December's dirty dozen
MAGA infighting at AmericaFest … Kelly vs Trump et al … And that’s one heckuva top hat.
Welcome back, folks!
We hope you missed us while we took a chunk of December off to bank some family time, plan a whole election year’s worth of newsletters and migrate our entire operation to a new email provider.
As usual, we were a bit ambitious with the time allotted … We need another week or so to finish our big move, bosses!
We’ll continue publishing here on Our Regrettable Platform (TM) as we work out the final kinks in our new system. By next Monday, we’ll be all moved into our new home(?).
In the meantime, we have some big news: the Agenda is hiring yet another reporter. (Yay!) We’ll tell you all about them after they come on board next week.
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December was a wild month of Arizona political news, making it a fitting cap to 2025.
To get you up to speed on what went down last month, today we’re running down the top storylines that caught our eye, even while we tried to ignore the news.
We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get to it.
1. The Legislature is (almost) back
State lawmakers kept dropping bills in the hopper over the holidays, giving Arizonans a sense of what to expect when the Legislature reconvenes next week.
A bill from Republican Rep. Nick Kupper would raise speed limits on rural highways and launch a pilot program allowing unlimited speeds between Casa Grande and Yuma.
Republican Sen. Janae Shamp is pushing legislation to fund a state study of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She also introduced a bill to ban fluoride in drinking water.
Democratic Rep. Stacey Travers wants voters to give lawmakers a pay raise. It’s been tried before — many times — and the public has said no.1 This time, Travers is tying the raise to actual term limits2, which she hopes will convince voters to support the measure.
Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers are reviving gun bills that Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed last year, teeing up another election-year fight over campus carry, business restrictions, gun registries and silencers.
2. New faces in the races
The GOP primary in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District is shaping up to be one of the most interesting races in the state.
Republican state Rep. Joseph Chaplik jumped into the race to succeed Rep. David Schweikert in CD1. Chaplik is part of the Freedom Caucus and has the backing of some big names in the MAGA crowd, but he didn’t get the coveted endorsement from President Donald Trump. That went to Arizona Republican Party chair Gina Swoboda, who announced her bid for the seat in October, much to the chagrin of the Freedom Caucus crowd.
Also running in CD1 is former Arizona Cardinals kicker Jay Feely, who, at Trump’s urging, dropped a bid to run in Andy Biggs’ open seat in CD5.
Swoboda’s team is already calling Feely a “carpetbagger.”
3. MAGA infighting
The MAGA crowd put on quite a show in Phoenix last month.
Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference in downtown Phoenix descended into open infighting among conservative influencers.
Under different circumstances, rapper Nicki Minaj’s fawning praise of Trump might have been the headline — but clashes between Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson drew national attention instead.
4. Not enough (land) trust
Is Arizona State Land Trust money going to be a big deal this legislative session?
Lawmakers couldn’t get on the same page on renewing Prop 123 last year, but both Dems and GOP officials are saying they’re “hopeful” about getting it done this year.
In the meantime, Republican lawmakers are lambasting Hobbs following an audit of the land trust, which is the funding source for Prop 123, alleging the agency failed for years to follow state law.
5. Trump vs. Kelly
It already seems like a million years ago, but the spat between Trump and Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly over Kelly’s “illegal orders” video is still making news.
If the Pentagon moves forward with charges against Kelly, it could actually elevate him into the ranks of leading Democratic presidential contenders in 2028.
As for those illegal orders, Kelly didn’t outright say the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela last weekend was illegal, but he did say Trump’s foreign policy over the past year has been “reckless, chaotic, self-serving and unconstitutional.”
Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego came out and called the war “illegal,” while Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, called it “100 percent constitutional.”
6. Going nowhere
The Colorado River is going to get a lot less water next year than experts predicted months ago.
Water gurus now expect the 2026 inflow to be 27% below normal levels, which further complicates the already contentious negotiations among the seven states that depend on the river.
Arizona and the other states have until Feb. 14 to strike a deal on future water allocations — or the Trump administration will impose its own plan.
The seven states have largely failed to agree on a solution for more than two years, and it didn’t get any better at last month’s meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association.
