Plenty of Vacancy

Empty seats everywhere! ... Taking bets on Sun's departure date ... And we swear we're leaving Substack someday.

A full month after Democratic Rep. Athena Salman officially resigned from the state Legislature, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is finally getting around to picking her replacement today.

Her seat has been vacant longer than any other in modern history.¹

During the crucial first month of the legislative session, the House Democratic caucus has been short a vote, and the residents of Tempe’s Legislative District 8 have had less representation at the Capitol than other Arizonans. 

Salman’s seat has taken so long to fill that another lawmaker has already resigned, and supervisors will now have to select a replacement for Democratic Rep. Jennifer Longdon as well. 

And it seems there are two more likely appointments coming up soon. 

• Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun faces almost certain expulsion after the House Ethics Committee delivered its damning report yesterday into her bizarre antics and found she had committed bootable offenses.²

• And Democratic Rep. Amish Shah is rumored to be days away from resigning to focus on his campaign for Congressional District 1.

And it’s still January.

This is the farewell parade that our art intern, ChatGPT, imagines throwing for the outgoing lawmakers.

A month is an unacceptably long time to leave a seat vacant, according to a Republican lawmaker and a Democratic county supervisor, who agree that changes are needed to ensure that seats can’t just sit vacant forever when the Legislature is in session. 

A bit of background, since this is going to come up a lot in the next few weeks:

When a lawmaker quits, gets expelled or dies, Republican or Democratic party activists called “precinct committeemen” in the district meet and select three potential replacements. Supervisors in the outgoing lawmaker’s county must select the new lawmaker from those three names. Current law gives the precinct committeemen deadlines to nominate the candidates, but it doesn’t require the supervisors to make their final decision within any amount of time. You can read the law here.

Last year, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors took an unprecedented three weeks to appoint a replacement for Republican Rep. Liz Harris after she was expelled for inviting conspiracy theorists to the Capitol to accuse her colleagues of crimes. 

At the time, Republican Sen. J.D. Mesnard told his fellow senators that he had his suspicions about why supervisors were taking so long to appoint Harris’ replacement — including that they didn’t want to appoint any of the three candidates that party activists nominated. 

That’s exactly what happened, Democratic Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo told us yesterday. All three of the Republican nominees were election deniers, he said, and one of the nominees was Harris, the expelled lawmaker.

“Legitimately, we had a meeting with the county attorney’s office to ask, ‘What are our responsibilities here? Is this a possibility we could send the list back to the PCs and say thank you, but no thank you? Send us three new names,’” he recalled.

When a Democrat’s seat is vacant, it’s not such a big deal — an absent vote is the same as a “no” vote. But Harris’ expulsion left House Republicans without a functioning majority to pass legislation. 

So during last year’s vacancy, Mesnard started drafting a bill to force the supervisors to make their selection within five days of receiving the list of three names from party activists. But after the drama died down, he forgot about it until we asked. He said he’s going to dig it up and file it this year.³

Passing a bill now won’t change the process for this year, when we’ll likely see at least four new appointments to the Legislature, starting with today’s. Including last year’s four new appointments, nearly 10% of lawmakers in the state will have won the job without earning a single vote from voters. 

Regular citizens don’t have a say in who represents them through the appointment process, and Gallardo said any reform lawmakers come up with should include more citizen involvement beyond just the hard-core party activists who are registered precinct committeemen.  

”The public is not involved unless they’re PC,” He said. “I'm a big proponent and making sure that we have some feedback or some consideration by the public.” 

You can tune in to today’s meeting at 10:30 a.m. to see who the supervisors appoint.⁴

Resign or fight?: The House Ethics Committee issued a 12-page final report saying Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun “engaged in a pattern of inappropriate behavior,” which is an expellable offense. The committee members found Sun threatened the superintendent of the Littleton Elementary School District, misused her title as a state representative in a private custody matter and made a death threat toward a Tolleson city employee. It’ll require a two-thirds vote from the full House if lawmakers ultimately decide to expel her. 

What a week: Republican Rep. David Livingston found out through a 23andMe test that he has a 38-year-old daughter he never knew about, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. Livingston figured the daughter must have been conceived during his freshman year at ASU when he was having “relations,” as he puts it, but never knew about the pregnancy. It’s not the first time an Arizona lawmaker found out about a surprise offspring — two years ago, former Rep. Jay Lawrence announced he found out he has a daughter from Utah in a less sentimental way. 

