PHOENIX – In an unprecedented and innovative legislative maneuver, the entire Arizona State Senate decided simply not to do its job last Friday morning, issuing a statement saying the Senate “never really wanted to be a legislative body in the first place, anyway.”
“To paraphrase a famous and respected figure from modern American fiction, ‘Screw you guys, we’re going home,’” said Senate President Andy Biggums [R-Gilbert]. “After careful consideration and serious, candid debate, we have decided it’s time to spend a few days getting wasted and playing video games.”
As a byproduct of the Senate’s decision to leave work early on Friday, amendments to the state’s “revenge porn” statute approved last week were not adopted as planned, making it likely the state will be back in court to defend against a currently paused lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union last year.
Biggums acknowledged the looming lawsuit would “probably cost the state a whole bunch of money we don’t have. What else is new?
“Look, this is Arizona,” Biggums said. “When you look at the voting track record here and consider some of my esteemed colleagues who have been elected time and again, it’s very clear what the electorate of this state expects from us: a shocking degree of general ineptitude and partisan pettiness, punctuated by the occasional evincing of abject lunacy.”
Reid Lowlands, the attorney leading the ACLU’s lawsuit, said his legal team is “considering its options.”
“At the moment, those options include sending out a tweet in which I refer to the Arizona Senate as ‘a collection of dunderheaded, glue-sniffing rednecks,’ posting a status update to Facebook truthfully reporting that I have recently LOL’d, or holding our tongues for now, at least until we get back into court, where U.S. District Judge Susan Michaels-Bolton presumably will suffer an aneurysm while trying to wrap her brain around how incredibly senseless and dumb this whole charade has become,” Lowlands said.
B.J. Mehzdup [R-Chloride] said he was “disappointed” by the Senate’s lack of action on his proposal, which he believes would have “finally shut up those ninnies over at the ACL-BOO-HOO-U.”
“Whatever,” Mehzdup said. “At the end of the day, in Arizona we have a long and rich tradition of executing whomever we please, so even if the current statute is deemed ‘unconstitutional’ by some black-robed, outside-agitating liberal activist holding a gavel, we’ll just organize ourselves a Revenge Porn Posse and mete out justice one efficiently adjudicated hanging at a time.”
For his part, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brrrnnvcchchachcich said his office is “prepared to vigorously and zealously and defend the law” in court.
“This here law don’t need no fiddlin’. What it needs is to be enforced, come hell, high water or the reincarnation of Thurgood Marshall,” Brrrnnvcchchachcich said. “We are talking about the law which says no more of them Mexicans can sneak up here and have babies, right?”
In the statement explaining the senate’s decision, Biggums noted while the senate’s in-house legal advisers had opined changes to the law were needed to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment, he and other members of the senate remained skeptical about the need to alter the original statute.
“As we understand it, the U.S. Constitution grants us the unfettered authority to write, pass and amend laws as we see fit, irrespective of what some dumbass collection of judges in Washington D.C. might have to say about it,” Biggums wrote. “It’s high time we repealed that so-called ‘First Amendment’ anyway. That damn thing has been nothing but trouble since Day One. Besides, any reasonable Arizonan will tell you the guarantee of our crucial, freedom-ensuring right to bear arms should have come first to begin with.”
Asked about Biggums’ interpretation of the authority vested in state legislatures under the U.S. Constitution, UCLA law professor and First Amendment expert Eugene Bollocks said “Good Christ — has this guy been using paint thinner to wash down handfuls of secobarbital or something?”
Although he strongly disagreed with Biggums’ perspective, Bollocks said something positive still could be distilled from the ongoing controversy over the state’s revenge porn legislation.
“If Arizona wants to pass law which might actually prove helpful to its citizens, maybe they could establish some sort of test that must be passed in order to hold public office there,” Bollocks said. “Failing that, mass legislative suicide remains a viable and honorable alternative.”
