The Daily Agenda: We're back!
We hope you had a nice break from politics ... Here's the big stories you missed in December ... And we're laughing about this prolific Facebook Marketplace user.
Happy New Year! We hope you didn’t fly Southwest over the holidays.
There’s a lot of news to catch up on since we left you for our December break, and we’ve got a full recap in today’s Other News section. But we want to start this year’s first email talking about the future, not the past.
Changes are on the horizon as Gov. Doug Ducey prepares to hand over the keys to the Executive Tower to Katie Hobbs in a private ceremony today ahead of her public inauguration Thursday. We’ve got a whole new cast of characters entering state government. Democrats for the first time in decades hold the state’s top three offices, and they’re all staffing up.
Hobbs has announced many of her closest staff positions, some from the Secretary of State’s Office, and tapping various agency directors, some from the social services world and some Ducey appointees.
And as we look to the new year, we’ll be asking: What becomes of the Arizona Republican Party without Ducey and his crew as the counterweight to the MAGA crowd? Where will Ducey alums find their footings and new gigs? What kind of governor will Hobbs be? And which Democrats will truly have their hands on the levers of power inside and outside of the Hobbs administration?
Of course, our new lawmakers are sure to provide an endless source of cringeworthy entertainment in 2023. Facing a host of daunting challenges this year — from the school spending limit to water resources — the legislative braintrust is so far mostly focusing on tax cuts and pronouns.
With so many brand new lawmakers, it’s going to take them time to get up to speed. Some lawmakers will have to break ranks if we’re ever going to get a state budget that Hobbs will sign. We’re bracing for a long session and waiting to see who among the Republican caucus will be willing to strike deals.
We’ve got some big changes coming to the Arizona Agenda as well.
Starting today, we’re putting up a paywall to read the full Daily Agenda. Our Friday stories will remain free. Please support us (two independent local journalists who took a chance at doing something cool) by becoming a paying subscriber. We’ll probably experiment with the paywall situation over the coming weeks and months while we attempt to find the right balance between giving everything away for free and locking it all down.
To help move our free readers off the fence, we’re offering a 7-day free trial for annual subscriptions. (If you have questions about how the free trial works, check out this post from Substack.) We’re also happy to offer discounted rates for group subscriptions.
You’ll want to stay up to date as we all figure out what a divided state government looks like. We’re here to help you make sense of all the noise. Thanks, as always, for inviting us into your inbox every morning.
Finally, a ruling: The Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s newer 15-week abortion ban would take precedence over a pre-statehood outright abortion ban for doctors performing abortions, giving providers some ability to do their jobs. The ruling was a loss for outgoing Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and incoming Democratic AG Kris Mayes isn’t going to repeal it to the high court. But, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer notes, a doctor who’s part of the case could try to appeal it. Hobbs will likely still call a special session on abortion as well.
The courts ain’t having it: Kari Lake’s lawsuit was, as expected, a two-day court spectacle and ultimately a total flop, as a judge threw out all 10 of her claims and ordered her to pay $33,000 in attorneys fees, though the judge ultimately declined to impose sanctions on the lawyers who brought her case (much to the chagrin of outraged newspaper columnists everywhere). Lake is appealing. Meanwhile, a separate judge is still considering sanctions against failed secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem and his attorney Daniel McCauley for their failed conspiracy-laden lawsuit1.
Pinal County can’t catch a break: Republican AG candidate Abe Hamadeh also lost his election lawsuit, but picked up 231 votes in the recount of that race, far more than expected but still not enough to overtake Democrat Kris Mayes. Pinal County, which memorably became the center of attention during the primary over a different screw-up, also stole the show this year when it added about 500 votes to its total tally for the race after the full recount, causing the majority of that 231-vote shift. No other county’s results changed significantly. A swing of this many votes in a recount is rare and worthy of scrutiny: Typically, vote totals change by single digits, if any. Like in the primary, Pinal officials blamed the miscounted original numbers on “human error.” Mayes was pretty stoked about her narrow win, while Hamadeh is predictably not thrilled and “exploring legal options.”
Fiscal conservative: Outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey agreed to remove the border wall he built out of junk shipping containers after the feds sued Arizona. It cost about $100 million to put them up four months ago, and it’s gonna cost taxpayers another $76 million more to take them down. Protesters had camped out at the makeshift wall in recent weeks, as captured in this story by The Intercept.
Still the talk of the town: U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema remade herself as an independent, sparking dozens if not hundreds of think pieces about what it all means, as was probably the goal. Here’s a cartoon comparing her to Elon Musk.
Ducey’s gonna Ducey: A state water agency trying to fast-track Ducey’s desired $750 million contract with an Israeli company to help build a desalination plant in Puerto Penasco, Sonora, hit a snag after Senate Republicans called it a “rushed movement” without adequate discussion and a Democratic lawmaker said it “reeks of backroom deals.” The Water Infrastructure Finance Authority, the water agency that’s stacked with Ducey people, slowed down a bit after the scrutiny. Substacker Robert Robb called it Ducey’s final folly and complained the “raw exercise in crony capitalism” partially succeeded, as WIFA is still moving forward with negotiations with the company on the “far-fetched” concept.
Arizona’s dryness is so hot right now: The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both ran features zooming in on Teravalis, a planned development in Buckeye that could quadruple the city’s total residential water use, as a symbol for the struggle between growth and water management in a drying southwest. And the Times has a sharp guest opinion declaring Arizona’s real problem isn’t the Saudi Arabian company pumping water to farm alfalfa to send overseas, it’s that special interests and politicians who have kept water so unregulated and prices so artificially low that it makes economic sense to do that.
“Blaming the Saudis may be a good political play, but the problems won’t go away until state lawmakers properly reform Arizona’s groundwater laws,” author Natalie Koch writes in the Times.
Out with the old: The Republic’s editorial board ran through Ducey’s big struggles and accomplishments in office in an attempt to define his legacy. But they really summed it up in the lede: “Doug Ducey almost always got what he wanted as governor. Except an heir apparent.”
Winding down: As the Jan. 6 committee wraps up its work, it referred U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (a one-time sweepstakes winner) to the House Ethics Committee for potential sanctions for failing to comply with a subpoena. In a familiar refrain, Biggs, who’s running a longshot campaign to lead the U.S. House, called it a “political stunt.” AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk both talked to the Jan. 6 committee, but said basically nothing, their recently released depositions showed.
December news drops: The Republic dropped a couple new investigations in the sleepy news month of December. Reporter Richard Ruelas caps off his investigations into Ducey’s Border Strike Force with data, finally obtained after years seeking records, showing the force doesn’t really do anything its name would imply. And reporter Andrew Ford dives into the Arizona Medical Board, finding that the public doesn’t readily get information on doctors’ reprimands that could help patients.
Bad ruling of the month: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers can effectively ignore their own laws that require them to hold legislative committee hearings that comply with the state’s open meeting law. The lawsuit stemmed from a quorum of committee members attending an American Legislative Exchange Council conference.