Advertising

Ousted Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who lost his GOP primary earlier in the month, spoke with The Guardian in an extensive interview published on Monday and warned that the U.S. Constitution is “hanging by a thread.”

Bowers appeared before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and detailed the pressure campaign that former President Donald Trump and his allies waged against him and other Arizona officials in an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state.

Bowers’s testimony won him widespread praise for his integrity and willingness to defend democracy, but also earned him the ire of Trump and the MAGA base, which rallied around his primary opponent David Farnsworth.

Bowers spoke with Ed Pilkington on his ranch in Mesa, Arizona and pulled no punches in criticizing the plot by Trump and his allies to use an “arcane Arizonan law” for the state legislature to toss out the state-wide vote and switch the victory and the state’s electors to Trump.

“I was trying to send a definitive message:

this is hogwash,” Bowers told The Guardian of his opposition to the plan. “Taking away the fundamental right to vote, the idea that the legislature could nullify your election, that’s not conservative. That’s fascist. And I’m not a fascist.”

Pilkington notes in the text of the article that the text of the law Trump and his allies pointed to for Bowers to invoke “has never been found.”

Farnsworth has previously claimed that not only was the 2020 election in Arizona stolen, but that the “devil himself” was behind Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Farnsworth joins a slate of general election GOP candidates running in Arizona who deny the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and have vowed to overturn the result if elected including the candidate for governor, Kari Lake.

“The constitution is hanging by a thread,” Bowers told Pilkington while discussing the current state of the GOP. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”

Bowers is a life-long conservative who attributed his steadfast political views to being raised on a ranch and his deep faith in the Church of Latter Day Saints.

“I never had the thought of giving up,” Bowers

said when asked if he ever thought of just giving into the pressure. “No way. I don’t like bullies. That’s one constant in my life: I. Do. Not. Like. Bullies.”
Tags: David Farnsworth, Donald Trump, Ed Pilkington, Joe Biden, Rusty Bowers