Bipartisanship behind the scenes

Lawmakers agree on more than you think … The fake electors are in charge now … And we really shouldn’t laugh at typos.

The state House and Senate are about to start voting on bills.

The first batch of bills at the Arizona Capitol made their way to the House and Senate rules committees yesterday — readying them for votes from the full House and Senate later this week.

A surprising number of those bills have support from both sides of the aisle.

And sure, we frequently tell you about how the Legislature is full of ideologues who only represent the loudest segments of their own political party. But for all the guff we give our lawmakers, most of the bills that get passed at the state Capitol are actually bipartisan.

Our art intern, ChatGPT, thinks lawmakers should wear purple in support of red and blue politicians agreeing on something.

Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto stamp ensures that any bill lacking bipartisan support won’t make it into law. But the majority of bills that gain traction at the state Capitol have always been bipartisan — there’s just a lot of stuff in state government that’s noncontroversial and just needs to get done.

The 38 bills that lawmakers heard in yesterday’s rules committee hearings are instructive.

But first, a bit of context: The House and Senate rules committees are the last major stop before bills head to a vote from the full House or Senate.¹ Bills only make it to a chamber’s rules committee after passing other committees that deal with their subject matter, like the Education Committee or the Judiciary Committee.²

Even though all 38 of those bills were drafted by Republicans, about three-quarters of them received bipartisan support in committee.

And half of them flew out of their assigned committees with unanimous support.

Those unanimously supported bills include routine procedures like funding for nuclear emergencies, and policies that are generally accepted as good ideas, like expanding gynecology services in rural areas.

Lawmakers tackle a lot of issues each year that don’t get much attention simply because they’re not controversial.

But not every bill with bipartisan support is noncontroversial.

It only takes a single lawmaker to make a bill “bipartisan.”

For example, Rep. Lydia Hernandez was the only Democrat to vote “yes” on four of those “bipartisan” bills. The moderate Democrat threw her support at measures like giving private universities state funding for teachers’ scholarships and allocating money to beef up school security — ideas the majority of her caucus didn’t like.

And there are still plenty of party-line votes at the Capitol.

Democrats didn’t want to advance bills that put more guardrails in elections or require the state to identify every person as either male or female, for example.

Meanwhile, some bills have so much bipartisan support that both Democrats and Republicans put their names on them as cosponsors. But as Republican Sen. TJ Shope pointed out, looking at cosponsorship to identify “bipartisan” legislation can be misleading.

It’s the votes that matter.

Having a lot of cosponsors just means a legislator worked harder to get other people to sign onto a bill, he explained.

“I don’t think (being a co-sponsor) matters,” he said. “(I) rarely sign on to others’ bills … unless somebody actually thinks it’s important and I end up relenting and moving on with my day.”

Bills that earn bipartisan support in committees usually fall into a few categories: straightforward fixes to overly burdensome processes, routine maintenance bills that don’t have political baggage and policy-driven ideas that appeal to both sides.

For example:

• SB1041 lets school district governing board candidates gather nomination signatures electronically as nearly all other candidates for elected office can currently do. It passed unanimously in the Senate Education Committee.

• SB1047 releases $388,470 in funding to settle claims against the state. Claims over one year old have to get legislative approval. It received unanimous support in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

• HB2045 would require candidates to be listed in an alternating order on the ballot, so that one party’s candidates aren’t always listed first. (Currently, the party that won the last governor’s race in your county is listed first on your ballot.) Every House Federalism, Military Affairs & Elections committee member supported it.

• SB1081 would convene a stakeholder group to look into increasing obstetrics and gynecology services in rural areas. The entire Senate Health and Human Services Committee thought it was a good idea.

• SB1034 would let retired state employees return to work as prosecutors after six months and still get retirement benefits. Every lawmaker on the Senate Appropriations Committee voted for it except Republican Sen. David Farnsworth.

Not gonna happen: The window has closed for Attorney General Kris Mayes to get that investigative file the Department of Justice put together on the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Mayes asked the DOJ for the report earlier this month, saying she wanted to use it in her prosecution of fake electors in Arizona. It was a longshot to begin with and now that Trump is in office, it’s not going to happen.

Stiff competition: Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen filed initial paperwork to run for attorney general against Mayes, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. The only other Republican in the race so far is Rodney Glassman, a former Tucson city councilman who ran unsuccessfully for attorney general, among a long list of other offices.

COVID relief: State officials announced some good news for the Isaac Elementary School District, KTAR’s Kevin Stone reports. The state recently appointed an independent “receiver” to manage its bungled finances, but now Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said the U.S. Department of Education would return $6 million in COVID funds, which the school district had forfeited for not spending it. The bad news is there are still a lot of questions to address about whether the district can use the money to cover its payroll.

All you need to do to help us make payroll is click that button and upgrade to a paid subscription.

Back at it: GOP lawmakers are trying again to pass a bill that would ban big Arizona cities from making certain rules on single-family housing, Capitol Media Services’ Bob Christie reports. Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci says he’s trying to make it easier to build “starter homes” to address the housing shortage. After Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the bill last year, Biasiucci took out one of the major sticking points for Hobbs — the bill now excludes areas near military airports.

Tragic consequences: More than 40 Indigenous people in the Phoenix area died as state Medicaid officials tried to respond to the sober living scam that targeted them, ProPublica’s Mary Hudetz and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting’s Hannah Bassett report. Nearly all the deaths were connected to substance abuse, often after officials tried to sound the alarm on the lax oversight that allowed thousands of people to get sucked into the scam.

They’re not wild animals: Tempe police cited a man for feeding unhoused people at a public park, ABC15’s Adam Mintzer reports. City officials say local organizer Ron Tapscott didn’t apply for a city permit for his group, which feeds more than 50 people per week at Mouer Park. Tapscott, who is not the first person to be cited in Tempe for feeding the homeless, was unfazed.

“There are people out here that are desperate,” Tapscott said. “If the city is not willing to help them, we are.”

Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, has a fun little quiz for readers today.

Curt loves reading old newspaper archives. And as he scoured the news in the past week, he felt transported back to 2017, during Donald Trump’s first first week in office.

So he created a quiz to see if you know what year you’re living in.

We took it and we got a barely-passing 66%.

Can you do better?

Some traditions should never die. The Trump administration sent out a press release with a spelling error, adding to a long-running tradition from Trump’s first term.

Officials were talking about sanctions against the country of Colombia, but they screwed up the spelling, which made it look like they had something against Columbia University in New York.

But now we want to know what former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer has against Columbia University.

1. Technically, the bills still have to be heard in “caucus,” but lawmakers don’t vote on them in caucus. If you need a refresher on the bill-to-law process, check out our handy zine.

2. Rules is essentially a rubber stamp committee — lawmakers only vote on whether the bill is constitutional and written correctly, not the merits of the bill. But the chairmen of the rules committees hold a lot of power since every bill has to pass a rules committee vote before the entire chamber votes on it. It’s a perfect place for chairs to hold a bill hostage as leverage.