AP Photo/Matt York
- The Arizona state House on Wednesday voted to expel Rep. Liz Harris, a Republican.
- Harris was expelled after inviting a conspiracy theorist to a committee hearing in February.
- First elected in 2022, Harris was removed just three months into her term.
An Arizona Republican has been kicked out of the state legislature for inviting a conspiracy theorist to a committee hearing who falsely claimed Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and a number of other lawmakers — as well as leaders of the Mormon church — were being paid off by Mexican drug cartels.
In February, just a month after taking office, Rep. Liz Harris, a Republican from outside Phoenix, invited a speaker who spent 40 minutes detailing an alleged scheme, involving members of both parties and the Church of Latter-day Saints, to accept bribes from narcotics traffickers in the form of phony deeds to property, the Arizona Mirror reported.
Harris had previously promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and authored a debunked report alleging mass voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Elected last November — an election she has also claimed was fraudulent — Harris has said she did not know the speaker planned to make the unsubstantiated claims, which included a charge of bribery against her fellow Republican, House Speaker Ben Toma. But at an ethics committee hearing earlier this month, Harris asserted that she was scared following the February hearing because she thought she would be targeted by drug cartels for airing the conspiracy theories, claiming she thought: "I'm about to be beheaded," per the Arizona Mirror.
In a report on Tuesday, the ethics committee said Harris, because she allowed false claims of criminal wrongdoing to be aired against her colleagues, of having violated the "institutional integrity of the house." A day later, by a 48-11 vote, members of the GOP-led legislature elected to kick her out immediately, passing a resolution that charged her with having "engaged in disorderly behavior" that "violated the order and decorum necessary to complete the people's work in the State of Arizona."
Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the Arizona Republican Party.
In a statement, House Democratic leader Andrés Cano praised Wednesday's vote, saying Harris had done "real damage" to innocent people.
"Misinformation, lies, and conspiracies are not harmless, and it's not just politics," Cano said. "The defamatory allegations that Representative Harris' invited her guest speaker to make are patently absurd, but there are many people who believe them. They believe the lies, and they continue to threaten retribution because we dispute them."
Harris is the third state lawmaker to be removed from office by her colleagues this year. Earlier this month, Republicans in Tennessee voted to expel two Democratic members for joining with protesters on the House floor demanding gun control legislation in the wake of the Nashville school shooting. One of those lawmakers, Rep. Justin Jones, was reinstated earlier this week, and another, Rep. Justin Pearson, was reinstated on Wednesday.
Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com