The Daily Agenda: Tom Horne's revenge

A throwback politician likes throwback policies ... The feds are coming! ... And those "rich people" are the worst, right Mark?

Back in the year 2000, Arizona voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative requiring English immersion as the only model of teaching English to children who speak another language. 

We were among a handful of states to institute so-called “English-only” education laws around that time, California included, as immersion was considered the best model for kids. But 23 years later, the research has changed. Nearly everyone in academia — and even in Republican political circles — now agrees that dual language is a more effective way to teach English to kids who don’t know it.

Everyone except Tom Horne, that is. 

Since retaking¹ the office of Arizona superintendent of public instruction this year, Horne has resumed his war on dual language classes. During the last school year, he warned that the classes are illegal. Now, he’s threatening to withhold funding from schools in the coming year if they allow English Language Learners into the classes without a waiver, which they do.  

But Horne hit a formidable front this week in Attorney General Kris Mayes, who fired off an opinion neutralizing his threat to withhold funds from schools that offer the classes to ELL kids by declaring he doesn’t have the authority to do that. Horne, who noted he is a former AG himself, called the decision political and is now threatening to sue.

In the opinion, however, Mayes didn’t actually say the classes are legal under the 2000 ballot initiative. Instead, she sidestepped the question, saying her office wouldn’t second-guess the Board of Education’s decision to implement dual language programs as “immersion programs.”

“It is surprising that the Attorney General evades the key issue, placing ideology over the law,” Horne wrote in response. “A dual language program without waivers is an obvious violation of that to anybody who can read English.”

While it may be bad public policy, Arizona’s English-only law is still the law of the land. (In fact, we’re the only state where it’s still the law of the land.) When voters approve a law, only voters can repeal or change it. And voters haven’t repealed the English-only law.

Eliminating the English-only model was a major priority of former Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, a Democrat and former speech therapist. She championed a resolution in 2019 — sponsored by former lawmaker and fan of “1958-style voting” John Fillmore, of all people — to ask voters to repeal it. That resolution passed the House 59-1 but got stuck in the Senate. A similar measure stalled out in 2020.

So rather than ask voters to repeal the English-only law outright, lawmakers came up with a clever workaround. They passed a law that required the Board of Education to come up with new rules within the “immersion” framework outlined in the 2000 initiative, but that essentially allows ELL kids to join dual language classes. 

That workaround went against the spirit of the ill-advised 2000 ballot initiative, which explicitly repealed the state’s existing bilingual education laws. But because the law didn’t actually change the statutes that voters implemented, it was fair game, legally speaking. 

The push to repeal Arizona’s English-only education law officially died last year, as the Arizona Mirror’s Laura Gomez noted, since, for the first time in years, no Republican lawmakers sponsored legislation to ask voters to repeal it. Advocates and lawmakers presumably believed the workaround worked, and everyone was pretty happy with that solution until Horne came back. But Horne’s return and subsequent threats to schools reinforces the hard truth that progress is always two steps forward and one step back. 

Arizona has been failing its English Language Learners for a long time. We have some of the worst ELL graduation rates in the country. Keeping ELL kids segregated in “English immersion” classes is not helping them learn English faster, and it’s screwing up their ability to graduate high school. A return to the kind of four-hour immersion blocks that Horne wants would be a huge setback. 

It’s time to repeal Arizona’s English-only law once and for all, and to do it the right way: by taking it back to the voters.  

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Corrections: Monday’s edition accidentally left Democrat Amish Shah out of the campaign finance roundup for Congressional District 1. He raised $550,000 this quarter and has about $380,000 cash on hand in his bid to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, putting him in second place among the five Democrats running in the primary. Additionally, we didn’t realize CD6 Democratic hopeful Jack O’Donnell had already abandoned his short-lived campaign, leaving Kirsten Engel as the lone Democrat attempting to take on Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani.  

