Lawmaking is Hard

Some lawmakers make laws, some don't ... The tax man wants his cut ... and driving home in style.

Monday marks the (alleged) halfway point in Arizona’s annual legislative session. Technically, lawmakers are only supposed to work 100 days per year, though the session often stretches far beyond that. 

Our colleagues at the Tucson Agenda tapped into Skywolf, our Agenda-affiliated bill tracking and political intelligence tool, to figure out what their local lawmakers have been up to and see how their bills have fared so far.

It’s an insightful read on how to judge your lawmakers’ lawmaking abilities, even if you don’t live in Tucson. So we’re handing over the top of today’s email to our Old Pueblo friends. 

If you like what they’re doing or want to stay in the know about Southern Arizona, check out the Tucson Agenda. 

And if you’re a politico who needs real-time access to the kind of data that the Tucson Agenda used to write this report, check out Skywolf. 

State legislators are running for re-election this year (most of them, anyway), and voters will decide who sticks around and who gets the boot.

What better way to determine if they’re worthy of your vote than to evaluate their records at the Capitol this year? Passing bills isn’t the only job of a lawmaker, but it’s a big part of what they do.

Are your local lawmakers any good at it?

Now’s a good time to take a preliminary look. This week was “crossover week” at the Capitol, when bills that started in the House should be voted out of that chamber and into the Senate, and vice versa. It’s at this point that most of the roughly 1,800 bills, memorials and resolutions introduced this legislative session fade away.

If they haven’t passed the committees they were assigned to by now, they’re officially dead.¹

With those deadlines in our rearview mirror, we used Skywolf, our Agenda-affiliated bill tracking and political intelligence tool, to scour the 220 bills filed by the dozen lawmakers in Legislative Districts 17, 18, 20, and 21, which cover the bulk of the Tucson area. 

Legislative deadlines have already claimed the lives of 151 of those bills. Only 69 remain “alive.”

Most of Tucson’s Democratic lawmakers are already pretty much out of the legislating game. 

They can still advocate for the causes they hold dear and vote for or against bills from other lawmakers, but Sens. Rosanna Gabaldon and Priya Sundareshan, along with Reps. Betty Villegas and Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, no longer have any bills working their way through the pipeline.

Reps. Christopher Mathis and Nancy Gutierrez each have one bill that’s still alive, but both bills would just create license plates that support ovarian cancer research and promote bicycling. Worthy causes, perhaps, but not exactly world-moving stuff.

You could chalk it up to Democrats working under the thumb of the Republican-controlled Legislature, but two local Democrats are doing just fine. In fact, Democratic Reps. Alma Hernandez and Consuelo Hernandez are two of the most effective lawmakers at the Capitol so far this year.

Alma filed 10 bills and eight have made it far enough to be considered still alive. She focused on issues that reflect her background, such as education about the Holocaust (she is Jewish), and public health (she teaches a course on public health policy at Arizona State University).

She has earned a reputation as a dealmaker at the Capitol, in part for her friendships and ability to make allies across the aisle, and in part for her willingness to compromise. 

For example, several of her bills were assigned to multiple committees. But she was able to convince the speaker of the House or committee chairmen to withdraw them from some committees, keeping them alive and moving without actually “passing” the committee on a vote.

In other cases, she has accepted Republican amendments to her bills to ensure they can pass. Her HB2757, for example, sought $10 million for a Holocaust museum over the next three years. Republicans amended it to just $3 million three years from now. But it passed its committee. 

Her sister, Consuelo, has used many of the same tactics to great success. She filed seven bills this year and five still have a shot at becoming law.

And Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, who filed a whopping 44 bills, still has six bills that are working their way through the process.

Gonzales’ bills focused on education, but not the issues that provoke the wrath of Republicans. She wants to bump up state funding for community colleges, dual-enrollment courses, and Native students. And she wrote a bill to shorten contracts for senior administrators at community colleges. 

Republican state Sen. Justine Wadsack is Tucson’s most prolific bill-filer, and she’s kept the majority of them moving far enough in the process to be considered alive. Of the 50 bills she filed, 35 are still technically alive and moving through the pipeline. 

That may sound like a lot, but it doesn’t mean all of them, or even most of them, will become law. Last year, only three of her 52 bills got signed by the governor. Six of them got vetoed. 

