Arizona Democratic Party Requests Investigation of Redistricting, Claims It Protects Incumbent GOP State Senators

The Arizona Democratic Party submitted a complaint on Monday to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, asking him to investigate whether a couple of members of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) violated the Arizona Constitution by drawing district boundary lines to protect at least three incumbent Republican state senators. Executive Director Charlie Fisher, who signed the letter, also asked the attorney general’s office (AGO)to determine if the members violated Arizona’s Open Meeting law, and whether members, as well as senators and their staff, improperly used state resources and funds.

The moves may have been done to include significant Republican enclaves in heavily Republican districts, not to just grab a single senator’s residence. State Senator Vince Leach (R-Tucson), one of the senators who was accused of being gerrymandered into a heavily Republican district, explained to The Arizona Sun Times about the area he lives in that was included, “Catalina has always been in LD 11. Since the election of 2012.”

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States Take a Stand on Value of Human Life: Oklahoma Protects Unborn Babies from Abortion, Colorado Dismisses Their Humanity

In just the span of about a week, legislation concerning ending the lives of unborn babies in two states starkly reveals that while many state lawmakers are standing up to protect human life, some appear to be underscoring the extremity with which they are prepared to go to dismiss it.

The states continue to take their respective stands in advance of the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, now awaiting a decision at the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is considered to present the most significant challenge to the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

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Commentary: Teachers Unions’ Other Foes Are Liberal Parents

Khulia Pringle would seem an unlikely critic of the local Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The St. Paul native embarked on a teaching career in the hope of improving a school system that she saw as failing her daughter. By the time she finished her training in 2014, she had grown so disillusioned with the public school system that she took a job with an education reform group, helping to recruit and place hundreds of tutors in schools across the state.

While she shares the union’s emphasis on pushing for higher pay and smaller classrooms, the self-described liberal education activist says the federation’s three-week strike last month provided final confirmation of her worst fear: The union and public education system place a higher priority on serving their own needs than they do on serving students and parents, 60% of whom are minorities.

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Consumer Prices Rise 8.5 Percent, the Highest in 40 Years

Newly released federal inflation data show that prices continue to rise at the fastest rate in four decades, continuing the trend of soaring inflation.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Consumer Price Index, a key indicator of inflation, which showed prices rose an additional 1.2% in March, part of an 8.5 percent spike in the past 12 months.

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Analysis: Famed Bangladesh Mask Study Excluded Crucial Data

With one exception, every gold standard study of masks in community settings has failed to find that they slow the spread of contagious respiratory diseases. The outlier is a widely cited study run in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of its authors claim it proves that mask mandates “or strategies like handing out masks at churches and other public events—could save thousands of lives each day globally and hundreds each day in the United States.”

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New Study Shows Red States Handled COVID-19 Better Than Blue States

A new study by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that states led by Republicans did a better job than Democrat-led states at managing the coronavirus and keeping their states from slumping into an economic and social recession.

As reported by The Daily Caller, the three states that ranked the worst in mortality, economy, and schooling during the COVID pandemic were New Jersey, New York, and California, all of which had implemented some of the strictest lockdown measures in the nation. By contrast, the states that ranked the highest were Utah, Vermont, and Nebraska.

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Commentary: Make the Judiciary Great Again by Holding Senators Accountable

Following four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late March, the full Senate voted 53-47 last week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Supreme Court—fulfilling Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to name a black woman to the high court. Three Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to confirm Jackson—Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Utah’s Mitt Romney.

Imagine a slightly different scenario: a Republican president nominates someone to serve on the Supreme Court and asks a 50-50 Senate to confirm that person. You can be absolutely sure that Democrats would force the vice president to break the tie to get that nominee on the bench. Remember when, in 2016, President Trump nominated Betsy Devos to be secretary of education   and Vice President Mike Pence had to break a tie, even without an evenly split Senate?

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GOP Calls Out Biden’s Attempt to Impose a ‘Green New Deal’ Through Wall Street Regulation

A group of 40 House Republicans sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Monday, urging the agency to rescind a regulatory proposal forcing companies to disclose “climate-related risks.”

The Republicans, led by House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment Ranking Member Ralph Norman, slammed the financial regulator, saying it exceeded its congressionally-mandated authority in issuing the climate rule, in the letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The lawmakers added that the rule was especially inappropriate given the ongoing energy crisis.

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Arizona Senate President Says Maricopa County Election Officials Had USPS Destroy Live Ballots

Arizona’s Senate President took to a popular podcast last week to reveal that audit results from the 2020 election show major problems with how absentee ballots were handled. 

“What they’re not telling you is all the ballots that were returned to the post office – undeliverable – and you know what, they said ‘we don’t want them back, you can keep them. You can just destroy them. We don’t need them,'” Senate President Karen Fann (R-District 1) said on The Conservative Circus Podcast. “So those ballots never went back to the Election Department. They told the Post Office “oh, you can just destroy them, we don’t need them.'” 

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