Keep It Moving

Stand up for your convictions, Jake ... It's never too late to deny defeat ... And subscribe so we don't have to auction our teeth.

Starting this week, bills that have already passed the state House are eligible for committee hearings in the state Senate, and vice versa. 

Getting on those committee agendas in the second chamber is critical for bills to stay alive. Kind of like sharks, bills die if they stop moving.¹ It’s rarely the votes that get them — far more often it’s death by deadline.²

The next big deadline is March 22. By then, House bills have to clear Senate committees, and vice versa.

Committees usually meet once a week, so a bill has at best five chances to get on the agenda and receive a vote. Otherwise, it’s effectively dead. 

This is probably the worst version of our requested “the legislative process as the board game of chutes and ladders” image that our art intern, ChatGPT, came up with. But is that Donald Trump?

Chairmen hold all the power to schedule bills for votes or not. It doesn’t matter how popular a bill might be or what a worthy cause it is — if one committee chairman doesn’t like it, that’s usually the end of the road for a bill.

Yes, we’re talking about Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman and HB2595 again.³ The bill would allow a privately funded monument on the Capitol lawn honoring Don Bolles, a local journalist who was assassinated in 1976 for his work.

In case you missed it, Hoffman, a fake elector and professional troll farmer, unilaterally killed two different iterations of the bill last year by stuffing them in his desk drawer and refusing to schedule them for a hearing in his committee. Hoffman, who’s “known for responding to reporters curtly or with profanity” went mute when Republic reporter Ray Stern asked whether he plans to kill the Bolles bill again this year.

Despite being among the very first batch of bills assigned to Hoffman’s committee, HB2595 isn’t on his Senate Government Committee agenda this week. 

Just for fun, here’s a small sample of the bills that passed out of the House with unanimous support last year, only to die in Hoffman’s Senate Goverment Committee because he decided not to put them up for a vote. 

• HB2002 would have provided additional workplace protections for certain Department of Corrections employees. 

• HB2156 would have required the State Treasurer’s Office to post a current list of its state investments on its website.

• HB2625 would have required the director of the Department of Health Services to inspect residential care homes.

• HB2808 would have stiffened penalties on government agencies and officials who refuse to turn over public records to the public.

Whoever is in charge of this project⁴ has four weeks left to convince Hoffman to put the bill up for a vote, or to find a way around him. 

HB2595 passed out of the House with support from more than three-quarters of the representatives. 

Its champions include some of the most conservative members of the Republican caucus. Not to mention it received support from the majority of House Republicans, which is allegedly among the shifting goalposts used to determine if bills sponsored by Democrats deserve a hearing in the Senate. 

But considering the Senate Goverment Committee’s makeup, even getting a hearing doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing. 

The eight-member committee includes five of the most MAGA Republicans in the Legislature. Assuming all the Democrats support the bill, as they did in the House, they’re still outnumbered by Hoffman and Sens. Justine Wadsack, Wendy Rogers, Janae Shamp and David Farnsworth.

Farnsworth, however, calls Bolles a “hero” and is a big fan of HB2595.⁵ So that theoretically gets it to at least four votes in favor. But it’ll need one more to pass. We don’t know if there are any other Republicans on the committee who would support the monument to Bolles, or if they think he’s “fake news” too.⁶

But if Hoffman wants to kill the bill again this year, he should at least have the guts to put it up for a vote and cast his “nay” vote, rather than quietly killing it while dodging reporters’ questions.

Take a lesson from Bolles — show a little courage.

Not until the final gavel sounds: None of the bills Democrats have pushed to fulfill Gov. Katie Hobbs’ agenda have received legislative approval, and the slate of goals she outlined for her second year in office weren’t included in the hundreds of bills lawmakers advanced last week, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. Hobbs wants more oversight of the school voucher program, to protect abortion access and get her own version of a Prop 123 extension passed to fund teachers’ raises, among a plethora of other priorities. The governor said it’s too early in the process to call those goals unsuccessful. 

Presidential until proven guilty: A group of Republican senators advanced a bill that would protect presidential candidates accused of violating the Fourteenth Amendment from getting kicked off the ballot. Coincidentally, Donald Trump is facing several states trying to remove him from their primary ballots, per the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy. The Supreme Court is set to rule on booting Trump from the ballot in Colorado based on his involvement in the Jan. 6 riots, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes already said the former president can’t be removed from Arizona’s ballot. 

