Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, but Arizona’s lawmakers don’t seem to be feeling the love.
Instead, our politicians are sparring over drag queens, government surveillance and the never-ending state tax form fight.
Still, politics has always doubled as a matchmaking pool.
And sometimes, the only people who can stand politicians are other politicians.
Either way, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day weekend (and Arizona’s 114th birthday), we’re rounding up some of Arizona’s best love stories.
Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly
The Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly love story is one of Arizona’s most wholesome.
The two first met at a conference in China, though both were with other partners at the time. They reconnected after their respective separations — and went on their first date at an Arizona State Prison facility in November 2004, when then-Congresswoman Giffords was researching the death penalty.
They married in 2007, and Kelly, a veteran astronaut and Navy test pilot, gave Giffords a ring inscribed “You're the closest to heaven that I've ever been.” (Adorable!)
But their political love story soon became one rooted in survival and purpose.
On January 8, 2011, Giffords was shot in the head during a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway. She’s since gone through countless hours of rehabilitation to regain her speech and mobility, and leads a gun violence prevention organization.
Last month, the couple gave ABC a sit-down interview 15 years after the shooting, which coincided with Kelly, now a U.S. Senator, being censured by the Pentagon for telling troops not to follow illegal orders.
“Let me make this perfectly clear, though: Gabby and I are not people that back down," Kelly said.
Shawnna and Clint Bolick
Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick and state Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick’s marriage landed in the national spotlight after the state’s high court reinstated Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban.
In 2022, Shawnna voted to pass the law that became a key part of the state Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. But after the court — including her husband — used that law to reinstate the full ban on abortion, Shawnna voted to repeal the territorial-era law.
John Oliver pointed out the political overlap in his show’s opening segment, and revived a video of Clint performing a reggae parody in fake dreadlocks under the persona “Rasta Clint.”
While Rasta Clint’s parody was pretty ridiculous, the Bolicks have serious roots in the conservative legal movement.
Shawnna previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025, and Clint used to be Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, an equally powerful libertarian think tank.
A match made in conservative Rastafarian heaven.
Kate and Ruben Gallego
U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego proposed to Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego in peak political-nerd fashion: at the 2008 Democratic convention, he enlisted people in the crowd to hold up signs that read, “Marry me, Kate.”
Back then, the pair were Obama campaign volunteers.
The couple announced their divorce in 2016, when Kate was months away from giving birth to their son. In his memoir, Ruben wrote that the breakup was partially driven by his struggles with PTSD.
But the divorce stayed mostly private until Kari Lake turned it into a campaign issue when challenging Ruben for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024.
A conservative news site petitioned to unseal the divorce records, while Lake told Ruben’s potential voters to “hold off until we get the details about why he ran off on his wife when she was nine months pregnant,” and suggested there could have been “spousal abuse.”
The divorce records went public, but didn’t have any of the titillating details Lake had hoped for. The judge who ordered the record’s unsealing called it: “one of the most garden variety divorce files I have ever seen.”
Kate endorsed Ruben in the 2024 Senate race.
Merissa and Jeff Caldwell
While neither of them holds elected office, the Caldwells earn a spot on the Arizona power couples list for their wedding alone.
The Republican activists tied the knot on a December cruise of the “Gulf of America,” where Merissa wore a dress embroidered with “Taxation Is Theft,” and Jeff sported the same slogan on a ribbon wrapped around the brim of a gold top hat.
Merissa Caldwell (formerly Hamilton) is best known for her work on the grassroots MAGA organization EZAZ, and she lost a bid for mayor of Phoenix in 2020.
Jeff Caldwell managed Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap’s campaign, and now works as the recorder’s “Special Projects Director,” whatever that means.
In 2018, Jeff ran for governor of Kansas as a libertarian, but the couple’s wedding webpage tells the story much better than we could:
“Jeff was a noble knight, campaigning for the governorship of Kansas, his heart set on serving his people. Merissa, a wise maiden with a voice like a clear bell, was there to speak for the children and families, victims of a dragon-like government department that she wished to tame.”
Linda and John Kavanagh
For a political lifer like Sen. John Kavanagh, it’s no surprise that his wife, Linda Kavanagh, also found her way into public service.
They recently marked 50 years of marriage, despite John talking Linda into running for Fountain Hills mayor in 2012.
