The Daily Agenda: Attendance matters

They changed the magic numbers! … That's a wrap ... And leave the endangered fish and Gila monsters alone.

It’s not often that Democrats’ “no” votes actually matter at the state Capitol. But yesterday, they really needed everyone to show up. 

With rare exceptions, the magic numbers in the House and Senate are 31 and 16: It takes 31 votes to form a simple majority in the House, and 16 votes in the Senate. With a simple majority, lawmakers can do almost¹ anything. It also happens to be the exact margin of seats that Republicans control. 

A coalition of 30 votes in the House doesn’t have power to do much except to stop bills from passing. And, apparently, 30 votes is enough to censure a fellow lawmaker. 

Yes, we’re talking about #BibleGate.

Republican lawmakers yesterday attempted to expel Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton after they set up a sting operation and caught the ordained minister on hidden camera taking some Bibles that were laying around the House and hiding them in a minifridge and under couch cushions, which she later claimed was a prank/protest about the separation of church and state. 

When the expulsion vote failed, Republicans settled for censuring Stahl-Hamilton instead, even though a majority of representative didn’t want to do that. 

And if you’re surprised that a lawmaker can be censured with less than a majority of the chamber voting in support, you’re not alone! 

Democrats were also pretty surprised. As, presumably², was Republican Rep. David Cook, who stuck his neck out to support the Democrat with an impassioned speech about how he spoke to Stahl-Hamilton as a professional and as a friend, and he thinks lawmakers were heading down a slippery slope making an example of her.

“I've been ridiculed, and I do not like public shaming. I don't like it in schools. I don't like it in churches. And I darn sure don't like it here as it's being used as a weapon. This should have all been taken care of by leadership on both sides of the aisle and the members involved,” Cook said. 

For a moment, it appeared Cook had saved his Democratic colleague from a censure. 

But Republicans were able to censure Stahl-Hamilton anyway, without a Cook or a 31-vote majority, because the censure was a motion, not a resolution. And that one bit of geeky minutiae made all the difference. 

The House hasn’t censured a lawmaker in recent history. But it has expelled a few. And each time, it has used a resolution to do so, not a motion, the House Chief Clerk’s Office confirmed.³ So nobody really thought through the implications of the censure being in the form of a motion, one Democrat told us.

With Cook’s support, Democrats would have had 30 votes, enough to block Stahl-Hamilton from being censured. That’s if everyone had shown up. 

But two House Democrats were absent: Reps. Stacey Travers and Alma Hernandez. Travers was caring for her sick mother, the House tells us, while Hernandez was at an event at the White House. Because 30 to censure her was a majority of the 58 who showed up, it was enough to carry the motion.  

During debate, Democrats argued that Stahl-Hamilton was the victim of a coordinated attack on her character to score political points.

“I believe that from start to finish, from the moment that staff installed a spy camera into the members lounge all the way to how we got to this censure vote and everything in between, has been orchestrated to harass and bully my colleague,” Democratic Rep. Athena Salman said, noting the House has refused to turn over all the footage the cameras shot. 

Republicans argued the debate would be going very differently if it was one of them who hid a Quran. 

“If we had a Muslim member of our body who asked for the Quran to be placed in the lobby, and I was to take that Quran and throw it in a freezer or put it under the cushions of chairs for members to sit on, the calls from my Democratic colleagues for my expulsion would be deafening,” Republican Rep. Justin Heap responded.

Both are probably true. 

Hiding the Bibles was childish and disrespectful and unbecoming of a lawmaker or minister. Setting up a hidden camera in a semi-private office and calling a vote to sanction her without clearly explaining the rules was overkill and sneaky. 

The House burned an immense amount of time, energy and goodwill on this relatively benign controversy. There’s a lot of shady stuff happening at the Capitol, and we can think of much better uses of the Ethics Committee’s resources than #BibleGate. 

The Legislature adjourned yesterday until July 31, marking another backbreaking two-day workweek for our public servants.

Here’s a roundup of a few things lawmakers did and didn’t accomplish:

✅Rio Verde Foothills: Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin’s bill to create a new government entity that can buy and deliver water to the water-impoverished Rio Verde Foothills residents is on its way to Gov. Katie Hobbs, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. 

✅Rental tax ban: Lawmakers are trying again to get Hobbs’ signature on a bill to ban cities from collecting rental taxes after she vetoed a previous version, Camryn Sanchez writes in the Capitol Times. 

✅Water grants: Lawmakers passed legislation to fix an oversight in a bill from last year that meant tribal governments weren’t eligible to access certain water conservation grants.

