2022 was filled with moments we won't forget ... no matter how hard we try

Exhale, Arizona. Mercifully, blessedly, finally, we have reached the end of 2022.

It’s been yet another year of the surreal and the startling in Arizona politics. Of a saavy senator, a subpoena-shy congressman and an election that just won’t end.

A tough year for public school children, a great year for private school parents and an election that just won’t end.

A year in which Democrats shot themselves into the foot and so did Republicans and, oh yeah, an election that just ... will not ... end.

Before we march gratefully into what we hope will be a better, (dare I hope, saner?) future, let’s look back on a particularly peculiar year – one filled with moments we can’t forget ... no matter how hard we try.

Cue the awards for a few of the year’s most astonishing performances:

Most Startling Makeover that Everybody Saw Coming

Forget purple wigs and profane rings. Kyrsten Sinema’s latest makeover is the real eye popper – one prompted by the Arizona Democratic Party’s decision to take aim and shoot itself smack in the foot.

Sinema has long been targeted by members of her own party for not being Democratic enough. In January, the state party’s executive board actually voted to censure the first Arizona Democrat to win a Senate seat since the 1980s.

In Arizona's election:How GOP voters helped Democrats win

So in December, she returned the favor and left the party, putting a sizable kink in Democrats’ control of the Senate and in Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego’s plan to take her out in 2024.

Sinema’s move to independent, assuming she runs for reelection, means Democrats may well wave goodbye to the seat it took them three decades to snag.

Any bets on whether Kari Lake is sizing up her chances?

Quickest Draw When the Target is Your Own Foot

This one goes to the Republican Party’s brain trust, which apparently met in a broom closet and decided what a great idea it would be to purge the party of John McCain supporters.

The party run by state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward and headlined by Lake made it clear that they didn’t need – or want – RINOs or the independents who are key to winning statewide elections in Arizona.

Ward equated the traditional wing of the party with the “Evil Empire”. In August, Lake celebrated her primary win by proclaiming “We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.” In November, at one of her final campaign events, she sneered at the “the party of McCain” and McCain Republicans to “get the hell out!”

So they did.

Yet Another Shoot Yourself in the Foot Moment

Ward, Rep. Mark Finchem and other leading lights within the MAGA movement spent much of the year advising people not to vote early – abandoning a strategy that has allowed them to dominate for decades – and not to use county-supplied black felt-tip pens at polling places.

“You can vote with ANY pen you choose … ,” Ward tweeted. “Don’t be bullied.”

“We’re not saying the machine cannot read blue ink,” said Timothy La Sota told a Mohave County judge, in challenging Abe Hamadeh’s loss. “We’re saying it is less able to read blue ink. And in a race of this small of a margin, that could make the difference.”

Best Care and Feeding of White Nationalists

Folks, we have a tie.

Last year, the award went to Rep. Paul Gosar, for palling around with Nick Fuentes and giving the keynote speech to Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference. But Gosar also deserves a share of the hardware this year, for his spirited defense of Fuentes after the House J6 committee subpoenaed him.

“The phony January 6th Committee’s partisan witch-hunt continues as they have now set their sights on young conservative Christians like Nick Fuentes,” Gosar wrote, in a January post on Gab, a social media site that caters to the far right.

It’s worth mentioning that this “young conservative Christian” has warned that America needs to protect its “white demographic core”, called the Jan. 6 insurrection a “glorious day” and, of course, denied that the Holocaust never happened. Both the Justice Department and Anti-Defamation League call him a white supremacist.

State Sen. Wendy Rogers calls him a friend. In January, she spoke at AFPAC.

She was later censured by the Arizona Senate, though not for her embrace of white nationalists as “patriots” or for the antisemitic trash she posted after her speech. Instead, she was rapped for calling for public hangings during her speech and for later social media postings threatening to “personally destroy” any Republican senator who supported her censure.

Biggest Jackpot Since Alt Fuels

That would be the state’s new universal school voucher program. In June, Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Legislature opened wide the state wallet, decreeing that any Arizona child can now snag at least $7,000 to $8,000 annually in public cash to go to private school.

Thousands of families rushed to snap up the free money, most of them parents whose kids already were in private school.

Remember the state’s disastrous Alt Fuels giveaway in 2000? The generous tax credit program that subsidized the purchase of luxury, gas-guzzling SUVs?

That $10 million program was heading toward $680 million when then-Gov. Jane Hull and the Legislature pulled the plug. In the end, the debacle cost the state $120 million.

In June, legislative budget analysts estimated the state’s expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts would cost about $33 million this year.

To date: we’re at $313 million. With more to come.

Most Admirable Republican Who Kept His Integrity (But Not His Political Career)

It was bad enough (from a Republican point of view) that House Speaker Rusty Bowers refused to go along with a scheme to overturn Arizona’s election in 2020. But in 2022, he went public with what happened. In June he testified before the House J6 committee, detailing phone calls from Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Andy Biggs and others, pressuring him to get on board with overturning the results of Arizona’s presidential election.

Naturally, the state party’s executive committee censured Bowers for the apparently unpardonable sin of holding onto his integrity when Donald Trump came calling. This lifelong conservative Republican then lost his primary election to a guy who believes – literally – that the devil led the conspiracy to deny Trump a second term.

Bowers went out with his head held high.

“I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” he told the House committee. “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.”

Best Artful Dodge by an Arizona Congressman

For two years, Rep. Andy Biggs has ducked questions about just how involved he really was in the scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election – both inside and outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Biggs (along with Gosar) was famously part of the congressional trio that “schemed up” the event outside the Capitol, according to Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander. His fingerprints are all over the plan inside, to have fake electors swoop in to steal the election for Donald Trump.

Now he’s facing a possible ethics investigation for his refusal to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, to answer questions about his involvement in the plan to thwart the peaceful transition of power.

Biggs insists there’s nothing to see here and calls the House J6 committee’s push for an ethics investigation a “political stunt”.  Some of us call it about time.

Best PR Stunt that Cost Taxpayers $100 Million (And Counting)

The award goes to Gov. Doug Ducey, who in August suddenly decided to spend $100 million to stack a few thousand shipping containers, topped with concertina wire, on federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Arizona has had enough,” he said.  No word on why it took until his final few months in office for Arizona to have had enough.

Or how his container wall could stop anyone from crossing the border, given that you can still squeeze between some of them or climb over any of them.

A few weeks ago, the feds sued the state for trespassing on federal land and damaging the environment, prompting Ducey …. to declare victory and announce that he will dismantle the wall.

Question is, who’s going to pay for it? (I think you know.)

Best Use of Incendiary Remarks to Scorch Any Surviving Shred of a Political Future

Hands down the coveted sore loser award goes to Kari Lake, who just cannot get over the fact she lost the election for governor.

The vote didn’t convince her or the MAGA faithful. Her loss after a two-day trial didn't convince her. Every day, she makes the rounds to conservative podcasters and newscasters to rail about the various ways in which county officials conspired to deny her her due.

Of late, her incendiary/fiery complaints, sound, well, downright incendiary.

“They have built a house of cards here in Maricopa County,” she said, shortly before her trial. “I think they’re all wondering what I’m gonna do. I’ll tell you what, I’m not just gonna knock that house of cards over. We’re going to burn it to the ground.”

I guess if you can’t make Arizona great again, the next best thing is to turn it into … an ash heap?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 2022 in Arizona was filled with moments we'd rather forget