After the Trump led Republican party suffered an embarrassing 2022 election rejection where swing states sent election deniers packing, all but one took their defeat with dignity. The exception to that was Kari Lake. The former TV personality mimicked Trump by denying her loss and went to the courts to try to overturn her legitimate defeat.
Unlike Trump’s 60+ futile attempts to find a friendly judge or get lucky with a favorable ruling to give their coup attempt legitimacy, it looks like Arizona, or at least Maricopa County won’t be putting up with such nonsense. For them, one frivolous suit without merit is enough.
As many recall, after the 2020 election, Maricopa County was invaded by the “Cyber Ninjas” — a group with no particular expertise in election politics. That group proceeded to rip apart their voting machines, looking for some phantom “fraud” to try to get the results overturned.
They found nothing, and did a lot of damage to the voting machines to the tune of millions of dollars. A bill that had to be paid by Arizona taxpayers. That is in addition to that and other attempts to delegitimize the American voting process that still does damage today.
So, this time around, Maricopa County is putting their foot down before it gets to that stage.
After Kari Lake’s nonsensical attempt to get the court to overturn the results, an attempt that featured no real evidence or anything of substance, Maricopa County is going after Lake in that same court system.
A motion for sanctions was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on Monday in response to that effort by Lake to overturn the 2022 election results.
The motion was filed in response to Judge Peter Thompson‘s ruling against Lake‘s challenge, and came after Maricopa County Attorney Tom Liddy informed the court that the defendants would be seeking sanctions. Liddy told the court that “enough is enough.”
Thompson ordered the defendants to file their motion for sanctions by 8 a.m. on Dec. 26. The motion seeks sanctions against opposing counsel in response to what Hobbs‘ legal team describes as “abusive litigation tactics,” and asks the court to issue an order barring Lake and his legal team from initiating any further legal action related to the 2022 election result.
The motion also asks the court to issue an order requiring Lake and his legal team to pay the costs incurred by Hobbs and her legal team in defending against their challenge. It remains to be seen whether the court will grant the motion and issue sanctions against Lake and his legal team.
No one is saying that a candidate can’t bring legitimate and evidence based cases to the court after any election. But what seems to be the bigger issue is that some candidates and entities with almost bottomless piles of money, are totally abusing the system for their own purposes — cases that are more about propaganda and messaging to die hard followers than anything to do with how the election was conducted when those cases are rejected by the courts.
And of course, they play the “you never know” game where they might get lucky or find a friendly judge who is willing to ignore the law and give the abusers their wish. Some of these entities can afford to file suit after suit in hopes of getting lucky just once.
Americans saw that play out when Judge Cannon in Florida pretty much ignored every law to give Trump a “special master” to review stolen classified documents that were found at his Florida resort. Fortunately, for our justice system, actual defenders of the Constitution and statutory law in the appellate court squelched that effort and set things back to their proper place.
It appears that in Maricopa County, as well as most of America, enough is enough.
