The Second Coming of Trent Franks

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Speaking of political zombies, one of Arizona's most notorious is threatening to wander in from his exile in the Sonoran Desert and stage a triumphant comeback.  Former US Congressman Trent Franks who resigned from the House in disgrace in 2017 after it was learned that he was trying to convince a couple of female aides to bear a child for him - and even offered one $5 million to carry his spawn, announced on Friday that he would try to regain the seat that he voluntarily vacated more than six years ago.   

Debbie Lesko, a former state senator who won that seat in a special election and has held the office continually since Franks resigned, announced a few weeks ago that she was leaving Congress to spend more time with her family and because she was not happy with the way Congress is currently functioning, and several less-than-optimal Republican candidates have already announced plans to try and replace her in representing a parched patch of desert west of Phoenix.  

Being a former long-term resident of that congressional district (Arizona - 08), I still maintain an interest in the political shenanigans that occur there.

Three Republican extremists were already in the race to succeed Lesko when Trent Franks made his surprise entry last week.  Blake Masters who ran unsuccessfully to unseat Mark Kelly in the US Senate last fall, Abe Hamadeh who lost the state attorney general's race in 2022 and in true Republican fashion still claims that he won that race, and State Senator Anthony Kern who was part of a set of Trump fake electors in 2020.

While Trent Franks was serving in Congress he seemed to relish being involved in controversy.   In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama became President, Trent Franks described him as an "enemy of humanity."   Franks was primarily a one-issue representative during the fifteen or so years that he spent in Congress representing Arizona - and that issue was abortion.  Trent woke up and roared any time the topic came up.  He was stridently opposed to women having rights to make their own reproductive health care decisions.   Franks once stated that half of all Black children are aborted, and a few years later he said that incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.  

But that was then, and this is now - and now Trent Franks smells an opportunity to end his wanderings in the desert and return to the nation's halls of money power.

Arizona can do better.