The Daily Agenda: Skinny majority kills skinny budget
The Daily Agenda: Skinny majority kills skinny budget
Only RINOs vote with the Dems ... "Christian" schools and tax dollars ... And never break character, Kari.
Republican lawmakers, determined to show a united front against Gov. Katie Hobbs’ budget proposal, attempted to ram through their own “skinny budget” yesterday but were stymied by one of their most conservative members.
Liz Harris, a hard-right MAGA enthusiast, was seemingly keeping her campaign pledge to vote against all bills until Arizona calls a do-over on the 2022 election when she killed Republicans’ skinny budget proposal, with no warning to her colleagues, on the House floor yesterday.
Republicans were prepared to hammer through their “responsible budget” with no new spending outside of what is required by law yesterday. Democrats, assuming the battle was lost but that Hobbs would surely veto any skinny budget, didn’t bother to debate against it. Seemingly nobody expected Harris to vote against a measure championed by her friends in the Freedom Caucus
Republican Rep. David Livingston, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told us he didn’t know why, exactly, Harris opposed the most fiscally conservative budget Republicans could possibly offer up. He motioned to “reconsider” the budget package, a procedural maneuver that gives lawmakers two weeks to bring a bill back for a new vote.
If that fails, he’s not sure what Republican lawmakers will do.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really have a Plan B.”
Plan A was always something of a gimmick.
The state last passed a skinny budget in 2020, when COVID-19 put a brief end to the political bickering. Lawmakers unanimously adopted a “continuation” budget and closed up the Capitol in the name of fiscal stability and safety as the virus spread across the U.S. It was a brief moment of bipartisan agreement.
Since then, Republicans have attempted to pass a skinny budget again a couple times. The idea has failed to gain traction even among the GOP majority. Last year’s skinny budget attempt, for example, was shot down by Republican then-Reps. Jake Hoffman and Michelle Udall, who argued the skinny budget was too fat and too skinny, respectively. That impasse in the GOP ultimately led to the historic bipartisan budget agreement that Gov. Doug Ducey signed last year.
Now, Livingston wants to make skinny budgeting mandatory. His House Concurrent Resolution 2038 would ask voters to amend the state Constitution to require lawmakers to pass a skinny budget by the 45th day of the legislative session.
“It really is how we should do it,” he said. “We should continue the government at baseline levels and then fight over whether there’s excess money or not. Or cuts, if that’s the case.”
A skinny budget makes sense to avoid a government shutdown if there’s a true deadlock among people negotiating in good faith or in the face of a global pandemic. But making it the go-to move every year would take away what little incentive lawmakers have to work together to craft a budget that reflects Arizonans’ priorities: the threat of being blamed for a government shutdown.
If Republican lawmakers really want to stick it to Hobbs, they should get serious about passing a real budget — complete with their best ideas and a few priorities from Democrats — and force her to make difficult decisions and line-item vetoes. But putting a skinny budget up for a vote and watching it fail doesn’t make the governor look bad. It reinforces her message that Republicans are too hung up on election conspiracies to govern.
Not very Christian of them: Heart Cry Christian Academy, a religious school that accepts public dollars via school vouchers, told a gay couple with a child in the school that gay people aren’t welcome at their Queen Creek campus, the Republic’s Renata Cló reports. Although they take public dollars via vouchers, religious schools are not required to abide by any nondiscrimination laws, and the father cannot pull his child out of the school because he shares custody with his ex-wife, who has legal control over the child’s education. The Arizona Department of Education, which oversees Arizona’s voucher system, wants nothing to do with the case, saying the parents should file a complaint with the courts if they’re unhappy.
"One of my fears is the fact that she's in that school and they're brainwashing her, and they're telling her that it's not OK for me to be me," the father told Cló.
Don’t celebrate yet: A bill to lift the cap on school spending and stave off a $1.3 billion cut to schools this school year is scheduled for debate on the House and Senate floor tomorrow. The bills need a two-thirds majority to pass. Substacker Robert Robb writes that if Republicans don’t provide the necessary votes to get it to two-thirds, there will be hell to pay for Republicans, some of whom could be subject to recall campaigns.