So she can be bought: U.S. Senate hopeful Kari Lake’s latest candidate financial disclosure reports show she earned more than $100,000 working for Superfeed Technologies, which was formerly headed by Jeff DeWit, who also formerly headed the Arizona Republican Party until resigning after Lake dropped a secret recording outing him for bribing her. Lake also earned $100,000 from a book deal and $75,000 in speaking fees before she kicked off her Senate campaign, the Republic’s Ronald Hansen reports. 

Still keeping us guessing: The window for U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to gather enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot is narrowing, and the independent’s inner circle is weighing whether voters value her bipartisan brand enough to reelect her, the Washington Post’s Liz Goodwin and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez write. The outcome of the deal she’s crafting to address the migrant crossings at the border could be a key indicator, but Sinema’s tepid fundraising efforts and the uncertainty of a third-party candidate could paint an even clearer picture. 

Saving ourselves into a deficit: Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne claimed the state’s ESA program saves taxpayers’ money at a press conference yesterday as Senate President Warren Petersen shot down journalists’ questions as “biased,” the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Recent estimates place the cost of the program $100 million above initial estimates, but the state’s budget didn’t take a hit. That’s because Arizona allocated more money than necessary to the education budget this year after overestimating how many students would attend public schools. That inflated student count has left the state education department with a $28.5 million surplus.

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This space is reserved for gawking at astoundingly large numbers and humbly asking for $12 so we can continue writing this newsletter.

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Lot of this going around: A Phoenix man was hit with three years of probation after threatening to poison Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates in an email, per the Republic’s Sasha Hupka. Gates has previously said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of harassment from election deniers in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

Hair bias: Democratic Rep. Quantá Crews, the only Black woman in the House, is pushing legislation to ban race-based hair discrimination against employees and students, the Arizona Mirror’s Leah Britton reports. The bill is similar to the CROWN Act that has passed in 23 states and 51 cities, including Tucson and Tempe. 

Back to being a civilian: The Phoenix Police Department’s head of civilian oversight is resigning after two years on the job, per 12News’ Melissa Blasius. Roger Smith was hired after a record number of police shootings and a federal investigation into the police department, but the program he headed to investigate use-of-force allegations was curtailed by a 2022 state law that limited who can investigate police conduct. 

Suing for peace: The city of South Tucson is suing two multi-family residential properties for not managing criminal activity from residents and visitors, AZPM’s Paola Rodriguez reports. The city is suggesting a remediation plan that involves increased lighting, security and a “crime-free” addendum on leases. 

Grand acknowledgment: The U.S. Geological Survey published a 20-page report acknowledging the harms uranium mining in northern Arizona poses to the Havasupai Tribe, KJZZ’s Michel Marizco writes. Mining near the Grand Canyon could impact rituals like collecting medicinal plants and breathing in smoke from sage, the report found.  

We have a new neighbor on Our Regretable Platform, Substack. We’ve previously noted that former state Rep. Mark Finchem maintains a brain dump on this site, but we’d now like to introduce you to Republican Rep. Rachel Jones’ new Substack, Reclaiming the Copper Dome. Here’s a snippet from her inaugural edition:

“Why am I branching out and becoming one of few elected officials using SubStack as a main channel of communicating with constituents and other citizens?  Because I’m sick of cringeworthy, canned political e-mails that start off, “Dear ____” and in some cases, are obviously not written by the individual on the campaign banner.  This platform will allow me to organize my thoughts most pertinently according to the business of the day and present meaningful content in many formats.”

To answer your next question: Yes, of course we subscribed!

Also, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio informs us he’s heading to the U.S.-Mexico border to campaign for a candidate from a state that touches the U.S.-Canada border. 

1. At least, it’s the longest vacancy while the Legislature is actually in session.

2. Sun could, of course, resign, but that seems unlikely. It seems equally unlikely that a vote to expel her would fail. But we may not have seen the last of Sun anyway — last we checked she was still a candidate to challenge her district’s senator, fellow Democrat Eva Diaz.

3. However, because Mesnard forgot to file the bill before the deadline for senators to introduce bills, he noted that he’ll now have to use a “strike-everything amendment” to get it heard this year, which is funny considering that when he was House speaker, he tried to ban strike-everything amendments. 

4. The smart money is on Democrat Jevin Hodge.