Bowers, a lifelong Republican and speaker of the Arizona state House, detailed the pressure campaign led by Donald Trump to get him to say the state’s 2020 election was rigged. He said Trump lied about him in a November 2020 press release that claimed Bowers told the then-president he believed the election was rigged. And Bowers spoke eloquently about why he refused to give up his belief that Joe Biden had won the presidential race.
“It’s a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired, that’s my most basic founding belief,” Bowers said. “So to do this because someone just asked me is foreign to my very being. Will not do it.”
His testimony was among the most memorable given by witnesses called so far by the House special committee investigating January 6.
And now he’s paying the price for it.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Republican Party Executive Committee formally censured Bowers. “He is no longer a Republican in good standing and we urge Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary,” state party chairwoman Kelly Ward tweeted. This rebuke is unlikely to surprise Bowers. Ward pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and she and her husband were subpoenaed by the Justice Department over their involvement in a scheme to offer fake ballots after the 2020 race.
More broadly, Arizona has become a hotbed of 2020 opt-out among Republicans.
Cary Lake, a Trump-backed candidate for governor of the state, has been a defender of Trump’s campaign conspiracies. Blake Masters, who is running for the GOP Senate nomination with Trump’s support, also embraced the former president’s campaign lies and even questioned whether the 2022 election would be legitimate.
Before the censure from the state party, Bowers’ political prospects in his bid for a state Senate seat this year looked dire.
“It’s so hostile,” Bowers recently told NBC News. “If I succeed, it will be a miracle.
Ward had already endorsed Bowers’ opponent before the Aug. 2 primary, former state Sen. David Farnsworth. (It’s decidedly odd for a state party chairman to run in a Republican primary, but I digress…) Trump also chimed in, posting on his Truth Social site: “Bowers must be defeated and the highly respected David Farnsworth is the man to did.”
Farnsworth, in case you were wondering, said of the 2020 election: “It’s a real conspiracy led by the devil himself.”
Bowers is, by all accounts, a reliable conservative voice. And he even said he would consider voting for Trump again in 2024.
But that’s not enough for people like Trump, Ward and Farnsworth. Anything short of total allegiance to the former president and his election lies is not only unacceptable, but should be punished.
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