The Daily Agenda: The issue that never goes away
No, we don't mean the 2020 election ... Mark Finchem has thoughts ... And a law so bad Arizona won't defend it.
School leaders and Democrats are again sounding the alarm about the need to raise or eliminate a school spending cap, this time saying Gov. Doug Ducey should call a special session.
And the Governor’s Office admits the governor promised he’d call a special session while in budget talks with Democrats — though they say he warned he would only call a special session if the Legislature had the two-thirds vote needed to pass an increase to the Aggregate Expenditure Limit.
“Our criteria has always been the same: A special session would have to be specifically focused, and there would have to be the votes,” Ducey spokesman C.J. Karamargin told us.
If you’re new to this issue, we covered the AEL multiple times during the legislative session. Basically, voters approved a spending limit for schools in 1980, and the Legislature has had to increase that limit multiple times since then to allow schools to spend their entire budgets. Increasing requires a two-thirds vote. Lawmakers could also, with a bare majority, refer a measure to the ballot to get rid of the limit entirely.
But in the past two years or so, the AEL has created uncertainty for school budgets and turned a fairly perfunctory exercise into a constant political football. Arizona Sen. David Livingston, for instance, said the battle over expanded school vouchers — and education leaders’ support of a referendum on the expansion — turned increasing the AEL into a “war.”
Lawmakers last approved an increase in late February, just days ahead of the deadline, after enough Republicans joining Democrats to reach the two-thirds requirement. But those kinds of last-minute deals cause chaos in school administration.
Then, the state budget allocated $1 billion more to schools, meaning some will hit the ceiling again soon. The deadline to increase the AEL is March 1.
Republicans won’t be playing ball this time, at least not before the November election, though some rank-and-file GOP lawmakers told us they’d support a special session and help increase the limit.
House Speaker Rusty Bowers thinks the issue can wait until next legislative session, his spokesman told us. (Bowers will not be in the Legislature next year.) Senate President Karen Fann thinks a special session would be “premature” and that those calling for one now are “playing politics.” She also won’t be around the Capitol anymore when time runs out on the AEL next year.
“For the current fiscal year, we won’t even know the exact amount of excess spending until early November. Any action today to override the limit would mean we are either guessing at the excess spending amount, or worse, providing a blank check to districts to spend whatever they want,” Fann said in a statement.
We’re in the middle of election season. Of course the politicians are playing politics. But the broader problem of the AEL will keep coming up until lawmakers (or voters) resolve it.
GOP Sen. Paul Boyer, who is also leaving the Legislature at the end of the year, is on board for a special session. So is GOP Sen. T.J. Shope, though he said the idea hasn’t been discussed among Republicans at the Capitol yet. There’s a good chance it has enough votes to pass with two-thirds, he said, but it’d be a challenge getting both parties to the Capitol right now.
“Somebody like myself, in a swing district, I think it’d actually be helpful (with the election). I believe in it anyway,” Shope said.
Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios said she and other Democrats reached out to the Governor’s Office a month ago to reiterate their plea for a special session. He didn’t respond. She hasn’t seen any movement from Republicans to gather votes. She thinks the issue should be addressed now, before a new Legislature brings more uncertainty to the issue, and so that Republicans are on the record about their support (or lack thereof) for public school funding.
“All I can do is tell them, look, I've got 14 solid Democrats,” Rios said. “At the end of the day, all they have to do is bring six votes to the table.”
Candid camera: Republican candidate for secretary of state Mark Finchem told Republican group in July that former Vice President Mike Pence “seized power over an existing president” on Jan. 6, 2021, which he called a “coup,” the Republic’s Robert Anglen reports, based on video of the comments. Finchem also said that Pence was trying to rig the 2024 election by endorsing moderates in this year’s primaries (Trump has endorsed many far-right politicians, including Finchem). Finchem would not explain his comments to Anglen.
