Scandals and Silence
Democrats don't wanna talk about Jevin ... Katie keeps on vetoing ... And all the kids wanna be Queen Paul.
After news broke Monday that brand new Democratic Rep. Jevin Hodge was accused of sexual assault in college, his fellow Democrats are publicly remaining quiet about the allegations and privately planning for Hodge’s potential departure.
The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl broke the story that Hodge, who was appointed to the Legislature less than two months ago, was suspended from George Washington University nearly a decade ago after a hearing board found he violated sexual violence policies. Pitzl corroborated the claims with documents from the university that show the woman reported that Hodge sexually assaulted her in his Washington D.C. apartment in 2015. Hodge denies the claims, and said he stopped sexually pursuing the women after she told him to. The woman said Hodge’s lawyers threatened a defamation lawsuit against her and offered to drop the case if she signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Hodge was widely viewed as a rising star in Democratic circles, until about 6:01 a.m. Monday, when Pitzl’s story dropped.
Now, the Capitol community is waiting on his resignation.
But Hodge’s appointment to the House raises obvious questions about who knew what when regarding these decade-old allegations and the paper trail of documents backing them up — and why Democrats allowed him to be appointed to the office.
Unfortunately, his Democratic colleagues aren’t offering many answers.
Democrats were widely unavailable to speak at the Capitol yesterday, and many didn’t return our phone calls. Others referred us to the statement that House Democratic leadership — Reps. Lupe Contreras, Oscar De Los Santos, Nancy Gutierrez and Melody Hernandez — had already released, saying the caucus stands with survivors of sexual violence, and it was all news to them.
House Democrats held a closed-door briefing on the Hodge allegations Monday morning, per our sources at the Capitol. And given their silence, part of that briefing likely included instructions not to talk to the press.
Hodge was noticeably missing from his desk on the House floor.
And although Democratic leaders at the Capitol may have, indeed, been caught off guard by the allegations, it’s clear that people in the party knew.
In 2022, Hodge ran to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert in Congressional District 1, and lost in a pretty close race. Pitzl reports the victim’s friend called the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in early 2023 to tell them about the alleged assault, but it never became public knowledge. Hodge announced he wouldn’t run again right around that time.
While Democrats are likely leaning on Hodge to resign, the situation compounds the issue of Democratic vacancies in a caucus trying to take over the majority next year.
House Democrats are already dealing with a cascading brain drain on their caucus. Democratic Reps. Leezah Sun, Jennifer Longdon, Amish Shah and Athena Salman1 resigned this year alone. Democratic Rep. Marcelino Quiñonez and Democratic Rep. Laura Terech announced they won’t run for reelection.2
And more importantly, it raises questions about how potential lawmakers are vetted before they end up representing Arizonans at the Capitol — especially when they aren’t elected.
Our sister ‘sletter, Tucson Agenda, has a great story today about how Gov. Katie Hobbs’ new prison director opened the doors for a Tucson nonprofit to start once again shipping donated books to people in Arizona prisons.
Read Between the Bars started in 2007 as a program to get used, donated books to people in prison. But in 2017, organizers noticed a large number of packages being returned by the prisons, per outreach director and longtime volunteer Becca Fealk. Eventually, all of Arizona’s prisons adopted the same policy that unless a sender was an authorized distributor, essentially a bookstore, they could not send books to prisons.
The policy started under Director Charles Ryan and continued under his successor David Shinn, who didn’t respond to the group’s attempts to speak with him about the issue
But when Hobbs appointed Ryan Thornell to the position following Shinn’s departure, the situation took an abrupt turn.
“He was immediately open to working with us and getting things back up and running,” Fealk said.
In January, the group sent off its first shipment of books in seven years. They’ve been regularly shipping books since.
Fealk told our sister ‘sletter that while she and other volunteers are happy to be back at work fulfilling its mission, it’s also satisfying to see Arizona on the right side of the increasing trend of prisons banning books.
