The Ben Toma tell-all

Before he began a nearly eight-year career at the Arizona Legislature — one that ended with holding one of the most politically powerful jobs in the state — former House Speaker Ben Toma had only been inside the House one time.

He was chaperoning his kids’ field trip.

The second time was after the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors unexpectedly appointed him to take over for a resigning state lawmaker in 2017.

He recalls the supervisors announcing his appointment, then being promptly whisked away in an SUV with then-House speaker and current Sen. JD Mesnard, and sworn in as a state lawmaker.

We recently spent an hour talking with the former speaker about all sorts of things, like how he became chairman of the powerful tax-setting Ways and Means Committee without ever doing his own taxes, and about how being loud is easy but “governing is hard.”

We wanted to hear what someone who spent years inside the Legislature had to say about the process now that he’s outside it. And, as someone who spent years wrangling Republican votes, Toma must have some insight into what he thinks is going wrong in his increasingly fractured party.

Toma had plenty to say.

And that unexpected appointment was just one of several twists that shaped the course of his life, and in some cases, the course of Arizona.

After he was first appointed to his Peoria-area district, Toma was elected to three more terms in the House, where he played a key role in major state policies, including Arizona’s flat income tax and universal school voucher expansion. During his final term as speaker of the House, a Democrat entered the governor’s office for the first time in 14 years, and the GOP held a razor-thin one-vote majority.

But after losing his 2024 congressional bid, Toma has turned some of that experience into a broader critique of where Arizona politics, and his party, are heading.

Toma got his first lesson in responsibility long before he entered politics.

He was 9 years old when the secret police in communist Romania showed up at his grandmother’s house and announced he and his three younger siblings had just days to leave the country.

At the time, Toma didn’t speak English, and the employee assigned to help him and his siblings at the airport didn’t speak Romanian. But the guy looked official enough, so Toma handed him the folder and followed his lead.

Toma shepherded his three younger siblings from Romania to Portland, Oregon, where they reunited with their parents after nearly two years apart.

The family eventually left the rainy Pacific Northwest for Arizona. There, Toma built a corporate career at American Express before moving into real estate and starting his own firm.

He got his start in politics almost by mistake: a local political operative came into his office hoping to recruit Toma’s younger brother for a 2014 appointment on the Peoria City Council. His brother wasn’t interested, but the operative discovered Toma lived in the right district and suggested he put his own name forward instead.

But a few months later (after an election screw-up in which officials sent out two rounds of ballots missing one of the candidates, delaying the City Council election for months), Toma ultimately lost the special election to keep the council seat.

He stayed politically active, though — enough to land on local Republican precinct committeemen’s short list of nominees when Republican Rep. Phil Lovas resigned from his House seat a few years later.

But at an April 2017 Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting, Toma said he wasn’t expecting to hear his name announced as the state’s newest lawmaker, let alone to be ushered straight to the Capitol to start voting as one.

Here’s what Toma had to say about his path through Arizona politics, edited for clarity and length.

(District Republicans) knew me as a worker, and they called and said, “Hey, this appointment is going to happen. Would you consider running?” I said no at first.

Then, a day or so later, they actually called my wife to have her talk to me about it and convince me that this wasn’t going to be the same type of process as (his City Council appointment).

So after we all talked, I said, “Well, okay, that’s fine. It’s not going to be years of this process. Might as well put (my) hat in the ring.”

They told the three of us (potential appointees) to come with our spouses to the county meeting that Wednesday. My wife and I made brunch plans because neither of us expected me to be picked.

When we got there, we were number 40 on a 40-something-item agenda. So we thought, “Oh, this is going to be great for brunch.”

But JD Mesnard, who was speaker at the time, went up and spoke to the supervisors. As soon as the meeting started, they said, “Look, the speaker’s here. They need this person to vote today, so we’re going to move the last agenda item to the first.”

I thought, okay, well, at least brunch is back on.

Then (former Supervisor) Clint Hickman started speaking. I don’t know what he said, and then he said my name. After that, I honestly don’t remember much because I did not expect it at all. I went up there and said something. It was probably incoherent because I don’t know that anybody understood it.

