The Daily Agenda: Eww, Trent Franks is back

"Be fruitful and run for office" ... Thanks for the records, AzCentral! ... And love the piece, hate the headline.

Does the name Trent Franks ring a bell? It has been a while since he was a member of Congress representing the West Valley. 

He was a socially conservative family man who served in the Legislature in the 1980s and founded the powerful Christian lobbying group Arizona Family Research Institute, now known as the Center for Arizona Policy. 

He was the kind of guy who claimed that abortion was worse than slavery for the Black community, that rape usually doesn’t result in pregnancies, and that former President Barack Obama was an “enemy of humanity,” (though he did eventually acknowledge the president was born in Hawaii).

Then his nearly eight-term career in Congress exploded in a matter of days after a string of sexual harassment charges from his staffers, including 

• Several staffers said he pressured them to be a “surrogate” for him and his wife, and it didn’t seem like he was talking about the in vitro fertilization kind. 

• He repeatedly offered one staffer $5 million to carry his child and retaliated against her when she refused. 

• He sent weird love notes to a staffer. 

One of Franks’ last Instagram posts.

As you might suspect, these weren’t the first incidents. He also rescinded an internship offer after a 23-year-old woman refused to visit his house when his family was away one night, she wrote years later after he had resigned. 

“I should have marched back into the congressman’s office the next morning and demanded that they honor their offer. Or I should have gone to House leadership and made a formal report. But I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, and, at that point, I didn’t want to work for a member who would rescind a job offer because I wouldn’t go to his house alone late at night,” the would-be intern wrote. 

There were also other rumors over the years.

Franks resigned at then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s request amid an ongoing ethics investigation in 2017. (The Ethics Committee investigation eventually found he engaged in sexual harassment “and/or” retaliation against his staff.)

Now, Franks is trying to make a comeback to his old seat that U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko has been keeping warm for the last six years. 

You would think Franks has no chance, even in an increasingly crowded GOP primary in an increasingly sex-scandal-tolerant Republican Party. 

If you Google Franks, it’s almost impossible to find a story that does not mention the whole surrogacy/resignation thing. There are some disgraces that just don’t wash off, even after six years of silence. 

So why on Earth would Franks run for office again? Is it delusion? Compulsion? 

Nope, it’s “God’s Will,” he told supporters. And it’s hard to argue with that.

Thumbs of fury: Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, recently un-lifetime-banned from Twitter¹, used the social media platform to send a bolded and all caps “WARNING” to Gov. Katie Hobbs’ director of the Arizona Department of Revenue, saying he could be held personally liable for upwards of $2 million for sending a letter to Arizonans letting them know about a tax rebate that Hoffman championed and directing them to the governor’s website. The director, Rob Woods, is actually a holdover appointee of Gov. Doug Ducey’s.

He still haunts us: The L.A. Times details how “suburbanites, Latinos and the ghost of John McCain” turned Arizona into a battleground. It’s not exactly a blue state. And it’s not really purple, columnist Mark Z. Barabak writes.

“Rather, Arizona is something like a Dr. Seuss character, as Paul Bentz, the GOP pollster, put it. The state is red, with purple spots.”

Neat: Hobbs announced a series of executive orders giving state employees “civic duty leave” to work the polls, offering state buildings up as polling stations and requiring agencies to put voter registration forms on their websites. 

Worth every penny: The Republic is trying to get Cyber Ninjas to pay almost $700,000 that the paper shelled out for lawyers in its public records lawsuit against the comically named one-time state Senate “audit” contractor. But something tells us that the paper will have a hard time getting that money.

That’s not… how taxes work: The Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy serves up today’s political mystery, entitled: “Whose ballot did Justine Wadsack post online?” which is a good question considering her residency issues. The Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith notes it was almost certainly her husband’s ballot since he’s registered at the out-of-district address where Wadsack definitely doesn’t also live. And the Republic’s Laurie Roberts has the 30,000-foot view on Wadsack’s insistence it’s her ballot. 

“The bigger issue here is that this is a state senator who votes on complex bills that impact the future of the state — one who passes multibillion-dollar budgets and makes laws for the rest of us to follow, and she doesn’t have even a basic understanding of how taxes work or who pays for what.”

Remember this tweet when you get to the laugh.

Think of the church: If you molest children in Arizona and confess it to your priest, they legally cannot tell the police about it. Democratic Rep. Stacey Travers wants to change that law, but Republican Rep. Quang Nguyen blocked it last year and plans to do so again next year, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. 

"I believe, personally, in some ways this is an attack on the church," Nguyen said. "That is how I see it."

Still better than what happened to Steve Farley’s rabbits: A Tucson Tortoise wandered out of his backyard and got scooped up by a rescue that rehomed him within four days rather than keeping him for the usual 10 days. The original owner tracked the tortoise back to the rescue, but it was too late. Now the man who adopted the tortoise won’t give it back. The old owner is suing the new one, per KOLD’s Shelby Slaughter, who is hot on the case. 

“I’ve tried calling that new owner five times. I’ve texted him twice,” Slaughter reports. 

Speaking of Republican Sen. Justine Wadsack, she hit us up yesterday! 

She said she’s trying to get a censure or expulsion motion going against Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun, and she wanted to help our “great story” “go viral.”

But she wasn’t happy with the headline. 

We declined to change it and explained we chose that headline because “they both have a reputation as unhinged and, in particular, mean to their assistants.” 

It was a very cordial text exchange!

1. This is our one and only acknowledgment that it’s officially called X.