Very on-brand: U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema makes her Senate staff do personal and campaign related tasks like grocery shopping, fixing the internet in her apartment and setting up meetings with campaign donors, according to a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee filed by more than a dozen advocacy groups, several of which are aligned with potential Sinema challenger U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, The Hill reports. The complaint was based on a December story in the Daily Beast that relied on an internal memo for staff that shed light on some of her demands, including requiring staff to keep a steady supply of room-temperature bottled water and booking her weekly hourlong massage.
Even more on brand: The Phoenix New Times runs through a couple of the wildest things Republican lawmakers said during testimony over Sen. Anthony Kern’s bill to make it illegal to do a drag show at any place where a minor might see it. Sen. Justine Wadsack, who said she regularly attends drag shows, claimed that “drag queens make children lie down on top of them.” Kern said he doesn’t think “all drag performers are pedophiles,” just that some are.
Pro-mom and anti-abortion: A package of pro-pregnancy bills that Republican Rep. Matt Gress filed — like legislation compensating rape victims for carrying their baby to term, letting pregnant women use the carpool lane and requiring child support payments from the date of the first positive pregnancy test — are part of a “strategy of the anti-abortion movement to disguise their real attempts to ban abortion outright” according to his colleague, Democratic Rep. Analise Ortiz, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers writes.
Everyone has an opinion (column): Lawmakers’ 2016 attempt to stop cities from regulating puppy mills at the behest of pet store operators has led to more animal cruelty and fraud, Don Scott, the former state council chair in Arizona for The Humane Society of the United States writes in the Republic. Scott highlighted a new bill from Democratic Rep. Amish Shah to repeal that 2016 law. In the Daily Star Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik declares that the company contracted to run the city’s recycling facility is acting like a “corporate predator and an environmental pariah” after it threatened to sue the city after the city started recycling smashed glass. And newspaper attorney David Bodney explains in the Republic how legislative Republicans are persuading the courts to exempt them from open meeting and public records laws.
Stay moderate, my friends: Freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s name is already on the lips of Beltway types discussing potential Republican candidates for the Senate next year after he successfully walked the fine line between not being Trumpy but not angering the MAGA warriors of his party, the Tucson Sentinel’s Blake Morlock writes. But he’ll lose all the goodwill if he sticks with his party’s threats to not lift the debt and deficit ceilings. And while Ciscomani is delivering the Republican rebuttal to today’s State of the Union Address, Sinema will join the Washington Post for some post-speech analysis.
Crisis acknowledged: The City of Phoenix is working on a sustainable development policy that the City Council could debate later this year, the Phoenix Business Journal’s Audrey Jensen reports.
As predicted: Republican lawmakers want the courts to allow their attorneys to defend a 2021 state law that banned abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities because Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes has publicly stated she won’t defend or enforce anti-abortion laws, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer reports. If the GOP lawmakers are allowed to get involved, they’d be represented cost-free by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Filing a records request now: Pinal County will release a report from an outside investigator that details complaints made by two former county employees who sued Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, though the board voted to delay the release by two weeks after Cavanaugh claimed the report could be “incomplete,” Pinal Central’s Mark Cowling reports.
Hot and unwelcoming: Capital B’s Adam Mahoney writes about the influx of Black people moving from out of state to Maricopa County, which has become the fastest-growing region for Black people aside from Dallas and Houston. But upon moving to Phoenix, some have reported finding it hard to build community, confront racism and struggle with the effects of the heat, especially in concrete-heavy parts of town like south Phoenix.
Bills to keep track of: A House proposal to charge drug dealers with homicide failed in committee. The bill to ban drag shows in front of children passed a Senate committee. And there’s another piece of legislation aimed at penalizing cities with higher minimum wages.
Just stay off our light poles: Seemingly every news organization in Arizona except us has a guide to the Super Bowl. If, like us, you plan to stay inside and avoid that whole debacle, you can still read about penalties for illegally renting your home, how Sky Harbor is preparing for all the sports tourists, or whether understaffed Phoenix Police Department can handle the additional responsibilities.
Happy trails: Mark Killian resigned as director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture, effective last Friday. Killian, who during his several decades in Arizona politics has served as a lawmaker, regent and department director, announced his departure on Twitter by sharing the resignation letter he sent to Hobbs.
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