Coming for Fred’s head: After a mess of personal infighting at an Arizona Board of Regents meeting that’s supposed to focus on the University of Arizona’s financial crisis, Hobbs is demanding a meeting with ABOR and UA leadership to “discuss next steps,” the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar reports. At the meeting, a faculty member accused ABOR Chair and 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Fred DuVal of conflicts of interest, and DuVal threatened to sue her.

“Chair DuVal and members of the Board of Regents appear more concerned with saving face than fixing the problems they created,” Hobbs wrote in a statement. “Instead of taking any accountability and guiding with a steady hand, ABOR is circling the wagons and announcing they are litigating personal grudges during Board meetings.”

Everybody chill: Lawmakers and public speakers have been particularly unruly this legislative session, and lobbyist and former Senate chief of staff Kevin DeMenna said on KJZZ’s “The Show” that lawmakers should take a literal page out of Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure that says all members are equal. The segment starts with a slate of some of the craziest exchanges in committee hearings this year, which is fun.

Welp, just deal with it!: Sewage is leaking into the Nogales Wash in Sonora due to malfunctioning pumps at a wastewater treatment plant, and the spill is expected to continue for the “foreseeable future,” the Nogales International’s Daisy Zavala Magaña reports. Raw sewage spills have happened before in the wash that empties into the Santa Cruz River, and officials are chlorinating the wastewater until they can fix the pumps. 

Flagstaff, that’s you: Republican senators advanced Sen. Anthony Kern’s SB1195, which would allow Arizonans to sue communities they think are "furthering Marxist ideology” (but not fascism), Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. The bill also prohibits using public money on things like monitoring greenhouse gas emissions and reducing meat consumption. Kern’s hoping to avoid Hobbs’ veto by running the same measure through SCR1015, which would be referred to voters. 

When Trump calls, she’ll fold: Rep. Debbie Lesko is leaving D.C. because she misses her family and sacrificing her time isn’t worth the lack of movement in Congress, she told Mike Broomhead on KTAR. Lesko said she’s familiar with the constituency in Maricopa County’s District 4 and is running for a position on the Board of Supervisors because it’s a “natural fit.” She spent most of the interview hitting Republican talking points about the border and said Democrats are only paying attention because it’s an election year. 

Real councilmen of Fountain Hills: A third-party law firm confirmed Fountain Hills City Council Member Allen Skillicorn violated the council’s Code of Ethics after making a code enforcement officer “fearful of his safety” when aggressively approaching him. The officer filed a police report stating the councilman followed and flashed his high beams at him after he removed one of Skillicorn’s political signs for violating city code. Skillicorn’ said it’s “all political and a smear.” 

Gilbert’s other goon: One particular concrete slide at Gilbert Regional Park keeps hurting people going down it, including several broken ankles, a cracked tailbone and one person who broke their back. 12New’s Chase Golightly found seven reported injuries on the slide since the park opened in 2019, and three people have filed claims against the town. 

“I was telling a story about how silly it was for a grown man to break his ankle on a slide, and one of the nurses told me that it wasn’t the first that she had heard of,” said one of the slide’s victims, a man who broke his ankle in three places. 

We’re OG fans of the state auction. You can find some really cool junk there.⁷

But TEETH?! How is that even legal?

1. Our sharks intern, ChatGPT, tells us that’s an oversimplification and not entirely accurate. But some sharks like Great Whites would suffocate if they didn’t keep oxygen moving through their gills so we’re going with it. 

2. “Death by Deadline” is also the title of our forthcoming journalism/crime mystery novel.

3. If you didn’t see that twist coming, you must be new here. Welcome!

4. The bill was orphaned after its sponsor, Democratic Rep. Jennifer Longdon, resigned from the Legislature, though much like Oliver Twist, it’s a tough orphan that’s doing pretty well for itself, all things considered. For reasons that should be fairly obvious by now, Hank is no longer involved in helping to push the bill other than by obsessively documenting it. 

5. Farnsworth once showed Hank his scrapbook of old newspaper clippings about the Bolles case, which he keeps in his Senate office.

6. We’re really sorry about today’s footnotes. We’re trying to stop.

7. Ok just one more footnote: We saw recalled Senate President Russell Pearce and his brother Lester, a former justice of the peace, buying a car at the state auction once.