Dark money’s day in court

Sunlight burns big donors … More thoughts and prayers … And Mootilda lives.

When 72% of Arizona voters approved Prop 211, it was a powerful rebuke of dark money in politics.

But dark money may prove even more powerful.

Today, the Arizona Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in conservative groups’ legal challenge of Prop 211 (AKA the Voters' Right to Know Act), the law voters approved in 2022 to force political groups that spend heavily in elections to disclose their original donors.

The Goldwater Institute, representing other conservative advocacy groups, challenged the law all the way up to the state’s top court.

And the final ruling could have massive implications for Arizona’s donor disclosure system and potentially reshape what voters are allowed to know about who bankrolls politicians.

Under Prop 211, groups spending at least $50,000 on a statewide campaign must reveal the original donors of any contribution above $5,000 used for campaigns’ media spending. Campaigns had to begin filing those reports last year, and the threshold is $25,000 for local, non-statewide campaigns.

The disclosure only applies to those who donate for campaign media spending, and donors can opt out by directing their money away from that purpose.

The core of Goldwater’s argument is that Prop 211 puts a “target on (donors’) backs” by outing their names and addresses, a move they say tramples constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.

The vast majority of people who donate to a political campaign already have to disclose that information — it’s only those who donate to “dark money” groups who have their identities shielded. And the wave of “dark money” in politics is a relatively new phenomenon — before the Citizens United ruling in 2010, political groups had to jump through a lot of hoops and dance the line between “issue advocacy” and “express advocacy” in order to keep the source of dark money secret.

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Andrew Gould, a former state Supreme Court justice, is returning to court — this time on the other side of the bench — as an attorney for the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP). While Goldwater lost its first two challenges at the trial and appeals courts, Gould feels “very optimistic” about his chances with his former colleagues on the Supreme Court.

CAP, an evangelical lobbying group that champions controversial views against gay marriage and abortion, has stopped accepting contributions above $5,000 to avoid disclosing donors’ identities under the law, per court records.

“There has to be an avenue for people, as they want to influence policy or they want to influence issues, to be able to do it anonymously without having their names disclosed so that their business, their job, their social relationships are destroyed, or they're ostracized,” Gould told us.

But Terry Goddard, former Arizona attorney general who tried to get versions of Prop 211 on the ballot four times, sees it a lot differently.

“If I make a phone call or a one-on-one communication, I can make it as anonymous as I want. I mean, that's my right,” he said. “When I spend millions of dollars to buy a megaphone and try to influence people, that's an entirely different situation, and now that megaphone needs to be disclosed.”

Constitutional consequences

Goldwater started legally challenging Prop 211 a month after voters overwhelmingly passed it, but Gould argues the legal challenge has nothing to do with public opinion.

“If something's unconstitutional, it doesn't matter how many people supported it,” he said.

After today’s oral arguments, it could take a couple of months for an official ruling to come out. The court could uphold the law, overturn it entirely or invalidate only part of it.

For example, when GOP leaders Warren Petersen and Ben Toma sued over legislative authority, an appeals court struck down the part of Prop 211 that barred lawmakers from changing Clean Elections rules or enforcement. But it left the rest of the law intact.

Goddard thinks a ruling completely tossing Prop 211 could take the foundation of Arizona’s campaign disclosure law with it.

The state’s founders put a provision in Arizona’s Constitution requiring the “general publicity, before and after election, of all campaign contributions.”

Since then, everyone who contributes to a political campaign has to disclose their name and address. But before Prop 211, big spenders could route money through nonprofits or PACs and keep the original donor hidden.

From the minutes of the Constitutional convention of the territory of Arizona (1910).

Arizona’s changed a lot since the founders inked that into the Constitution.

There’s a lot more money pouring into elections, and a lot more political vitriol surrounding them.

“People react extremely aggressively and violently if they don't agree with you,” Gould said, adding that donors have stopped giving out of fear of retribution.

As evidence, Goldwater leans on testimony from two (fittingly) anonymous plaintiffs, Doe I and Doe II, who “reported fear of harassment, retaliation, and employment issues due to contributions,” per one court brief.

One of Goldwater’s main issues in the appeals court case was that those accounts don't survive a facial challenge, or that the law limits speech for a substantial number of people, not just those who can afford to give campaigns more than $5,000.