And right away, the speaker, who I had just met for the first time, said, “Well, you’ve got to come with us. You’re going to come in the SUV with us. We’re going to go straight to the House. We’re going to swear you in, and you’re going to start voting.”

It was kind of nuts. Within 30, 45 minutes of hearing my name at the county, I was sworn in and voting on my first bills.

I remember House counsel sitting next to me while the votes were happening pretty quickly, and I kept turning to him and asking, “What does this do?”

Finally, he was honest with me and said, “I could try to explain all this to you, but really, you have no choice. You should be voting however leadership votes.”

There was one bill related to school choice that ended up passing 31-29, and I was the deciding vote, I guess, in a sense.

I could have waited until I fully understood it. But in the heat of the moment, it’s a lot easier said than done.

After the 2018 election, Republicans went into 2019 with a 31-29 majority (in the House), and Rusty Bowers became speaker. I had asked to be on Commerce because my background was American Express and running my own business.

But (Republican Rep.) Jeff Weninger remained Commerce chairman, so I remember the speaker calling and saying, “Hey Ben, I’ve decided that I think you should go ahead and take over and be chairman of Ways and Means.”

And I said, “Mr. Speaker, I don’t know anything about tax policy. I’ve never done my own taxes.” To this day, by the way, that’s true.

He said, “You’re perfect. That’s exactly what we need. Somebody who isn’t close to this and can try to be reasonable about what you do.”

That was the year the Wayfair decision came down, and states were scrambling to figure out how to implement it. So I dove right into that. (South Dakota v. Wayfair was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 2018 that essentially said states can charge sales taxes on online businesses that have no physical presence in the state.)

I didn’t have any background in the complications of the tax code, especially when it came to cities, counties and Arizona’s TPT (sales tax) system. But in some ways, that ignorance worked out really well because I wasn’t anybody’s guy.

I met with everybody. I lost track of the number of meetings, but we spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way forward.

I’m not a tax fan, obviously, but to me, it seemed fundamentally unfair that brick-and-mortar businesses were required to charge TPT while online businesses were not. It just didn’t make sense. I’m a philosophy major, so fairness is important.

We eventually found a way to do what a lot of people thought was impossible. And the structural changes we made with Wayfair helped set up the flat tax a couple of years later.

The flat tax would not have been possible without the Wayfair bill.

That might sound like I know a lot of what I’m talking about. I learned it at the time.

By the time I came to do the flat tax, I was the newly elected majority leader, and we were still 31-29. So that was quite the negotiation.

I will say there are members — who shall remain unnamed — who are still there now and were highly skeptical and holdouts who are now championing (the flat tax) all the way. So it’s kind of ironic how that happens in politics.

I think this brings up a different thing that’s at the core of what’s wrong with a lot of our system now: You don’t have to be a jerk to disagree with someone.

You can disagree politely, and that’s what I’ve always tried to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s someone in the same party or a Democrat or whatever. You should be able to say why you disagree and have a civil conversation about it without resorting to name-calling, questioning someone’s motives or the ugliness you’re seeing more and more nowadays.

There were times when the governor and I disagreed. With respect, I would say sometimes it was because he wasn’t as close to the issue or hadn’t looked at it closely enough to understand what we were doing.

In 2019, it was the Wayfair bill combined with the conformity bill that ended up eliminating one of the tax brackets and simplifying some of the others that set up the flat tax.

The process is always the same, or at least historically it has been, as far as I’m aware. Usually, a day or so after the election, whoever looks like they’ve won will get together in a closed caucus and pick leadership.

The process is a secret ballot. If there are multiple people running and no one gets more than half, you keep going until someone gets a majority.

In my case, it wasn’t unanimous. I was challenged by (former Republican Rep.) Joseph Chaplik (one of the leaders of the Freedom Caucus).

I believe I won by four or five votes. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s not all that close given that there were only 31 people voting.

