Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake can’t seem to make up her mind. Does she believe that Arizona’s Civil War-era total ban on abortion is a “great law” and that abortion is “the ultimate sin,” as she said on the campaign trail in 2022? Or does she think that every woman should have “choices” when they get pregnant, as she insisted in a recent campaign video?
In the wake of a state Supreme Court decision re-animating the 1864 law that prohibits abortion at any point in pregnancy for any reason except to save the life of the mother, Lake initially issued a statement declaring it “abundantly clear that the pre-statehood law is out of step with Arizonans” views on abortion. She called on state officials “to come up with an immediate common sense solution.”
Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) had already offered one. The state’s top law enforcement officer announced her office would not enforce the ban, which snaps back into effect in June. The law declares anyone who “provides, supplies, or administers” an abortion be punished with up to five years in jail.
But, last weekend, Lake suggested county sheriffs should enforce the 1864 abortion ban: “We can have that law, but it’s not going to be enforced with the people we have in office,” Lake reportedly told the crowd at a Mohave County Republican Party event. “The only people who can enforce that law are our sheriffs. And we need to start asking the sheriffs if they’re willing to enforce that. I don’t think they are.” The comments were first reported by The Copper Courier.
Lake made these remarks just days after posting a video declaring, “A full ban on abortion is not where the people are.” In that same video, she said she wants to “make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices,” adding that there must be exceptions made for rape and incest — exceptions the 1864 law does not contain.
Voters may have a chance to weigh in on the matter, but not until November, when a ballot measure that would protect the right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, around 24 weeks, is expected to appear on the ballot.
In the meantime, at least one county attorney has expressed interest in prosecuting people under the 1864 law. And there are undoubtedly some Arizona sheriffs that would be willing to answer Lake’s latest call. As the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting has written, the state has become “ground zero” for the so-called “constitutional sheriffs movement,” whose adherents are already becoming accustomed to picking and choosing which laws they want to enforce.
The movement, which more than half of the state’s sheriffs have aligned themselves with, according to ACIR, is premised on “a radical ideology that the sheriff’s power within his or her county is superseded by no state or federal government entity but is guided by the sheriff’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Nullification, or refusing to enforce laws or mandates a sheriff deems unconstitutional, is a core part of the ideology.”
Earlier this week, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convened in Las Vegas for a training session that included talks by Trump associates Mike Flynn, Patrick Byrne and Mike Lindell.
At the same event, Lake told the crowd, “They’re going to come after us with everything. That’s why the next six months is going to be intense.” She went on to suggest supporters would need to “strap on” a “seatbelt,” a “helmet,” and “the armor of God,” before adding, “And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”