The Daily Agenda: Bad options abound

Appointees are rarely an improvement ... Executive orders are all the rage ... And disrespectfully, I quit!

We don’t yet know who will replace Steve Kaiser, a no-nonsense business conservative and state senator who abruptly quit the Legislature earlier this month. 

But it’s safe to say they’re an election denier. 

Republican activists in Kaiser’s north Phoenix legislative district met this week to select three potential replacements: Former lawmaker Shawnna Bolick, who is essentially Arizona’s Ginny Thomas, Twitter troll and Korean airplane conspiracy enthusiast Josh Barnett, and Paul Carver, who was in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, according to testimony provided to the U.S. House Select Committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol. 

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, whose Republican members have served as one of the strongest backstops against their party’s attempts to hijack the 2020 and 2022 elections, will make the final decision on which of the three election deniers gets the job. 

Supervisors weren’t exactly excited to talk about their conundrum when we called them yesterday, but it’s safe to assume they aren’t thrilled with their options. 

“We have to look at three people and try to make the best decision we can,” Supervisor Clint Hickman told us yesterday. “It’s a little bit frustrating that we’re supposed to make such a big decision with major consequences to the state and we only get to meet three people.” 

Kaiser wasn’t exactly a “moderate” of the old Republican Party. But he never indulged in the kinds of conspiracies and nonsense that have enveloped much of the modern GOP. His replacement, however, will not fit that mold. 

Bolick is a familiar face in Arizona political circles. She’s a former state lawmaker who is married to Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, and famously authored a bill to allow lawmakers to disregard the will of the voters in favor of picking their own “alternative slate” of presidential electors. She lost the GOP primary for Secretary of State last year to Mark Finchem. 

Barnett is also a known entity, assuming you spend a lot of time on the dark corners of Twitter. He’s a failed congressional candidate who helped invent and spread the lie that a bunch of ballots were being loaded on a Korean airplane among many other bizarre fantasies. 

We know less about Carver, the chairman of the Legislative District 2 Republican Party who was elected to the Deer Valley Unified School District Governing Board in November. But what we do know doesn’t give us much confidence.

His name pops up in a deposition from Ray Epps, the Arizona man who was deep in the MAGA movement until his fellow travelers decided he was an undercover FBI agent (he’s not) and started threatening his life. The testimony doesn’t shed much light on what, exactly, Carver did in D.C. that day, other than eat dinner with Epps. But couple that with his refusal to tell the Capitol Times’ Camryn Sanchez whether he believes elections in Arizona are free and fair, and his statement that he has “lost faith” in our elections, and you get a pretty good sense of what he believes.¹

Carver is also a “Three Percenter,” Right Wing Watch reported last year when he ran for school board, noting he “made no real attempt to hide his connection” to the anti-government militia organization, registering a local chapter as a nonprofit in Arizona and naming himself and his home address on documents. Kaiser, who said he quit the Legislature to focus on leading a center-right PAC to “grow the Republican majority,” nominated Carver to be his replacement and also backed the “Three Percenter” in last year’s school board race. 

But the smart money is on Bolick to get the appointment — if for no other reason than that she’s the best-known, most connected candidate for the job. And while Democrats can’t be happy with Bolick’s potential return to the Legislature, her likely appointment would carry one big silver lining for legislative Democrats: Bolick has lost more elections than she has won. 

In the uber-competitive Legislative District 2, her appointment might be the Democrats’ ticket to taking over the Senate in 2024. 

Out with the old, in with the new: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a pair of executive orders yesterday: One banning state money from going to “conversion therapy” that attempts to make LGBTQ kids straight and ordering state departments to develop policies to protect kids from the practice, and the other allowing the state health care plans to pay for “gender-affirming care” for adult state government and university employees so they can get medications and procedures to transition. Capitol scribe Howie Fischer has the details. 

No regrets: Former Gov. Doug Ducey joined reporter Dennis Welch for the inaugural edition of the “Politics Unplugged” podcast, telling Welch he has no regrets about campaigning for Donald Trump in 2020. Ducey offered his standard assessment that his party’s election deniers have lost since 2020, and Republicans talking about the economy and free markets won, without directly criticizing the former president. 