We did have a one-vote majority, so it’s a tough place to be when you’re leading with such tight margins. Anything that’s a priority for the majority has to have 100% approval. Any one person is a veto in that way.

And then, of course, we had a governor of a different party for the first time in some time, which added to the challenge.

Having just come off those things, my biggest concern was making sure we protected what we had passed and gave it time to be implemented.

And from a fiscal perspective, that’s always been important to me. I see what’s happening in D.C., and let’s just say I’m concerned. At some point, the bill comes due.

So I wanted to make sure we kept our financial house in order, that we were responsible and that we didn’t spend too much.

If you cut your income but don’t cut your spending, or at least maintain your spending and allow other sources of income to catch up, and you continue spending like a drunk sailor, it’s not going to end well.

All of that was in the back of my mind as I was thinking about how to protect the state and our financial health, especially post-COVID and coming into a new administration. I’m not going to say it was easy, because it wasn’t. But I would say it was important, and in the end I was largely successful.

More frequently than I would like, that’s for sure.

I think, unfortunately, it’s an import from what you’re seeing at the national level. And I thought a lot about this, during that time, but especially since — that part of the problem is that the incentives are all wrong now for being in office.

It seems like if you want to move on to higher office, what you have to do is constantly communicate that you’re fighting — that you’re the pure one, that you’re out there fighting for your team. Regardless of whether you’re on the left or the right, you’re trying to make Republicans more Republican or Democrats more Democrat.

I think what’s lost in all that is: What have you actually done?

And governing is hard. You have to balance competing needs with limited resources. When you’re in the minority, you can constantly point to all the ways the majority is messing things up without having to actually govern yourself.

It’s almost like you can stand behind your white picket fence and shake your finger at everybody passing by.

I think voters need to stop looking at social media posts and self-promotion fluff pieces and start looking at: What did you actually do while you were there?

And when it’s your own internal party fights, those are in many ways the ugliest and often the most unnecessary.

The other thing that finally dawned on me is that everybody focuses on swing districts when it comes to taking control. But in a state like ours that could go either way, the safe districts are the ones that pull the party one way or the other.

You have these ultra-MAGA, ultra-conservative — whatever term you want to use — members on our side, and then you have the AOCs of the world on the left, pulling the parties in completely different directions in ways that are actually detrimental to winning those swing districts.

I put my name in the race because originally it was supposed to be just me versus Abe, in terms of the big names. I knew there were going to be others, but that’s what it was supposed to be.

I was asked by the current congresswoman (now Maricopa County Supervisor Debbie Lesko) to run. I was the person she called, so I thought, okay, with her support, even with the Trump endorsement of Abe, I felt there was a path to victory.

But then Masters jumped in, and the one that was actually the killer for me was former Congressman Trent Franks jumping in. If you look at the final numbers, I was third, but that 15% that went to Franks most likely would have gone mostly in my direction. That potentially could have resulted in a win, or at least it would have been very, very close.

I would say I learned a lot through that process. I don’t like to pick fights I can’t win, and I didn’t initially pick a fight I couldn’t win. But things developed in a way that made it unwinnable for me given how everything was divided.

If there was a mistake, it was probably not deciding to call it sooner. It’s easy to say that in hindsight, but I really do think it would have been a completely different outcome if Franks hadn’t jumped in.

I don’t have anything specific at this point. I obviously still care quite a bit, but I’ve been doing a lot of the things that got put on the back burner — things that were important on a personal level and needed to be done.

I think it’s actually an understatement to say that it’s very costly to be there. I mean that financially, emotionally, relationally and so on. You learn a lot, but make no mistake, it’s very costly to be there.

In terms of what’s next, I honestly don’t know. I haven’t decided on anything, and I’m not sure that I will anytime real soon.

I realized that I never really intended to be on the City Council, and I got there. I never intended to be in the state House, and I got there. And then I changed the state, and I probably changed the nation, at least in terms of education.

So I don’t know. As much as it’s uncomfortable, I think waiting for something more concrete and for the right thing is probably the right choice for now.