Challenges to President Joe Biden’s agenda are coming in from all corners.
The Florida governor is fighting his mask mandate, Texas landowners his open borders, Georgia Republicans his election reform scheme, and West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin his massive tax and spending package.
But no place has lined up to tackle virtually everything Biden and the Democrats touch like Arizona, the nation’s ground zero of policy warfare.
“It’s high noon,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican. “There’s so much crap going on,” he added, referring to the state’s fight over mask mandates, federalized elections, abortion, immigration, critical race theory, 2020 election audits, and even the National Archives’s move to put hazard warnings on historical documents, including the Constitution.
The last time we checked in with Brnovich, the leading GOP Senate primary candidate poised to challenge Sen. Mark Kelly next year, he and the state were front and center in the election reform fight.
Since May, however, the list has exploded, and he has jumped in with both feet. “I am kind of the straw that stirs the drink,” he said.
Most known for the historic Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee election integrity case, the first-generation American has greatly expanded his portfolio like no other state attorney general.
Along the way, he’s been hit by critics who claim he’s using his office to expand his name recognition and reach leading up to the 2022 primaries and his likely eventual challenge to Kelly, who has a more local approach to his job.
A look at press releases tells that story. Brnovich’s recent releases reference cases involving election reform, gun control, illegal immigration, vaccine mandates, airline antitrust, and taxes.
Kelly’s releases cover local jobs, veterans, forest policy, and the drought in the West.
But Brnovich said he has not added to his and his staff’s caseload for the election, though he is aware of the national importance of many of the cases and challenges to Washington he has filed or joined.
“I feel like there’s this window of opportunity, this key moment in history that if we don’t stand up now and protect the Constitution and rule of law, we’ll never get it back,” said Brnovich, who compares himself to the sheriff played by Gary Cooper in the classic High Noon Western.
He is especially concerned that Washington Democrats will succeed in pushing through Biden’s liberal agenda before the election, in which Republicans are now favored to take control of Congress.
“We’re facing two maladies in this country. One was created in a Chinese lab. The other is coming out of D.C.,” he said. “If we don’t have this fight now, I don’t want to look back 25 or 50 years from now and have people ask, ‘What did you do when the United States was becoming a socialist or Marxist country?’ I want to be able to say, ‘I stopped it.’”