“People should be concerned about this. We hear a lot about banning books for kids or banning topics because they’re taboo, but if people can’t get books, that’s a whole other issue,” Fealk said. “Director Thornell started to buck that trend and let this resource in. That’s really important for Arizona.”
Not in Katie’s Backyard: Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the “Starter Homes Act” that would have barred some cities and towns from regulating lot sizes for single-family homes. The bill had bipartisan support, but like all of the city-centric solutions that lawmakers have proposed to Arizona’s housing crisis, city leaders and the League of Arizona Cities and Towns lobbied hard against it. Hobbs said the bill would have “put Arizona at the center of a housing reform experiment with unclear outcomes,” citing concerns from firefighters about residential density and the Department of Defense about density near military bases. Progressive Democrats like Rep. Analise Ortiz said it doesn’t appear the governor has a housing plan and called her veto “wishful thinking” and said the problem can be solved without zoning reform. Meanwhile, home developer and Senate President Warren Petersen criticized cities for being willing to change ordinances to let people sleep in their cars, but not zoning to speed up construction.
“(Hobbs is) listening to the people who created the problem,” Petersen said in a statement.
Dominoes keep falling Part 1: Democrat Yassamin Ansari resigned from the Phoenix City Council as she seeks the Democratic nomination to win U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego’s seat in Congress. City Council members will appoint a replacement next month to serve until a special election in November (and potentially a runoff in March if no candidate wins more than 50% on the first round), per the Republic’s Taylor Seely. Mayor Kate Gallego has allegedly been angling to get Democratic Rep. Marcelino Quiñonez appointed to the seat, seeing him as a better ally on her centrist Council than progressive Democratic Sen. Anna Hernandez, who announced last month that she would run for the seat on the council (and move into the district before the election). Quiñonez officially announced he’s not running for reelection yesterday after refusing to tell us last week if he would resign to seek the City Council seat. He didn’t mention any plans.
Dominoes keep falling Part 2: Democratic Rep. Laura Terech announced yesterday that she won’t run for reelection. Any candidate trying to replace her in the uber-competitive Legislative District 4 has just two weeks to gather at least 485 valid signatures from Democratic or independent voters in the district to qualify for the ballot. Former lawmaker Kelli Butler, who’s now on the Maricopa County Community College District board, quickly announced she’s running for Terech’s seat in what appears to be a coordinated candidate swap.
The Arizona Agenda has all the hot gossip about lawmakers’ comings and goings. To keep your whole office up on the goss, get a group subscription.
A real nail-biter: It’s Election Day in Arizona! If, like Hank, you still haven’t voted, head on down to any county polling location. (If you live outside of Maricopa County, check out your county recorder’s page or the Clean Elections tool seems to work for all counties.) If you’re not registered with one of the two major parties, you can’t vote in this Presidential Preference Election, even though you’re paying for it, as KJZZ’s Ben Giles helpfully explains on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” But you can still vote in the July primary — you just have to pick a Republican or Democratic ballot.
Personal update: Democratic Sen. Eva Burch told her colleagues on the Senate floor yesterday that she plans to get an abortion, saying it’s not her first planned but non-viable pregnancy and an abortion is the safest choice for her, the Huffington Post’s Alanna Vagianos reports.
“I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions,” Burch said. “But I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world.”
Victory tours: President Joe Biden is in Arizona today and tomorrow, though his actual agenda was still unclear Monday, beyond “motivating voters,” per the New York Times. Donald Trump skipped a planned trip to Arizona last week in favor of the Ohio speech where he said it would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, but not actually in the context that many news organizations implied.
Speaking of news: The Goldwater Institute got ahold of the curriculum and coursework for a Cronkite School of Journalism class at ASU where students are taught about avoiding “microaggressions,” checking one’s “cisgender privilege,” and using “preferred pronouns.” And the Sierra Vista Herald-Review has started running stories from the Epoch Times, a far-right conspiracy news organization with ties to a weird religious movement that’s doing very well financially, including this piece about a Boeing whistleblower who may or may not have committed suicide. Epoch Times recently started putting up billboards in the Valley, we noticed.