Just another Tuesday: Donald Trump expects to be indicted and arrested soon, as federal investigators recently sent him a “target letter,” in the “clearest sign yet” that the obstruction of justice investigation is heating up, Politico reports. Earlier this month, the Washington Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reported that former Gov. Doug Ducey was telling donors that Trump had pressured him to overturn the election, and the former governor was surprised he hadn’t heard from federal investigators about it. And yesterday, CNN followed up with a report that special counsel Jack Smith's team has indeed asked Ducey to be a witness in Trump’s case. It’s not clear when they asked, exactly. But Smith has been busy in Arizona, Wingett Sanchez reports in her latest scoop: His team recently did an hourlong video conference interview with former Congressman John Shadegg, who led the final stage of the state Senate’s audit by overseeing a review of Maricopa County’s routers and other equipment. Meanwhile, the Michigan attorney general filed felony charges on her state’s fake electors, raising a lot of eyebrows in Arizona after AG Kris Mayes’ office confirmed to Wingett Sanchez last week that she’s investigating Arizona’s fake electors. 

“He’s been responsive, and just as he’s done since the election, he will do the right thing,” Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told CNN.

Counting hats and water bottles: Gov. Katie Hobbs ordered state inspectors to investigate heat-related workplace safety, even though there are not any state regulations around that specific kind of thing, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. They’re basically trying to ensure that outdoor workers have access to water, shade and rest, but are threatening citations under the broad requirement that workplaces remain “free from recognized hazards.’’

On birthdays and hometowns: Hobbs visited the Navajo Nation Council in Window Rock Monday (not in Sierra Vista, as her office mistakenly said in a press release), noting she has already tripled the staff size of the state's Office on Tribal Relations, established a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Task Force and taken on fake rehabs that have preyed on Indigenous people, the Republic’s Arlyssa Becenti writes. Monday was the tribal council’s 100-year birthday, while last Friday, tribal officials celebrated the 75th anniversary of their right to vote in Arizona, which Natives were granted only after decades of legal fights, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith notes.

Gotta count them all: Cochise County was back in court yesterday arguing to a panel of appeals court judges that it should have been allowed to do a full hand recount on all races in the county’s 2022 election. The Arizona Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley breaks down the legal arguments. 

Is this a phantom voter?: Failed Secretary of State candidate and longtime Pima County lawmaker Mark Finchem, now allegedly contemplating a run for Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, has been registered to vote in the Biltmore area of Phoenix since January, Substacker Dillon Rosenblatt reports after pulling Finchem’s voter file. Finchem is also trying to raise $500,000 for his nonprofit with Cochise County Recorder David Stevens so they can scrutinize voter rolls in 30 counties where “statistical anomalies have been observed,” and where there are “persistent rumors of substantial phantom voter presence.”

For a half-million bucks, we will also investigate “statistical anomalies” and “phantom voters.” Or, better yet, if you subscribe now, we won’t do that!

The complaint box is full: Gilbert Mayor Brigette Peterson filed an ethics complaint against City Council Member Jim Torgeson after he left a constituent a voicemail accusing the mayor of extortion and calling her names. The constituent also filed an ethics complaint against him. Torgeson filed three ethics complaints against Peterson in 2021 before he was a member of the council, the Gilbert Independent’s Tom Blodgett writes. 

“I stand behind every word,” Torgeson said of the voicemail that inspired two separate ethics complaints.  

It’s already in your backyard: Mesa residents aren’t happy with the city’s plan to buy a $7.4 million hotel to house homeless people until they can graduate from a city program and get on their feet, the East Valley Tribune’s Scott Schumaker reports. The city has rented 80 rooms in another hotel about a mile-and-a-half down the road but wants to move the program into a city-owned facility for stability. 

Some like it hot: Hank spoke with Lauren Gilger on KJZZ’s “The Show” Monday about growing up skateboarding in the Valley’s heat, and how outdoor manual labor in summer is his version of hot yoga. 

Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, who is personally worth somewhere around $30 million according to his latest financial disclosure forms (not including the $1.3 million in his campaign account), says he’s worried that the No Labels Party is subverting democracy by creating a new party with backing from just a “few rich people,” he told CNN.

Yeah, it would be a real shame if the rich controlled politics in this country. 

1. Horne was also SPI from 2003 to 2011.