The gatekeepers

Arizona lawmakers introduced a record number of bills this session. Most of them are already dead.

They didn’t die in public votes, where the full body of elected lawmakers is given a say. Instead, they stalled earlier, when a small group of all-Republican committee chairs decided which proposals were worth hearing at all.

The committee process represents one of the Capitol’s most powerful bottlenecks.

The Republican leaders of each chamber decide who to put in charge of each committee, and those committee chairs, in turn, decide which bills get hearings.

Most of the time, committee chairs’ decisions unfold quietly. That power becomes more noticeable when someone forces the issue into public view.

For the past three years, Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman has unilaterally killed a bill to dedicate a monument to slain investigative journalist Don Bolles by refusing to give it a hearing in his Senate Government Committee. The Arizona Agenda spotlighted the blockade early on, and Rep. Selina Bliss later accused Senate leadership of purposely routing the measure to Hoffman’s panel.

And last year, Rep. Walt Blackman held a press conference to accuse Sen. Wendy Rogers of killing his bill to make false claims of military service a state crime. Rogers had thrown her support behind Blackman’s primary opponent, who faced allegations of stolen valor during the campaign.

Here’s the thing: A bill is never truly dead at the Arizona Legislature.

Blackman got his stolen valor bill signed into law after placing it on a strike-everything amendment of a bill that had already been voted out of the Senate, bypassing Rogers’ approval.

But those procedural workarounds are the exception, not the rule.

With the help of our legislation tracking service, Skywolf, we analyzed every bill assigned to committees so far this session. Less than half of them were ultimately brought up for committee votes ahead of last week's deadline, and only 5% of the bills voted on in committees were sponsored by Democrats.¹

Here are some of our most interesting findings.

Some committees see far more legislative traffic than others, giving their chairs even more disproportionate influence.

The House Commerce and Senate Government committees — chaired by Rep. Jeff Weninger and Hoffman, respectively — are two of the hardest to get a bill through. Each committee was assigned more than 100 bills, and each heard only about a third of all the bills assigned to it.

Although Weninger and Hoffman differ on political ideology, they face the same issue as chairmen: Their committees cover so many policy areas that bills compete heavily for limited hearing slots.

But it's not just the volume of bills that makes a committee hard to pass a bill through. It’s also up to the whims of the chair.

For example, Rep. John Gillette’s Federalism, Military Affairs & Elections Committee only held votes on about 35% of the 83 bills his committee received.

Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci’s Transportation & Infrastructure Committee had about the same number of bills assigned to it, but managed to hold votes on 65% of them.

Bills fare a lot better in committees with the bandwidth to discuss them, but those kinds of committees tend to be much more limited in scope.

Rep. Tony Rivero’s International Trade Committee and Sen. Mark Finchem’s Federalism Committee, for example, heard all the bills that were assigned to them. But fewer than 10 bills were assigned to each of those committees so far this session.

If you’re a committee chair, your ideas often matter more. At least to you.

Notably, longtime Rep. Gail Griffin sponsored 50% of the bills she put up for a vote on the Natural Resources, Energy & Water Committee. And 45% of the bills that Rep. Matt Gress held votes on in his Education Committee were his own. More than a third of all the bills in Rep. Selina Bliss’ Health & Human Services Committee were her own.

Rep. Quang Nguyen, House Judiciary Committee chair, sponsored 12 of the bills that passed his committee, though three were later repurposed as strike-everything amendments. He said that was after he scrapped more than a third of his own bills from his committee’s list.

The trend is less prevalent in the Senate, but persists for the biggest committees.

More than 40% of the bills that Sen. JD Mesnard’s Finance Committee voted on were his own. About a third of all the bills that made it through Sen. Kevin Payne’s Public Safety Committee were his own. Same for Sen. Carine Werner’s Health and Human Services Committee.

Every committee is configured to guarantee a Republican majority. Democrats still hold seats on each committee, but not enough to defeat bills.

Only a very few lucky Democrats get their bills heard in committees. In the House, only 8% of bills heard in committees were sponsored by Democrats. In the Senate, it was just 3%.

Weninger let five Democratic bills through House Commerce this year — though he noted the lawmakers who secured hearings tended to be those he works most closely with.

In an unusual departure, the top sponsor in Biasiucci’s Transportation Committee wasn’t the chair himself, but a Democrat: Rep. Myron Tsosie. Nearly all 11 of Tsosie’s bills that advanced through the committee appropriated funding for projects on the Navajo Nation.

If your bill gets on a committee agenda for a vote, congratulations! It’s probably passing.

In the House, only eight bills have failed in committee votes this year. That’s about 1% of all bills voted on so far.

Only four bills have failed committee votes in the Senate — less than one percent of all committee votes.

But to get that far, lawmakers have to do some lobbying, Nguyen said.

For those bills that did get a committee hearing ahead of last week's committee deadline, the next test is this week.

It's “crossover week," when the House speaker and Senate president decide which surviving bills are worth a vote from their full chamber so that they can cross over to the next chamber — and start struggling through committees once again.