That ties into Goddard’s larger worry: if the court throws out Prop 211 on free-speech grounds, it could unravel disclosure laws altogether.

If wealthy donors can claim anonymity as a constitutional right, why wouldn’t small donors get the same protection?

“I don't see how (the Supreme Court) can write an order that would say this only applies to people who are wealthy enough to set up a 501(c)(4) to disguise their identity, but if you want to give $50 or $100 you still have to fully disclose who you are,” Goddard said.

Gould told us he does support some guardrails on dark money, but Prop 211 is too “broad.”

Goddard, however, told us he purposely narrowly tailored the law to apply only to campaign media spending like ads and mass mailers. He didn’t expect this level of litigation, especially after widespread voter support.

“I guess the only explanation I have is that the folks who like to use dark money have lots of resources, and they're determined to litigate this to the end,” he said.

America, 2025: Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of the Arizona-based Turning Point USA, was assassinated yesterday while debating students at Utah Valley University and answering a question about mass shootings. The shot was believed to be from an academic building around 150 yards away, per the New York Times, and although the shooter has not been identified or caught, President Donald Trump delivered a speech from the Oval Office last night declaring it an act of “radical left political violence” and promising to retaliate against those he deems supportive of violence.

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said.

It’s SB1070 again: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says this week’s Supreme Court decision allowing ICE patrols in Los Angeles basically gives a green light to racial profiling and could lead Arizona back to the days of SB1070, KJZZ’s Alisa Reznick reports. But because the majority of the court didn’t state their reasons, Mayes says law enforcement in Arizona should follow a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said racial profiling is illegal. Immigration advocates in Arizona also are warning of a return to the “dark days” of SB1070, while criticizing Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reasoning as “legal mumbo-jumbo meant to confuse” people, the Republic’s David Ulloa Jr and Nadia Cantú report.

Fast and furious?: Republican Sen. Vince Leach won’t seek reelection in 2026, he announced in an email to supporters. And former Sen. Justine Wadsack, who beat Leach in the 2022 GOP primary only to get defeated by him in 2024, dropped her lawsuit against Tucson police for pulling her over for going twice the speed limit, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. After apologizing to the court for not appearing at a recent hearing, Wadsack said she is “experiencing a family health crisis that is physically and mentally draining.” It apparently wasn’t draining enough to stop her from attending a Turning Point Action event, where she tweeted from when she was supposed to be at the hearing.

Unlike Wadsack, when we get tickets, we just pay them.
But we’re poor, so maybe you can help?

Call it commitment issues: The Scottsdale City Council backed off a plan to sue over the constitutionality of a new state law that took away city residents’ right to block the Axon headquarters, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports.

Decade before deportation: A new survey in Nogales, Sonora, found many people who were recently deported had been longtime residents of the U.S. The survey performed by the Kino Border Initiative found 44% of 278 deportees had lived in the country for at least 10 years, KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky reports.

“Deportations at this moment are deportations of community members,” Joanna Williams, the executive director of the Kino Border Initiative, said.

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In other, other news

Arizona spent nearly $1.5 million on outside attorneys and expert witnesses in defense of a lawsuit brought by the owner of The Cow Palace restaurant (Green Valley News) … ASU President Michael Crow answered students' questions on how the university is handling the Trump administration (Emma Bradford / The State Press) … Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against an Apache Junction landlord because it allowed its residents to suffer a week-long power outage last summer (Kylie Werner / KTAR) … Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas Galvin says federal oversight of the Maricopa Country Sheriffs Office is tyrannical (Serena O'Sullivan / KTAR) … And an audit found red flags for “potential misuse” of Navajo Nation executive spending (Crystal Hansen / Painted Desert Tribune).

We covered one prison break already this week, but we couldn’t graze past this one.

A cow named Mootilda was raised in San Tan Valley and fated to eventually die at a slaughterhouse.

But she made a grand escape that landed her on 12News — and ultimately saved her life.

But it wasn’t easy. After her escape, Mootilda was captured and returned to the slaughterhouse to be turned into burgers.

But the owner of Aimee's Farm Animal Sanctuary had seen video of her escape and fallen for the cow.

The owner was told she could buy the cow for $2,500 within the next 24 hours. Not knowing what to do, she turned to social media, where she raised enough money to bring Mootilda to her forever home, a sanctuary for traumatized animals.

She’s fitting right in and has even made a new bestie: a bull named Adora-bull.