By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Francis Menton is a retired attorney and law partner in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, so he has a close view of the sheltered, rote thinking of the Manhattan liberal, one of the topics he addresses in his blog, “Manhattan Contrarian.”
It’s a great place to live, he writes, with one exception: “We suffer from a stifling political and ideological orthodoxy. The central tenet of that orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending.
“The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending,” Menton continues, “therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.”
On July 6 Menton addressed a topic that went far beyond Manhattan, “How to Think Like a Liberal Supreme Court Justice”:
(https://www.manhattan
contrarian.com/blog/2023-7-6-how-to-think-like-a-liberal-supreme-court-justice-part-ii)
Being the communications capital it is, what happens in Manhattan doesn’t stay in Manhattan anyway, and the opining of its rhetoricians likely help to provide the guide stars for the High Court’s left-wing faction.
Do not look to legal constitutional argument from this minority judicial faction, Menton says. They decide what the correct left-wing position is and fabricate from that point.
“Each of these dissents follows the same rote formula: The heart of the opinion is an appeal to fear and/or guilt, completely divorced from anything about the law,” Menton writes. “The basic argument is that because of either some looming menace, or your sins, or both, you must cede infinite power to your betters to run things outside the constitutional order.”
Here in Arizona, we’re getting more of this flavor after the state’s major executive offices mysteriously fell into the hands of left-wing Democratic extremists in last November’s general election, which was marked by strategically convenient mechanical chaos and malfunction in populous Maricopa County on the November 8 Election Day when heavy conservative Republican turnout was expected.
Donald Trump had endorsed the GOP nominees for, among the leading offices, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and U.S. Senate. The GOP supposedly lost all these races to left-wingers last November despite the state not being a liberal bastion.
The major supervisors of putative election integrity here were strongly anti-MAGA Republicans Bill Gates, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, plus Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democrats’ nominee for governor who refused to recuse herself from supervising her own election.
The Wanderer has chronicled some of the turbulence arising from left-wing Democrats being given the red carpet to victory. That turbulence continues.
In a terse news release on July 10, left-wing Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that her chief of staff, Amy Love, would be leaving that job on August 7.
The four-sentence news release was captioned misleadingly, “Attorney General Mayes Announces Leadership Change.” Actually, it wasn’t a change. It announced an upcoming vacancy.
At least Mayes was to have Love as chief of staff for seven months, and the aide was to stick around for nearly a month after the announcement. The left-wing governor, Katie Hobbs, already had lost her chief of staff in an immediate resignation in late May, not even staying around for another day.
Hobbs’ chief, Allie Bones, exited her position quickly after less than five months. A May 25 news release announced Bones’ immediate departure, with no reason given except “to pursue new opportunities.” Bones, like Hobbs, is a social worker.
The Grand Canyon State’s largest daily, the pro-Hobbs Arizona Republic, wrote that Bones was the fourth of Hobbs’ top officials to leave the administration within her first six months, adding to instability at the highest level.
On July 13 reporter Rachel Alexander posted at The Arizona Sun Times: “Love . . . caused controversy at the State Capitol in May when she demanded more money for the Arizona Attorney General Office’s (AGO) budget, referencing a threat by Mayes to sue the legislature. State Sen. Jake Hoffman…shot back at her, pointing out that the Brnovich administration had requested less money and was satisfied with it.”
Republican Mark Brnovich was the previous state attorney general who left that job to run unsuccessfully last year in the GOP primary election for a U.S. Senate seat.
The Sun Times article added that GOP State Rep. David Livingston “followed up with a scathing letter to Mayes denouncing Love’s remarks,” saying:
“Sen. Hoffman rightly expressed his concern that you threatened litigation over a budget you had not yet even seen and based only on rumors, and perhaps your own misplaced speculation. I encourage you to learn the facts in the future before wasting taxpayer money and resources on politicized demand letters.”
Reporter Alexander added: “An insider told The Sun Times that shortly after Mayes took office, she forced out two black employees in leadership positions: the criminal division chief and the chief criminal investigator…. Imagine if a Republican did that? They would be accused of racism.”
