The Republican to progressive lobbyist pipeline

A Q&A with Jeanne Woodbury … Shut it down … And donate for more pillows.

Jeanne Woodbury’s past lives include being the head of a nonprofit, a math tutor and a Republican.

Now, she works at the most progressive lobbying firm in the state.

Woodbury is a partner at Creosote Partners and represents groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU at Arizona’s Legislature.

She’s argued against bills about 20 times this year. In March, she told Republican lawmakers why they shouldn’t support a bill increasing provider liability for gender-affirming procedures.

“This creates severe government pressure for doctors to discriminate against a minority of their patients seeking the same care that is actually sought in much larger numbers by cisgender victims,” Woodbury told the Senate Regulatory Affairs Committee.

It’s personal for her. Woodbury is a transgender woman in a political environment that challenges her existence, but she’s measured and precise when speaking to lawmakers and relies on statutes instead of sentiment.

And Woodbury is good at talking to lawmakers because she believes in what she’s arguing for.

“I'm not showing up and saying, ‘Okay, let me convince myself to think that we really need to pass this bill for Coca Cola’ … I get to show up and say, ‘Hey, this matters to me, personally, and to people I know,’” Woodbury said.

Lobbying comes naturally to her because she’s been politically active since she was a teenager. But Woodbury didn’t cross the aisle leftward until 2016.

“It wasn't so much walking away from the (Republican) party as it was a reexamination of my own political values,” she said. “I think that a lot of the things I believe in broad strokes haven't really changed, but then the question of how that should actually apply to policy has changed quite a bit for me.”

Woodbury pokes fun at her progressive friends by interjecting conversations with “the most conservative thing I can say that I actually agree with, just to scandalize them a little bit,” and finds herself agreeing with MAGA Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin.

“Fundamentally, I think that politics isn't so much about belief, although obviously that's important. It's about how to make sure that policy works for people,” she said.

The second Trump presidency has fanned the flames of transphobia. This year alone, Arizona’s lawmakers advanced legislation to tie biological sex to reproductive characteristics, ban pride flags on public property and prohibit people from changing the sex on their birth certificates.

Woodbury said she’s always been around “extreme anti LGBT rhetoric,” even from people she liked. But getting used to it doesn’t make it okay, and growing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments make her job more important.

“The reality is, when I go to the Capitol to work, the rhetoric is secondary. I'm there to make sure that good policy gets passed and bad policy doesn't,” she said.

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We took a break from politics to ask Woodbury some get-to-know-you questions.

Q: You also make websites and mini campaigns — what’s your favorite oddball side project you’ve done for fun or activism?

A: One of Woodbury’s favorite projects was a campaign against Prop 138, which would have let employers pay tipped workers 25% less than the minimum wage, but voters rejected it resoundingly last year. The measure’s backers tried to sell it as a way to protect tipped workers.

“My thought was: Protect them from what? Getting paid?” Woodbury said.

She designed campaign signs that said: “No on Prop 138, we can do the fucking math,” and put them next to pro-Prop 128 signs. Most of her signs were stolen.

Q: What’s the most unexpectedly useful skill you’ve picked up during your political career?

A: Being able to write JavaScript. Woodbury’s used that skill to make a bunch of cool websites, like “Alt Leg,” a more user-friendly homepage for the Legislature.

Q: What’s something about Arizona politics that outsiders never understand?

A: That the Legislature doesn’t end after 100 days.

Q: What’s a hill you’ll die on that has nothing to do with politics? Something stupid, like “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”

A:

”I mean, a hot dog is a sandwich. I don't think I would die on that hill,” Woodbury said. “It would probably just be that we need to assign more books in classes. I don't think people are reading enough in school.”

Q: If lobbying didn’t exist, what job would you be doing right now?

A: Her non-political dream job is working in a library.

Is the budget coming?: Arizona’s House of Representatives is reconvening earlier than expected — at 1:15 p.m. tomorrow, House Speaker Steve Montenegro announced in an email to lawmakers. He wrote he expects “committee meetings and floor work on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.” The Senate is still on break, but has Education and Transportation and Director Nominations committees scheduled today.

