District 7 State Sen. Wendy Rogers spoke to the Payson Tea Party last week to offer a staunch defense for her vote in favor of the state budget – and to repeat claims of election fraud courts have repeatedly rejected.
She also highlighted the endorsement of Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump. She read from a statement from Trump saying “Wendy Rogers is an incredible champion for Arizona Legislative District seven. She fought hard to advance election integrity…support the military and our always-under-siege Second Amendment. She has my complete and total endorsement.”
She’s facing opposition from Rep. David Cook in the Republican primary for the sprawling district that stretches from Flagstaff, to the White Mountain, across Rim Country and down into Pinal County.
Rogers, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel and pilot, has maintained a national profile on social media, raising record amounts of money for a state legislative district. She has also been censured by the Senate for remarks that were considered violent and inflammatory and threatening to other lawmakers. She has remained in the forefront of people denying the 2020 presidential election in Arizona was marked by widespread voter fraud – even though repeated court cases have found no evidence of miscast or fraudulent ballots sufficient to change the outcome of the election.
Rogers told the enthusiastic crowd that she also visited Gila County to mark the opening of the Tonto Creek Bridge, funded mostly with federal money.
She said she confronted an unnamed Gila County Supervisor with questions about what the county planned to do with some $500,000 she said they had in left-over money from the $25-million bridge project, which was mostly federally funded.
“Your county supervisors may not want you to know this. I went up to one of the three supervisors and I said, ‘you have half a million to spend.’ They said ‘yeah, and you can spend it however you want.’ I said, ‘I’m on the radio every other week and the biggest question I get is about roads and about potholes. In my humble opinion, dedicate some money to that. He said, ‘I’m not working right now.’ So I’ll put it out to you – you need to bear down. Ask how that money is going to be used. You need to tell them how you want that used. That’s your money.”
Rogers said she voted for the budget compromise between Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs because it was really a “Republican budget.”
Republican lawmakers rejected Hobb’s effort to put limits on the exploding cost of the private school vouchers and ruled out any proposal to roll back income tax cuts approved under the previous governor, which essentially imposed a flat-rate, 2.5% income tax.
Those two elements combined with the approval of a flood of infrastructure projects in individual legislative districts turned last year’s $2.5 billion surplus into a projected two-year, $1.8 billion deficit.
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