✅Voter warning: Lawmakers sent Hobbs a bill that would require early ballot envelopes contain a warning that dropping off early ballots at the last minute delays election results. ⁴

❌Housing: Lawmakers left town without accomplishing any meaningful reform on affordable housing after Republican Sen. Steve Kaiser “could not get a majority of fellow Republicans in the House or the Senate to get on board,” Capitol Media Services reports. Support from a majority of the majority party has become a new standard for whether bills receive votes.

❌Homeless camps: Republican defectors in the House killed a bill that would have forced cities to clear out homeless encampments, or else provide toilets, potable water and showers.

❌Prop 400: Technically a Prop 400 extension should be in the did accomplish category, since Republican lawmakers did send a plan to Hobbs, as the Republic reports. But it’s so certain to receive a veto that it’s going on the didn’t accomplish list. 

He’s had enough: Republican Sen. Steve Kaiser is quitting the Legislature as of Friday, he tells AZFamily’s Dennis Welch. Kaiser has been one of the few moderate Republican voices left at the state Senate and he spent the last year focused on affordable housing legislation, which failed the day before his announcement. He says he wants to focus on his nonprofit to grow the Republican majority at the Capitol, presumably with more center-right conservatives like himself.

Sweetheart deal: Charles Ryan, the former head of the Arizona Department of Corrections who was accused of getting drunk and then pointing a gun at Tempe police officers during an hours-long standoff at his house in January 2022, could get a plea deal soon, Matthew Casey reports for KJZZ. He faces weapons charges, rather than aggravated assault on a police officer.

Not bad work, if you can get it: Legislators are expected to collectively get $409,000 in per diem allowances for doing very little work during the extended legislative session, per 12News’ Brahm Resnik’s math, which Democrats cited yesterday when attempting to adjourn for the year. (It would also make the 2023 session the longest legislative session in history). One reason legislators cited for needing a longer session is to vet Hobbs’ director nominees, according to Sen. Jake Hoffman. But his committee already had months to consider those nominees, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda reports. Hoffman declined to address that when Duda asked him. 

We sometimes hear huge government numbers like $409,000 and think of all the great reporters we could employ with that kind of money. Anyway, subscribe!

Welcome to the club: The state’s recent decision to stop issuing water permits to housing developments without an assured water supply basically puts the Phoenix exurbs in the same position Pinal County has been in for six years, Casa Grande Mayor Craig McFarland tells Pinal Central’s Jodie Newell. 

Big plans: The New York Times has a glossy profile (with photos from Arizona’s Adriana Zehbrauskas) of Arizona’s tentative plans to build a desalination plant in Rocky Point, noting that besides having to pump water uphill across 200 miles, across a border and through Organ Pipe National monument, all that desalinated water would mean pumping a lot of brine into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening its fisheries. And the Arizona Luminaria has an in-depth feature about Sopori Creek conservation, a usually-dry tributary in southern Arizona in an area that was slated for development until voters blocked the deal and a nonprofit trust was set up to buy the land (which it is still fundraising to finish purchasing).

Tiny tents: The Maricopa County Republican Party stripped former Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson and her brother, former Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Andy Kunasek, of their voting rights as precinct committeemen and encouraged them both to resign last week, Republic columnist Laurie Roberts reports. The move came after they endorsed former cop Kevin Robinson, a Republican turned independent, over Sam Stone, a political operative and registered Republican, in the nonpartisan city council race last year. Roberts notes they join a long list of Republicans who are actually electable that the party has attacked. 

“Better, it seems, to lose — over and over and over again — than to compromise on, well, anything,” Roberts writes.

Today in critters: Customs and Border Patrol seized $2.7 million worth of endangered Totoaba Fish at the port in Nogales, the Republic’s Jose R. Gonzalez reports. The fish nicknamed the “cocaine of the sea” are worth $10,000 each on the black market and were hidden among other, non-endangered fish. And a 74-year-old Green Valley man is in critical condition after he attempted to save a Gila monster on the road and got bit on both hands, the Green Valley News reports.

(Legal disclaimer: Neither of these events are ha-ha funny — fish smuggling is a serious crime and we wish the Gila monster victim a speedy recovery in both hands. But they’re Arizona funny.)

1. Lawmakers need a two-thirds majority for a handful of things, like expelling a fellow lawmaker, raising taxes or adding an emergency clause to make a bill go into effect immediately upon the governor’s signature. And to amend voter-approved laws, they need a three-fourths majority, and then they can only amend to “further the intent” of the voter-approved laws.

2. Cook didn’t return our call, but Democrats were under the impression he also thought the motion needed 31 votes to pass. 

3. The Senate, however, used a motion to censure Republican Wendy Rogers last year. But that vote was overwhelming so the oddity of only needing a majority of those present didn’t come up.

4. CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated lawmakers sent Hobbs a bill to create a governing board overseeing the Arizona State Hospital. In fact, that provision was stripped from the bill before the final vote.