signatures to initiate a recall. The recall campaign was supported by the Oakland Police Officers’ Association, former Democratic Mayor Libby Schaaf, prominent local business leaders, and even Elon Musk.
Ranked-choice voting is promoted as a way to elect popular, moderate candidates. Yet before it was adopted, Oakland actually had moderate, effective mayors. What RCV actually gave Oakland was an unpopular mayor who is now the first to be recalled in the city’s history. There is talk that Oakland’s next move will be to repeal ranked-choice voting. If not, they could end up right back where they started.
Harry Roth is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and the director of outreach at Save Our States, where he manages the Stop RCV Coalition.
Since the results of the 2024 election came in, much of the focus has been on President-elect Donald Trump’s historic win—and rightfully so. Trump won every single swing state in a massive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, and he beat her in the popular vote too.
But Kamala Harris wasn’t the only significant loser to come out of November’s election.
Here in Arizona, teachers’ unions and other anti-school choice groups, like Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSAZ), made the 2024 election a referendum on school choice. And they lost big!
Much of their work began earlier this year, when Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs came into legislative session (just like she did in 2023) with her top priority being to regulate the wildly popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program out of existence. But it didn’t work. Despite the noise from Hobbs, legislative Democrats, the legacy media, the teachers’ unions, and other anti-school choice groups, only minor changes were made to the ESA program through the budget, with most of it remaining untouched.
This failure fell on the heels of other similar failures…
Though most attention was directed at the top of the ticket in the 2024 election, many groups on the Left waged high stakes on flipping Arizona’s barely Republican-controlled legislature.
In the two years since the 2022 election, when Republicans dwindled to 31 members of the 60-member House and 16 members in the 30-member Senate, Democrats have been busily planning and building their election takeover. After sweeping the top 3 statewide offices, including the Governorship, 2024 was the inflection point in the story of how Arizona went from red – to purple – to blue.
But that didn’t happen.
Under the leadership of Governor Hobbs and an orbit of well-funded organizations that raised upwards of $10 million to target key swing districts in Arizona, the Left failed to secure their legislative victories. Instead, the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Senate, in fact, expanded their majorities. Despite being outspent in every single race, Republicans now hold 33 members in the House and 17 members in the Senate, a small but meaningful gain. It’s a disaster for Katie Hobbs, who is already fighting low favorability and criticism by her own party for her inability to best Republican legislative leadership and rack up any wins for the Left’s agenda…
Democrats in the last election insisted that re-electing them was necessary to “protect our democracy.” But it turns out that for many of them, democracy only deserves protection when the democratic process produces their preferred result.
Prop. 314 was proposed to allow police to arrest immigrants who don’t cross the border at a legal point of entry and to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants. It was approved by over 60% of the voters. Sounds like democracy at work, right?
Not to Phoenix councilmember-elect Anna Hernandez, who vowed that the “Phoenix Council must move immediately to protect immigrant refugee residents in the city from the violence of 314… I am ready for this fight.” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, like many others, was also on board with the resistance, promising that neither the Phoenix Police Department nor “any city resources whatsoever” would be involved in enforcing this particular law. So much for respecting the democratic process.
Yet more Americans are beginning to realize our immigration policy sorely needs major corrections. In 1995, the Chairwoman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, Barbara Jordan, herself a civil rights icon, told Congress, “Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summarized in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave…For the system to be credible, people have to be deported at the end of the process.”
She’s right. There is no way to fix Kamala’s “broken immigration system,” (her words) that doesn’t involve deportation to undo the damage done.
Here’s where we are. The low hanging fruit is the 1.3 million aliens who have been given their due process and are legally qualified for deportation. They are part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “non-detain docket” of 7 million aliens, including criminals, who have not yet been processed but otherwise are eligible for deportation. Congress already has authorized ICE to deport all these individuals.
The obstacle is that their “recalcitrant” home countries refuse to provide the travel documents needed for the return of their own nationals. (Hmm. Wonder why.). The Supreme Court has ruled that all those, even the criminals, who are not deported within six months must be released.
However, under U.S. law, once the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has notified the State Department that a foreign country “denies or unreasonably delays” the return of its nationals, the Secretary of State must order consular officials to discontinue granting all visas to that country. That would surely get the attention of “recalcitrant” like China and India. Yet the Biden/Harris administration, ever loathe to stem the inflow of future Democrats, refused.
Despite the massive surge at the border following the 2021 inauguration, fewer than half as many aliens were removed by the Biden/Harris administration as during the previous four years. Instead, they alternated between laughably claiming the border was safely closed and that the only way to “fix” the problem was a comprehensive amnesty program combined with greater funding at the border but only to expedite the processing of immigrants.
There are other remedies that would mitigate the damage. The DHS secretary is allowed by law to require all aliens without a green card to be registered and fingerprinted. This would not only get a handle on the “gotaways” and criminals who have melted into the population. History suggests it would also trigger voluntary departures.
Finally, we could enforce the E-Verify program and compel employers to check on their workers’ immigration status. Many employers prefer cheap, compliant employees, but the long-term costs to our nation are too great. Absent the economic incentives, both public and private, few illegal immigrants would remain.
We are inviting many long-term economic and political problems by accommodating a cohort that will inevitably demand increased government support as they age. But more importantly, the Rule of Law is our legacy as Americans, the key to our freedom and prosperity. Ignoring the law at our border is a horrible mistake.
Border control and deportation don’t require more funds, more laws, or military action. It is a matter of simply enforcing the law for the protection of us all.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