“Listen, there’s a Donald Trump before Election Day, and after Election Day,” Ducey said. “He won the presidency in 2016 fair and square … And I think those policies from 2016 to 2020 were good policies.” 

Not that they were doing it anyway: GOP lawmakers said they wouldn’t consider any of Hobbs’ department director nominees after she issued an executive order saying any prosecutions of abortion providers would be handled by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, rather than county prosecutors. In a letter to Hobbs, lawmakers said she was acting like a “monarch.” Hobbs’ spokesman said the lawmakers were acting so slowly on her director nominees that at the current pace they wouldn’t all be confirmed until her second term, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports.

The more things change…: Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is stripping out most of the provisions his predecessor, Hobbs, fought to add into the “election procedure manual,” setting up yet another potential fight over the “election bible” that lays out how administrators must conduct elections, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield reports. The document — which requires approval from the secretary of state, attorney general and governor — has been the subject of intense fighting for years, even when Republicans held all three offices. 

Shout-out to Shawnna: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the “independent legislatures theory” that would have given state legislators nearly unchecked authority over how to conduct elections. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said legislatures are not insulated from the “ordinary exercise of state judicial review.” 

Speaking of fake electors: The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up its investigation into fake electors in seven states, some of whom were granted immunity for their testimony. It’s not clear whether the DOJ is focusing on Arizona Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern and the other fake electors from Arizona, the Republic’s Ryan Randazzo reports, but Attorney General Kris Mayes says she has an “ongoing “ investigation into the matter. The thought of talking about it was enough to send Hoffman scrambling for a place to hide: 

“State Sen. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, one of the Arizona fake electors, declined to discuss the investigation into the plan when approached recently at the Capitol, retreating to a members-only stairwell without addressing the question,” Randazzo reports.

A few words would have gone a long way: Two Prescott residents filed a lawsuit to stop the state from providing $15 million to fund the Prescott Frontier Days rodeo event, 12News’ Kevin Reagan reports. The problem, they say, is lawmakers didn’t include any language in the budget bill saying how the money should be spent, and the rodeo operator hasn’t promised to spend the money on the rodeo, which violates the state’s gift clause. The AG and Treasurer’s Office agreed to not pay out the funds until the lawsuit is settled. 

We can think of better ways to spend $15 million than on a rodeo, but we don’t have a lobbyist to work an Arizona Agenda appropriation into the budget. Subscribe today so we can hire one!

Cars kill: Arizona is the second-worst state for pedestrian deaths, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. More than 300 people were struck by cars and killed last year in Arizona, 12News’ John Tenet reports, and Arizona had the largest year-over-year increase in pedestrian deaths of any state. Phoenix’s 35th Avenue is the most dangerous road in the Valley, a study by the Maricopa Association of Governments found. The avenue has 13 of the 100 most treacherous intersections. The riskiest intersection, according to the study, is at 99th Avenue and Lower Buckeye Road, which had more than 400 crashes from 2017 to 2021, the Republic’s Kunle Falayi reports.

You get what you pay for: Arizona pays its politicians among the lowest in the country, former Arizona reporter Julia Shumway notes in a piece about Oregon politicians attempting to boost their pay. Our governor and secretary of state are among the lowest paid in the country. 

Yay public records?: A Maricopa County Superior Court judge didn’t dismiss Kari Lake’s bid to get ballot envelopes as part of her neverending election lawsuit, the Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports, but the judge didn’t officially side with Lake either. Judge John Hannah said that just because counties have traditionally believed those aren’t subject to public records laws, that doesn’t necessarily make it true.

The elections director in Pinal County quit her job in one of the more spectacular letters we’ve ever seen from an outgoing bureaucrat. It begins: “With no regrets, I quit” and goes on to accuse the county of politicizing elections and creating a "toxic” atmosphere.

Of course, the whole thing would be a lot funnier if not for the exodus of elections officials and the fact that, at this point, nobody wants to do that job.

1. Carver didn’t return an email from us yesterday, and he wasn’t at the school district office when we called.