Linda wasn’t having any luck working with the town council as a member of the Chamber of Commerce Board, so John convinced her to run for office instead, per the Fountain Hills Times. Linda was the mayor of Fountain Hills for six years.
She’s influenced John’s legislative agenda, too. In 2014, the senator ran a bill to ban live animals as carnival prizes after the then–Fountain Hills Mayor received a wave of complaints when a fair came through town.
Money can’t buy everything: After pumping $2 million of her own money into her bid to be Arizona’s next governor, Karrin Taylor Robson suspended her campaign on Thursday, saying “we cannot afford a divisive Republican primary.” Robson launched her campaign a year ago to unseat Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. But President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Robson didn’t deter other Republican candidates, like U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs and David Schweikert, from joining the race. (Plus, after Biggs jumped in, Trump endorsed him, too.) Now, the race for the GOP nomination boils down to the more traditional GOP candidate, Schweikert, versus the Turning Point USA-backed Biggs.
Heap of trouble: After months of simmering tensions, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is giving Recorder Justin Heap a choice: answer our questions by Feb. 18 or we might remove you from office, 12News’ Brahm Resnik reports. The conflict has its roots in the fact that the Republican-led board of supervisors and the Recorder’s Office share oversight of elections, but Heap is aligned with the far-right Freedom Caucus, whose members spew all manner of garbage about elections, including claims that the supervisors somehow disenfranchised voters.
No more nuisances: The state’s “public nuisance” laws have become a go-to tool for Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. She’s used them to net a $11 million settlement from Riverview Dairy in Cochise County for pumping groundwater and she’s now considering using them to block an ICE detention center in Surprise and a recycling plant in Benson. But Republican Rep. Lupe Diaz, whose district includes Benson, is trying to rein in her authority to use public nuisance laws with a trio of bills, Stacey Barchenger reports for the Republic.
"They're an obvious attempt to kneecap my office and our ability to protect Arizonans using nuisance law," Mayes said. "It's actually stunning and unbelievable that Lupe Diaz would be the one offering this legislation, given that its his community that we have tried to protect most with nuisance law.”
New crime incoming: Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Michael Way wants to create a new crime of “civil terrorism,” Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. HB2136 would cover acts like blocking roads and vandalism “with the intent to coerce or intimidate a civilian population.” And there’s a “subversion” measure in the bill that might just make it illegal to criticize the government. Way dodged a question from Democratic Rep. Lupe Contreras about whether Jan. 6 rioters would have violated Way’s bill.
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Unlawful freedom of speech: A bill from Republican Sen. John Kavanagh ostensibly deals with tipping off suspects that law enforcement is nearby, but the “unlawful alerting” in the bill would outlaw acts that are protected by the First Amendment, the New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. Kavanagh says telling your neighbors that ICE is nearby wouldn’t be a violation, but rapid response groups (like those that appear to have stopped the federal occupation of Minneapolis) that post about ICE activity on social media (like Democratic state Sen. Analise Ortiz did last year) could spend six months in jail.
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All this talk about love and couples in Arizona politics has us swooning for days gone by.
The year was 2016. Harambe was killed, the Zika virus was spreading, and people were Pokemon Go-ing to the polls to elect Donald Trump as president.
At the Arizona Capitol Times, our beloved Hank and now-senior editor of KJZZ Ben Giles were the king and king of the prom — or at least they were doing their best to convince everyone else as such.
For years, Hank and Ben tried unsuccessfully to win themselves the Cap Times’ annual “Best Power Couple” award, but management disqualified them since they worked for the paper.
We did some digging and found a horrendously millennial-coded video — which has aged about as well as Hank’s hairline — made for the paper’s 2016 “Best of the Capitol” event. It stars Republican Sen. John Kavanagh and former Fountain Hills Mayor Linda Kavanagh, consultants Marcus and Meghaen Dell'Artino, and a few other notable pairs.
Nowadays, making a video this bad is what the kids might refer to as cringemaxxing.
“For the record, I wanted no part in any of this,” Hank told us about filming the skit.
And he certainly wanted no part of us sharing this video.
Without further ado, please enjoy this blast from the past — and thank your lucky stars you don’t have employees ruthless enough to risk their jobs to put you on blast like this.
