Politicians helping politicians
Me, me, me ... Our eyes on the border ... And axing the axeman.
Arizona’s 90 lawmakers are elected by their various communities to fight for and reflect the priorities of their constituents.
But often, they end up fighting for their own interests and the interests of their fellow politicians.
While doomscrolling the nearly 1,000 bills introduced in the state Legislature so far this year, we couldn’t help but spot a trend:1 From giving themselves raises, to shielding themselves from campaign finance complaints and protecting their political allies from arrest, lawmakers are looking out for Number One.
More Money
State lawmakers earn a measly $24,000 per year. Or at least, that’s what they’d like you to believe.
The state Constitution says lawmakers can only get a raise if an independent panel recommends it, and if the voters approve it.2 But lawmakers have found ways around that: In 2021, they approved a massive increase in rural lawmakers’ daily allowance.3
In reality, taxpayers are now paying many lawmakers close to $100,000 for what is essentially a six-month per year job, including their base salary, mileage and per diem.
State Rep. Chris Mathis wants to amend the state Constitution to roughly quadruple his base salary to $96,000 per year, tying lawmakers’ salaries to the salaries of county supervisors. His HCR2018 and related HB2347 would ask voters to do just that.
For what it’s worth, Mathis, a Tucson Democrat, pulled in more than $47,000 in per diem and mileage reimbursements in the first six months of last year4 – on top of his $24,000 per year salary.
Lawmakers and Lawbreakers
When lawmakers break campaign finance laws, they almost never face repercussions.
And in the rare instance that they’re fined, they’re usually able to settle for pennies on the dollar.
But those rules aren’t lenient enough for Republican Rep. Laurin Hendrix, who filed a pair of bills to ensure politicians aren’t troubled by our pesky campaign finance laws.
His HB2667 would toss out campaign finance complaints if enforcement officers don’t act on them within six months. His HB2666 would require people to prove they’re real people before they could file a campaign finance complaint against a politician.
Campaigning with Kids
Candidates have very few restrictions on how they can spend their campaign cash. But Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton wants to ensure those restrictions don’t prohibit candidates from paying for childcare or care for other family members.
Caregiving expenses aren’t on the short list of items that candidates are prohibited from using their campaign accounts to cover.
But her HB2466 makes it clear that it’s an approved expense. The bill specifically notes that the changes “are clarifying changes only and do not constitute substantive changes to existing law.”
Protecting Politicians
Politicians of a feather stick together. That’s why Republican Rep. Rachel Keshel, an adamant election conspiracist, filed HB2440, which would protect county supervisors who refuse to certify their local elections.
Two Cochise County supervisors faced criminal charges for initially refusing to certify the results of their county’s 2022 election. The threat of ending up like supervisors Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby was a major deterrent to several other conservative county boards that didn’t want to certify their election results.
But Keshel’s bill would prohibit the Attorney General’s Office or any local prosecutors from bringing civil or criminal charges against a supervisor who refuses to certify their county’s election — as long as the supervisor had “a good faith belief” that there was something fishy with the election.
Sleeping Late
Senate President Warren Petersen needs a little more time in the morning to prepare for the Legislature’s annual opening day festivities.
His SB1073 would scooch back the prescribed time for the Legislature to start from noon to 1 p.m.
President Donald Trump made immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border a big part of his pitch to voters, and now he’s launching an onslaught of new policies.
He’s trying to get rid of birthright citizenship. He wants to let immigration officers detain people in schools and churches. He’s dismantling the refugee system. The list goes on and on.
And that was just Week One. We have four more years of this.
How are you supposed to keep track of all this border news?
Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, put together a list of reliable local and national reporters who do the immigration beat right, along with public intellectuals who help make sense of it all.
Earn that diploma: Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne renewed his request to make high school students pass an exit exam to graduate in his State of Education speech. Republican Sen. John Kavanagh introduced a bill to make it happen, even though a similar bill failed in the Senate last year, the Republic’s Madeleine Parrish reports. Horne also used the speech to defend his policy of automatically reimbursing school voucher purchases of up to $2,000 and to promote an AI tutoring chatbot. In a departure from Republican messaging, however, Horne told the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer he doesn’t want immigration raids in schools.
You can automatically reimburse us for never-ending coverage of Arizona’s school voucher system by clicking this button.
Mass chaos: Undocumented workers in south Tucson are running drills in preparation for border patrol raids, while nonprofit and mutual aid groups are ramping up preparations for Trump’s promised mass deportations, per the Arizona Luminaria’s John Washington and Carolina Cuellar. Meanwhile, U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego joined 11 other Democrats to ask Republicans for “commonsense, and fair immigration enforcement” reforms, the Wall Street Journal reports. Both senators supported the Laken Riley Act, which requires detention for undocumented immigrants charged with crimes, and the 13 Democrats’ votes would be enough to bypass a Senate filibuster.
Death and taxes: Two independent contractors were paid in cash for performing executions in 2022, but in an apparent violation of federal tax law, the state Department of Administration didn’t find receipts for those payments, the Republic’s Jimmy Jenkins writes. Both contractors received $60,000 each for helping to kill death row inmates. Meanwhile, the Auditor General’s Office found 47 Arizona school districts are alarmingly close to exceeding their budgets, per Arizona Family’s Sarah Robinson.
Hidden provisions: Republican Rep. Matt Gress filed a bill to harshen penalties for group assaults in response to the death of 16-year-old Preston Lord in 2023, 12News’ Kevin Reagan writes. The legislation is the brainchild of Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell. The bill also tacks on a provision that anyone who assaults a peace officer has to be sentenced to two more years than the standard assault sentence.
Yikes: A Casa Grande resident submitted a court filing in November asking for permission to shoot Trump, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reports. The man, Rene Ortiz, filed an initial claim in Phoenix asking the court to let him shoot whoever won the 2024 election, and he followed up the request at a Tucson courthouse. He was arrested last week.
A beloved Tucson landmark is at risk of being axed.
The more than 60-year-old Paul Bunyan statue belongs to an auto repair shop that’s losing business despite the lumberjack’s advertising efforts, KGUN9’s Craig Smith reports. The property owners put the land up for sale.
That means Tucson Police will have to find a new hazing ritual.
New officers sometimes get a radio call for “Man with an axe, Glenn and Stone, man with an axe.”
As every journalist knows, a “trend” is any time you find three examples of something. We culled our list down to seven examples.
The last time voters agreed to give lawmakers a raise was in 1980. Voters have shot down 14 ballot measures attempting to raise lawmakers’ pay since then.
Fun fact: Former Gov. Doug Ducey let that legislative per diem increase bill go into law without actually signing it. That’s the only bill we remember him “pocket signing.”
We only have the data from January to July 2024, but that should be the vast majority of the per diem and mileage payments anyway since lawmakers only work six months per year.
Whenever I see a raise for our legislature on the ballot I want to vote for it. But before filling out my ballot I see what we get for our 24000 (or more) a year and can't do it. Maybe we would get better representatives if we paid more. I mean they could hardly be worse, could they?
The AZ Legislators not getting a raise for 24 years shows conservatism at its worst. The idea that you can get good laws on the cheap is delusional. And FYI, most of legislators I know, (many), work year round on state business. I say this as a Reaganite.