Last-minute attempt: Finchem and GOP gubernatorial contender Kari Lake are trying to appeal their lawsuit against vote-tabulating machines to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ahead of the November election after a federal district court judge tossed it last month, the Associated Press reports. In the unlikely event it’s successful, the lawsuit would require ballots to be hand-counted, a time-consuming and costly process that’s less accurate than machine-counting.
Need more details: While housing supply and affordability remain top issues for Arizonans paying rent, the two candidates for governor haven’t released detailed plans on how to address the issue, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller notes. Lake has a plan on homelessness, which Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs then dinged, but homelessness is just one part of a much broader, needed conversation on housing issues, he writes.
Answer the questions, Abe: The father of Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general, “overstayed a visa by nearly seven years and was not in the country legally when the candidate was born,” the Republic’s Tara Kavaler reports, citing court records. Hamadeh didn’t respond to direct questions or address the visa issue in a written statement to the paper, instead saying the paper should write about Democratic candidate Kris Mayes’ staffers.
Democracy in crisis: A new effort dubbed the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network will work in battleground states, including Arizona, to protect the principles of democracy by reaching out to candidates, civic leaders and faith communities to tell them the importance of accepting election results and lowering the potential for election-related violence, the Arizona Daily Star’s Patty Machelor reports. The network is led by Democratic former U.S. Rep. Ron Barber and Republican former newspaper publisher Don Henninger.
Whoa: An attorney representing a man who is in prison in Arizona claims the Lewis Prison in Buckeye let inmates run security after problems with locks on cell doors were identified, the Republic’s Jimmy Jenkins reports. The prison’s leaders allowed and sanctioned a program where inmates were in charge of keeping other inmates in their cells, and issuing discipline against each other, the attorney claims. This discipline included “hundreds of beatings.”
He doesn’t even go here: In an op-ed for Real Clear Policy, former Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry leader Glenn Hamer, now in Texas, praises Gov. Doug Ducey’s “comprehensive judicial strategy,” which included expanding the Arizona Supreme Court and loading it with conservatives and appointing conservative judges at all levels. Hamer praises the new top court’s for killing a host of ballot measures, and implores other conservative governors to follow Ducey’s example on the courts, which Hamer says may be Ducey’s “most lasting achievement.”
The whole ballot is important: Politico lists Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction race as one of six to watch nationwide, as education leaders enter into a “new political frontier.” Democratic Superintendent Kathy Hoffman is “attempting to preserve Democrats’ hold on the education office with a message that focuses on academics and shies away from cultural battles in a bid to appeal to independent voters,” while Republican candidate Tom Horne is running on hot-button issues like critical race theory.
In related news: School board members weigh in on policies for schools, curriculum choices and financial issues, the Republic’s Renata Cló details in this primer on what, exactly, the job of a school board member is. We understand not everyone is a civics whiz, so we’ll also point you to this guide Rachel made while at the Republic that tells you which parts of government are responsible for what, so you know who to be mad at when stuff goes wrong.
We recommend listening: You may remember a court case from the 2010s about the Phoenix Goddess Temple, a place where practitioners provided sexual massages that the temple said were part of a religious practice. A new podcast called “Mystic Mother” dives into the whole issue.
We love local politics: A candidate for Sierra Vista mayor dropped food off to local firefighters, then took and posted a photo with them while they were in city shirts, leading the sitting mayor to post a statement on the city Facebook page about the limits of city employees’ involvement in campaigning while at work, the Herald/Review’s Dakota Croog reports.
Arizona Rep. John Kavanagh has found himself a man without a lawyer, meaning his new law to make it illegal to film cops within 8 feet won’t go into effect and the court challenge against it isn’t being defended by the state, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer reports.
As we previously mentioned, Maricopa County officials and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wouldn’t defend the constitutionally flawed law. Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers aren’t going to use their chambers’ attorneys to defend it, either. We’ve never seen the Legislature leave a bad law they approved out to dry like this.
Brnovich, for his part, is busy with other matters.
