After many Democrats and Republicans at every level across the country – including in Arizona – denounced that state’s Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that upholds an 1864 law banning almost all abortions, Democratic state lawmakers in the Copper State filed legislation to repeal the 160-year old law. But Arizona Republican state lawmakers on Wednesday blocked their efforts.
Republicans, who control both the Arizona House and Senate, on Wednesday refused to even allow a vote in either chamber on Democrats’ legislation to repeal the ban.
“Republican leaders in the Senate removed one bill from the day’s agenda on Wednesday, legislative aides said,” The New York Times reports. “In the other chamber, a Republican House member who has done a political about-face and called for striking down the law made a motion to vote on a Democratic repeal bill that has sat stalled for months. But Republican leaders quickly put the House into recess before any vote could be held.”
The Arizona Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl posted video of Democrats denouncing their GOP colleagues on the House floor.
Axios earlier on Wednesday reported the Republican House Speaker, Ben Toma, said he does not support repealing the 1864 law, enacted before Arizona was even a state, and said he will not allow a vote.
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Republicans’ move to block Democrats’ efforts to repeal the nationally-derided 1864 law came barely hours after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced his opposition to the law, while insisting the crisis would be “straightened out.”
The ruling affirming the near-total abortion ban was only possible after Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise to put only anti-abortion justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, justices who then overturned the five-decade old landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, thereby stripping away the constitutional right to abortion.
Trump has repeatedly bragged about ending Roe v. Wade, and said: “I was able to kill Roe.”
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“Republicans in the legislature aren’t serious about protecting women’s health and freedom,” Arizona’s Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, commenting on the Times report, said Wednesday. ” My office will do everything we can to push back against the implementation of the outrageous 1864 law. Clearly, we can’t count on the GOP to fix their own mess.”
Arizona’s previous governor, Doug Ducey, who left office in January of 2023 when Democrat Katie Hobbs was sworn in, was one of many Republicans who attempted to put distance between themselves and the ruling allowing the near-total ban to go into effect.
“The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate,” he wrote on Tuesday.
But as several have pointed out, of the seven justices on the Arizona Supreme Court, Ducey appointed five.
A strong majority of Americans support the right to choose, including medication abortion, and an even stronger majority support in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
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