Happy Birthday Arizona!

Spend your birthday at the State Library ... Powerful people back east for Lake ... And the oldest oppo dump ever.

Arizona’s Constitution will be on display at the state Capitol in celebration of Arizona’s birthday today. 

But the document is actually the third one territorial-era Arizonans came up with before becoming the 48th state.

That’s one of many fun facts we learned yesterday while touring the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records — an amazing resource for Arizonans who want to study up on state history, their family history, or basically anything historical. 

Our art intern, ChatGPT, baked Arizona a cake for its birthday. The cacti are edible!

You’ve probably heard the story about how Congress turned down a version of the current Constitution in 1910 that would codify women’s suffrage, citizens’ ability to recall judges and the direct election of senators in the state Constitution. President William Howard Taft, a judge, didn’t like the judge provision. 

A new version of the Constitution removed those points, and Taft signed Arizona into statehood 112 years ago today. But Arizonans just added those provisions back in shortly after becoming a state. Very Arizona of us.

And you may even know that there was a failed constitutional convention in 1891. 

But Wendi Goen, a lead reference archivist, found a lesser-known, second attempt at a constitution sandwiched between the two historically recognized ones when digging through the files at the Arizona State Library.  

It’s type-written, unlike the elegant loops of cursive on the previous constitution. 

“We wanted to show how hip we were,” Goen joked. 

Goen is one of several highly qualified employees running operations at The Polly Rosenbaum Building, which houses hundreds of thousands of state archives, artifacts and public records that existed before and after Arizona was inked into statehood. 

During our tour of the massive facility yesterday, we gawked at the perfectly preserved drafts of the state’s constitutions housed in temperature-controlled rooms and stacks of yellowed newspapers that existed before a just handful of corporations controlled all of the country’s print media.  

Goen helps a lot of different people pull from the wealth of information stored there, from BBC documentarians to people trying to nail down their genealogy.¹

But the information hub of all things Arizona is available to everyone. 

Goen described a woman who came to the library for help after she took over a family ranch and found she owed the state tens of millions of dollars for illegally using state land and water since the 1870s. Librarians tracked down documents from the late 19th century that said since the family paid taxes on their water rights, they were the rightful owners of the resource, and the state dropped the hefty fee. 

“I believe, in both the library and archives here, that we confirm and shore up the rights of our residents and that we make sure that the government is responsible for what it's supposed to do,” Goen told us. 

You can make an appointment or submit questions to see the library’s materials on specific topics at azlibrary.gov under the “Ask a Question” button. 

And come check out the original Arizona Constitution on display at the Capitol today. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Treasurer Kimberly Yee will have coffee and cake at 9 a.m., and the Constitution will be on display until 3 p.m.  

If you can’t bribe her, join her: After initially dragging its feet, the campaign arm of U.S. Senate Republicans² officially backed Kari Lake as their gal in Arizona yesterday, a sign that she has made nice, for the time being, with some powerful people back east, Politico reported. 

What, no Rob Schneider?: Mesa Mayor John Giles has the best/worst Arizona-B-list-star-studded State of the City address intro video ever. It’s Star Wars themed and features Alice Cooper and U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, the Republic’s Maritza Dominguez reports. We recommend you don’t spend six minutes of your life cringing through it, but do what you will. Speaking of cringe, happy Valentine’s Day!

Paper is expensive: The plan to create watermarked ballots that Cochise County Recorder David Stevens and his buddy Mark Finchem crafted is somehow still a disaster, even though the whole thing was called off some time ago. Votebeat’s Jen Fifield has a doozy of a tale about how Cochise County is still on the hook for 10 tons (or about $185,000 worth) of unusable watermarked ballot paper that was supposed to be used for a pilot program that never launched. Also, nobody knows what to do with the watermarking machine. 

“Like so much in Arizona elections, it’s a long story that starts with a conspiracy theory and ends in the southeast corner of the state,” Fifield writes. 

This land is your land… : Arizona Republicans are suing President Joe Biden, saying he wasn’t allowed to designate a national monument near the Grand Canyon, a move that was designed to head off uranium mining on sites sacred to Native Americans near the Grand Canyon, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Meanwhile, Gov. Katie Hobbs showed up in the rain last week to designate the Rockin’ River Ranch State Park as Arizona’s newest state park. The project has been a decade in the making, per the Camp Verde Bugle’s Vyto Starinskas.

Maybe next year: After failing to do basically anything to address Arizona’s housing crisis last year, lawmakers this year are moving a handful of housing bills through the legislative process. But the fates of those bills are far from certain, as cities and their powerful lobbying arm, the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, still oppose any major reform on city zoning, Bob Christie reports for Capitol Media Services. 

No trains for you: Republican lawmakers are holding the Department of Transportation hostage, threatening to shut it down if Hobbs doesn’t sign a continuation that they amended to ban the department from taking federal funds to pay for a passenger rail from Phoenix to Tucson (or anywhere else), Howie Fischer reports for Capitol Media Services. 

“People love their personal automobiles,” Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman explained. “They love the freedom that it entails them, they love the ability to go when they want, where they want, how they want.”

Talk to the ring: U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is still annoyed that people want to know if she still wants to be a senator next year, responding to The Hill’s questions about it in classic Sinema fashion. She has less than 50 days left to gather more than 42,000 valid signatures from registered Arizona voters if she decides to run. 

“Oh my god, what a waste of a question,” she told The Hill recently. 

The art of digging up dirt about a political opponent is called opposition research. And opposition researchers go deep. 

Like this Washington Post archive that was forwarded our way that mentions Kurt Kroemer, one of several Democrats running for the chance to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. 

Back in 1983, Kroemer was a marathon-running graduate student at American University in Washington D.C. who got arrested for disorderly conduct after slapping the hood of an off-duty cop’s car that had blocked his path on a run. 

Yep, a real scandal. But the story is pretty wild.

As the off-duty cop was arresting Kroemer, another runner attacked the cop, shouting “something to the effect (of), 'Let him go; he's a runner,’” according to the cop. The cop pulled out his gun and the second man ran off. 

"When he pulled out his gun I put my hands up like I was in a cowboy western or something. I said, 'All right, I'll go,'" per Kroemer’s quote in the October 22, 1983, edition of the Post. 

Forty years later, Kroemer tells us the “bad apple” cop was “completely overreacting.” And he notes that the case never went to court, “which says everything about this officer going well beyond the bounds of correct police behavior.”

1. The archivists wanted us to warn you — don’t go looking for family secrets you don’t want to find.

2. Correction: A previous version of this item said the campaign arm of Senate Democrats endorsed Lake. That would be wild. We meant Senate Republicans.