January 6, 2024: The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors tightened up its security procedures after an “organized, coordinated attack” in February where people rushed at the dias after the meeting, shouting that supervisors were illegitimate, the Washington Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Adriana Usero report. County officials think was a “dress rehearsal” for the insurrections to come. Also, one of the Jan. 6 rioters, a conservative influencer who stole a table and assaulted an officer, was an intern for U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, 12News’ Brahm Resnik notes. And for the British rendition of “American democracy is teetering and Arizona is ground zero,” check out Ed Pilkington’s piece in the Guardian, where he spent “a glorious spring day” in Phoenix, spoke to Mohave County’s election deniers and generally found “troubled times” in Arizona.
“I’m here today to put you on public notice and to inform you that you are not our elected officials,” said Michelle Klann, co-founder of a pro-Trump group, from a podium she had commandeered, per the Post. “This is an act of insurrection. Due to all the voter fraud, you have never been formally voted in.”
Always an Arizona angle: A South Carolina man whose son went missing near Buckeye three years ago is running for Congress in his home state in a campaign focused on helping families of missing people, 12News’ Chris Latrella writes. David Robinson helped organize dozens of unsuccessful searches for his son Daniel Robinson in the Arizona desert.
The kids of Cottonwood performed a play of “Sleeping Beauty” and now the whole area is in a tizzy.
The very simple version of this fascinatingly insular story in the Verde Valley Independent and Camp Verde Bugle is that a local school district superintendent apologized to families for allowing a female student to play a queen named “Paul.”
Queen Paul was a fictional character in the play, played by a female student in traditional female attire. She married King Wallace, who was portrayed by a male student actor wearing traditional male attire.
No, you’re not misunderstanding. There is nothing “weird” going on here besides a queen being named “Paul.” Still, some parents were outraged.
Longtime local high school theater teacher James Ball, who “was the recipient of the Arizona Thespians Teacher of the Year Award for the Northern Region in 2023,” was a little bewildered by the reaction, per the paper.
“We had 9 roles to cast with 8 students in the class. It was a group class project and the student who was cast as Queen wasn’t comfortable wearing a dress,” Ball told The Verde Independent in an email. “The students asked if they could do it as King Paul, and I said we had to keep it as a queen and king, but eventually compromised with Queen Paul … Perhaps some people took what we did as some deeper or political meaning that wasn’t meant or intended to be there.”
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointed Hodge to replace Salman.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this piece said Quiñonez resigned. He said he won’t seek reelection, but did not resign.
I'm much more interested in what the party infrastructure (the state party, the DCCC, and the DLCC) knew about the allegations against Jevin Hodge than I am what his "Democratic colleagues" knew. I'm not sure how the Members themselves could have been expected to know anything. Has his mother, the Tempe city councilmember, commented?
Someone please explain to me slowly - in small words - and short sentences - the proclivity of Democrats to skewer and eat their own progeny.
The Republican candidate for MCC Board, caught Vaseline-Lubed-Red-Handed masturbating in the parking lot of a community college (while watching kiddos play at the neighboring daycare center), not only survived the calls for him to stand down, but captured 36% of the vote.
JFK, Bobby K, Ted K, and Wicked Willy Clinton come to mind quickly when I think of old-school Dems who did some despicable things but held their office.
How times have changed. Today's Democrat candidates wither and run away over the mention of any possible prior offense, while today's Republican candidates adopt the old Kennedy clan excuse of "boys being boys". Hodge had a great future - certainly damaged by the reports of whatever happened a decade ago. But had he chosen to fight through this issue, he could have prevailed.
Our State is not a better State by applying the Cancel-Culture to Devin. There will be lots more Dems like Hodge who come forward in the future. People with great futures and great minds - but also humans who failed at some time in their past. At some point those future stars of the Dem party need to power through their past, prove their future value and stop walking off in shame with their heads bowed.