Wadsack’s hot-button legislation frequently makes headlines. One bill would block cities and counties from banning gun shows, which would undo the City of Tucson’s restrictions on gun shows. One would make school board elections partisan, while another would push cities toward dismantling homeless encampments.

She also filed bills that seem downright reasonable, such as funding home- and community-based care for people with developmental disabilities.

Her fellow Republicans in LD17, Reps. Rachel Jones and Cory McGarr, also are faring well. Jones filed 12 bills and eight are still alive. McGarr filed eight and five are still alive.

But only a handful of those Republican bills have bipartisan support, something the Democratic governor prizes highly when considering whether to sign legislation. 

For obvious reasons, Democrats have a harder time passing bills in the GOP-controlled Legislature. Almost 70% of bills filed by the Tucson Republicans are still alive, while only about 15% of bills sponsored by Democrats are still moving. 

At the same time, Republicans can pass all the bills they want, but they have to get Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ signature before those bills become law. Keep in mind, Hobbs vetoed a record number of bills last year.

If rousing speeches are your thing, then a legislator’s track record of pushing bills might not carry much weight. But if you’re looking for lawmakers who know how to make laws, it’s worth considering who’s good at it when you cast your ballot. 

Give and take: Attorney General Kris Mayes is trying to block the IRS from taxing the family rebates that lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs approved in the last budget. Mayes pointed to 22 other state rebate programs the IRS didn’t tax in 2022 and called the decision to tax Ariozona’s rebates “arbitrary and unequally applied,” the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. Speaking of your tax dollars, Hobbs is taking $4 million more of them to pay employee salaries in her office. Hobbs is paying employees an average of $10,000 more than her predecessor, Gov. Doug Ducey, and with the additional employees she has added, employee-related costs have increased 52%, per the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger.

History repeats itself: Republican senators advanced several SB1070-esque immigration bills, including one that would make it a state crime to cross the border illegally, which Hobbs has already committed to veto. But House Speaker Ben Toma is proposing HCR2060, which doesn’t require the governor’s approval but would go to the voters. It would require state and local officials to determine the legal status of people seeking public benefits through E-Verify among other harsher enforcement measures, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. 

Thou shalt not cut a check: Republicans in the House passed a measure that would ban guaranteed basic income, a program that’s intended to subsidize those making poverty-level wages with monthly checks. The program doesn’t exist in Arizona, but Phoenix tried it for a year in 2022, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes.

It’s a simple solution: Republican senators approved a bill to let teachers display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. 

"If you look back at the 1960s, the progressive slide in our country right now is because we have taken the Ten Commandments away from our schools,” Republican Sen. Anthony Kern, the bill’s sponsor, said. 

It was a deepfake, I swear!: 2024 will be the “deepfake election” as artificial intelligence-created video is rapidly improving and advancing, and Arizona lawmakers are attempting to do something to regulate it. Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin’s HB2394 would allow politicians to clear their names by letting courts decide if a video is fake or real, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda reports. And Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly is incorporating artificial intelligence tools into the office, she tells the Daily Wildcat’s Nandini Manepalli. Among the jobs she’s turning over to robots is checking for missing signatures on mail-in ballots. But they may do signature verification in the future.

“We could also have the (AI tool) do a first pass at signature verification,” Cázares-Kelly said. “If the signature that we have on file and the signature in the envelope are wildly different, the (AI) could segregate that and we could review it and contact the voter much earlier in the process.” 

Innocent until they plead the Fifth: Cochise County Supervisor Peggy Judd pleaded the Fifth during her testimony to a grand jury last November, the Herald-Review’s Terry Jo Neff reports, and now her lawyers are arguing that members of the grand jury weren’t notified that that’s not an indication of guilt. Her lawyers want a new grand jury to consider charges. Speaking of lawyers, the Corporation Commission, now helmed by conspiracist Jim O’Connor, hired fellow conspiracist Tom Van Flein as its general counsel, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. Van Flein was Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar’s longtime chief of staff. 

Cochise County has the weirdest news. 

An Oklahoma man hijacked a semi-truck carrying 10 Corvettes at a Willcox gas station. 

No, he didn’t want the Corvettes, which were valued at $1.2 million. He had just gotten out of prison and wanted to drive the semi-truck home, he told local police.

1. Nothing is ever truly dead at the Legislature until the session ends since there are so many ways to revive a rejected idea.