Liz Harris, an election-denying Republican lawmaker in the Arizona house of representatives, was expelled by her colleagues on Wednesday after she invited to a committee hearing a conspiracy theorist who accused elected officials of unproven corruption and bribery.
Republican and Democratic representatives joined together to expel Harris with a 46-13 vote. An expulsion requires a two-thirds vote of the chamber and is rare. The last expulsion from the Arizona legislature was in 2018, though before that, the most recent was in 1991.
Harris invited a woman to present at a joint elections hearing hosted by the Arizona house and senate in late February who shared unvetted allegations that various elected officials had illegally received bribes from drug cartels as part of an elaborate money-laundering and property-deed scheme. Among those accused by Jacqueline Breger, a local insurance agent with no elections expertise, included Governor Katie Hobbs and other state lawmakers such as the house speaker, Ben Toma.
The expulsion resolution said that Harris “undermined the public’s confidence in this institution and violated the order and decorum necessary to complete the people’s work in the state of Arizona”.
Before she joined the legislature, Harris gained notoriety for her involvement in election denialism. After the 2020 election, she led an unsanctioned canvass of voters, which was then debunked by elections experts. When Hobbs, a Democrat, won the governorship in November, Harris said she would not vote for anything unless there was a revote of the 2022 election.
The joint elections hearing came after Harris voted against a Republican-led budget plan, and Republican leaders allowed the hearing as a way to get Harris to change her vote on the budget.
After the hearing, the Democratic representative Stephanie Stahl Hamilton filed an ethics complaint against Harris. The bipartisan house ethics committee, chaired by a Republican, subsequently investigated the complaint and concluded Harris had committed disorderly behavior in violation of house rules. Her behavior had damaged “the institutional integrity of the house”. The committee recommended the full house decide how best to discipline Harris.
Harris had told the ethics committee she was not aware of what Breger would present to the elections hearing, but the committee received a batch of text messages from an anonymous source that contradicted that claim. The committee found Harris knew of the bribery claims ahead of the hearing and did not comply with internal deadlines to show any presentations to House leaders, which could have flagged the presentation as out of bounds.
In one of the text messages, Breger told Harris she was “trying to think of something that won’t raise a red flag” when naming her presentation, a sign that Harris knew of the extreme allegations the presenter would bring up.
Harris’s Republican colleagues were split on the expulsion vote, with some saying she clearly crossed a line and others saying expulsion went too far despite her lack of judgment on the issue.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Republican David Livingston said of voting to expel Harris. “Because this institution is more important than us individually.”
Alexander Kolodin, who voted against expulsion, said expelling Harris set a bad precedent because it held her accountable for comments made by a member of the public. The expulsion “gives credit to these awful allegations and makes her a martyr for them”, she said.
Harris narrowly won her election in 2022 in a swing district in Phoenix’s suburbs. Precinct committeemen in her district’s Republican party will now nominate three people who could replace Harris, with the Maricopa county board of supervisors deciding on the person who will take her spot.
With Harris’s seat now empty, Republicans do not have a majority in the House, leaving them one GOP vote shy of what they would need to pass their priorities until her position is filled.