Blocking Beijing: Arizona lawmakers are expected to try to override Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto of a law that would block the Chinese government from buying land in Arizona, Capitol Scribe Howie Fischer told KJZZ’s “The Show.” Lawmakers would have to get a two-thirds vote in both chambers to pull that off, and it’s highly unlikely they’ll pull it off. Meanwhile, as a countermove, Hobbs announced an alternate plan yesterday, called the BAN (Blocking Adversarial Nations) Act, to prevent China, Russia, North Korea and other foreign adversaries from owning land near military bases and critical infrastructure. She called the bill she vetoed a “watered-down, weak-on-China bill.”

An infographic the Hobbs administration put out yesterday.

The right to choose (if courts agree): Attorney General Kris Mayes won’t defend restrictive abortion laws that reproductive rights groups are challenging now that Prop 139, the Arizona Abortion Access Act, was recently approved by voters to put abortion rights in the state Constitution. But Montenegro, the state House speaker, said he’ll intervene instead, per Fischer. Superior Court Judge Randall Warner will likely let Montenegro step in to defend the laws that require a 24-hour waiting period for an abortion and prohibit prescribing abortion-inducing drugs through telemedicine. Even though voters approved the right to abortion, those rights have to be enacted through legal challenges to existing restrictive abortion laws.

School’s out … of money: Arizona’s public schools are set to get their monthly state payments cut because lawmakers haven’t passed a budget to approve the Education Department’s supplemental funding request, the Prescott Daily Courier’s Abigail Celaya reports. The department told schools it’s $200 million short but will “exhaust all possibilities” to ensure districts get paid, but that districts should still plan for partial payments in June.

Luckily, we don’t depend on state lawmakers to get paid. Our subscribers are much more reliable.

The GOP’s Civil War: Republican Rep. Ralph Heap is launching a bid for the Corporation Commission, the Republic’s Sasha Hupka reports. Republican Rep. David Marshall is also expected to run for the utility-regulating board, and the far-right duo plans to challenge slightly more centrist GOP incumbents Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers — who haven’t resisted environmental and diversity efforts as much as the far-right would like. Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman is holding a press conference today to announce the new candidates. State Treasurer Kimberly Yee already announced she’s challenging Tom Horne for Superintendent of Public Instruction and got the Hoffman-backed press conference treatment two weeks ago. While the Freedom Caucus’ battles have been mostly focused against fellow Republicans in the primary, it is also coming up with challengers for the Democratic governor, secretary of state and attorney general.

What do the voters know, anyway?: Glendale city officials have decided to continue the $1.2 billion VAI Resort project despite mixed reviews from the public, per KJZZ’s Nick Karmia. During a recent special election, voters rejected one proposal that sought to change the city’s general plan to rezone 10 acres for miscellaneous resort uses, but passed a different proposal to change the area’s zoning rules for commercial development. The city is arguing that the passage of one of the propositions gives them enough legal authority to continue.

“If we were to say tomorrow that you can’t do that because it’s inconsistent with a planning document, we likely would face litigation and would not prevail,” Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps said.

Pillow salesman Mike Lindell took the stand yesterday in his defamation trial.

ICYMI: Lindell is a major election fraud conspiracy nut, and he spread all sorts of lies about the people who run and work in elections. He eventually got slapped with a defamation lawsuit by Eric Coomer, a former executive at Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, for falsely accusing the executive of participating in an "Antifa conference call" to rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump, among other things.

Well, today was his big day in court. And it was as weird as you’d expect.

Denver-based local news reporter Kyle Clark has the best Twitter thread on the hearing that we saw.

Here are a few highlights:

And if you’re wondering, ‘Does this story end with the millionaire MyPillow guy setting up a GoFundMe account and begging for people to bail him out?’ Well… You pretty much answered your own question, didn’t you?

Sadly, he’s a quarter of the way to his goal of $1.5 million.