“If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more,” John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said. “As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere.”
7. Five years later…
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is moving ahead with her cases against the fake electors, despite recent setbacks in court.
But her office dropped its fake elector charges against Jim Lamon after Lamon, a businessman and former U.S. Senate candidate, agreed to turn over emails. Our best guess is that the deal is tied to Mayes’ ongoing case against the remaining 17 fake electors.
Meanwhile, election conspiracy promoter Jovan Pulitzer is trying to raise $400,000, claiming he needs the money to preserve 2.1 million digital images from the 2020 election.
8. Sinema’s new career
Leaked emails show that, despite previous denials, former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is working as a lobbyist. That revelation followed her veiled threats to the Chandler City Council ahead of its vote rejecting a massive data center proposal.
Sinema later railed against the left for killing the project while praising the Trump administration for backing AI data centers.
9. Legal weed gets a challenge
Critics of Arizona’s voter-approved recreational marijuana law are planning a signature drive to put a partial repeal of the law on the ballot next November.
The group says it doesn’t want to ban marijuana sales outright. They just want limits on potency and advertising, arguing current rules don’t adequately protect children.
10. Tent City 2.0
The Department of Homeland Security is planning to add Phoenix to the already long list of Democratic-run cities targeted by the Trump administration, per the Bulwark.
The plan, according to anonymous former federal officials, is to make more immigration arrests and build “soft-sided facilities” to increase the overall number of beds in detention centers in the Valley.
The details are still sketchy. Presumably, the Phoenix deployment would look a lot like the havoc wreaked by Border Patrol and ICE agents in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.
As our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, previously noted, the Trump administration paved the way for the deployment in Phoenix by removing the top ICE official in Phoenix last October. That decision opened up space for Border Patrol agents, who don’t follow as strict rules on arrests as ICE does, to take charge of immigration enforcement in Arizona.
11. Whodunnit?
Officials are pointing fingers over who pulled the plug on the popular PBS’ NewsHour West program.
The show was produced through a partnership between ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association (WETA).
But now, both sides say the decision to end it came from the other side.
WETA — a major public broadcasting station that produces news content for PBS — said ASU’s priorities changed, effectively ending the contract. ASU, meanwhile, says the call was PBS’s.
12. Last but not least: the Don Bolles bill
Republican Rep. Selina Bliss once again introduced a bill to build a memorial across from the state Capitol honoring Arizona Republic journalist Don Bolles, an idea we started advocating for in 2023. And this year, there’s a strong news hook: The proposal coincides with the 50th anniversary of Bolles’ murder, after his car was bombed outside the Clarendon Hotel.
As we look back on all the lolz we missed sharing with you during our December break, there are two stories we can’t move on without discussing.
First, a big mazel tov to Republican activists Marissa Hamilton and Jeff Caldwell, who tied the knot in one of the stranger politically themed ceremonies we’ve ever seen.
Hamilton, best known for her work on the grassroots MAGA organization EZAZ, wore a “taxation is theft” themed dress while the groom wore one heck of a shiny gold suit and top hat for their shindig, which was held in the “Gulf of America.”
Also in December, disgraced former Democratic state lawmaker Leezah Sun launched her gubernatorial campaign.
Sun, as you may recall, has been through a string of controversies far too long to recount here, which culminated with her resigning ahead of certain expulsion from the state House of Representatives in 2024.
She’s running as an independent after Democrats widely denounced her.
In lieu of the public supporting salary increases, lawmakers have simply circumvented the state Constitution by giving themselves huge raises in per diem payments.
Arizona does have term limits for state lawmakers, but they’re a sham. Lawmakers can and do circumvent them by hopping between the House and Senate indefinitely.
Welcome back!
Was so happy to see you in my inbox this morning. We missed you. Was a long month, they want to court marshal Kelly for telling the truth or lower his government salary, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, wag the dog in Venezuela. If anyone is interested they released the House questioning of Jack Smith over the January 6th attack on the Capitol (tomorrow by the way) and the stolen classified documents case. Cleverly released on NYE. It’s quite interesting, 8 hours so took me a few days but the Jack Smith is impressive.