Mayes had been declared the winner for attorney general over Republican nominee Abe Hamadeh by fewer than 300 votes, out of more than 2.5 million cast. However, Mayes acts as if she won by a landslide. The same for Hobbs, who was said to have triumphed by two-thirds of one percent over Republican Kari Lake but has ruled as if she has a resounding voter mandate.
The Wanderer asked conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard what reason he had heard for Love’s departure. Querard replied on July 11 that “I have no idea what is going on in these top Democrat offices, but they appear to be collectively unprepared to lead. It is almost like they all expected to lose and then suddenly had to hire staff without the time to find the right fits.
“It is possible that the resignation was tied to Mayes’ sudden public lawlessness,” Querard said, “but you have to imagine that anyone who took a job with Kris Mayes to begin with must be pretty far left of center, so her kind of lawlessness shouldn’t offend the lefties she hires.”
Both Hobbs and Mayes are pro-abortion extremists. Wikipedia says the LGBT newspaper Metro Weekly describes Mayes as an open lesbian.
“I Sure Did”
Querard’s reference to the attorney general’s lawlessness was in response to two points The Wanderer raised.
The first point: After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a Colorado web designer’s First Amendment rights on June 30, Mayes quickly issued a news release saying that she wouldn’t abide by that decision and that she instead agreed with the dissenting view of liberal Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
As a former daily newspaper reporter, Attorney General Mayes knows about putting herself on the record with a news release. Her rejection of the High Court’s ruling wasn’t an offhand remark while bustling along in a hallway.
Mayes’ five-paragraph news release of June 30 began: “Today, a woefully misguided majority of the United States Supreme Court has decided that businesses open to the public may, in certain circumstances, discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans. While my office is still reviewing the decision to determine its effects, I agree with Justice Sotomayor — the idea that the Constitution gives businesses the right to discriminate is ‘profoundly wrong’.”
The second point: Mayes said that her office won’t bring any abortion prosecution forward.
Arizona law says that abortion cannot be performed for reasons of race, gender, genetic illness or being late in the pregnancy. In other words, a client couldn’t tell an abortionist, for instance, that she wants an abortion in order to avoid having a baby girl.
But Mayes says she’d ignore such lawbreaking. Her stand is more consequential because, as already reported in The Wanderer, Hobbs announced by executive order that she was removing the authority of Arizona’s 15 county attorneys to prosecute possible abortion crimes and giving that power to Mayes, who already said she won’t enforce it.
In a July 3 letter to Hobbs, 12 of the county attorneys including Republican Rachel Mitchell, of populous Maricopa County, told Hobbs that she exceeded her authority, but Hobbs rejected their stand.
On July 10 Arizona PBS said Mitchell said she would continue making prosecutorial decisions as before, and that Hobbs cannot issue an executive order “with the authority of overcoming the law.” Mitchell said Hobbs was trying to establish “an extremely dangerous precedent.”
Meanwhile, a video drew attention that showed Gateway Pundit reporter Jordan Conradson trying to question Hobbs about election ballot security and failure of signature matching in an election she oversaw.
Hobbs resolutely walked away from him at a large gym then replied with an obscenity. When Conradson asked if he correctly heard her using the obscenity, Hobbs said over her shoulder, “I sure did.”
In another example of radical Hobbs dragging Arizona down a left-wing trail despite the state having a majority-Republican legislature, she announced on July 11 that the state was joining the U.S. Climate Alliance, an organization that describes itself as “committed to securing America’s net-zero future by advancing state-led, high-impact climate action.”
Its home page shows a row of those odious, dangerous windmills on a hill. Its “member commitments” include left-wing jargon about keeping in line with the Paris Agreement and “Centering equity, environmental justice, and a just economic transition in their efforts to achieve their climate goals and create high-quality jobs.”
Others of its 25 members include the left-governed states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.
In a separate development, Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma and Senate President Warren Petersen, both Republicans, issued a news release on July 10 saying they filed an amicus brief in federal court seeking “to protect Arizona’s recently enacted statute prohibiting gender reassignment surgeries for minors.”
They issued the brief in response to another high-handed executive order by Hobbs on June 27, requiring the state employee health-care plan to cover gender-reassignment surgeries but prohibiting tax money for “conversion therapy” for those seeking mental health.
The House speaker and Senate president didn’t want Hobbs’ order to be interpreted as requiring a conflict with Arizona law prohibiting this surgery for minors.
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