Arizona’s #MAGAGOP Extremists Are Misbehaving Like Spoiled Children Abusing the Family Credit Card

I wonder if anyone else has noticed how petulant and oppositional-defiant the MAGA crew running the Arizona Legislature are behaving? Given control of the public purse they’ve run the state into an almost $2 billion deficit in just one year with unpopular and out-of-control voucher scheme for the wealthiest in Arizona. Now they are demanding Arizona’s citizens spend at least $325 million more per year in wholly unfunded mandates on our state, county, and city law enforcement agencies with their mad, bad, and several-ways-unconstitutional border enforcement law.

Let’s face reality: this GOP is not the fiscally prudent business-types of your grandad’s and pop’s GOP. These wackos are foaming at the mouth fascists, fraudsters, grifters, Christian Nationalists, and nosey parker morality police that your pop and pop-pop would have crossed the street to avoid talking to.

First, they dammed the revenue streams of Arizona’s government with Ducey’s crass and vain vow to reduce taxes every year he held office, and then adopted a reckless and wholly unnecessary flat income tax rate that was merely a gift to the very wealthy in AZ (who got an average of $16,000 a year in tax abatement) and, at most, one extra fast food meal (literally, about $60 a year) to the rest of us. Those tax cuts in total are estimated to be costing the state at least $1.9 Billion per year in lost revenue (notice a correlation here with the current budget deficit?) Of course, these cuts are likely permanent because Arizona’s constitution currently requires a super-majority in both legislative chambers to pass any revenue increase via taxation. That requirement is anti-democratic and should be repealed.

Now, Arizona’s MAGAGOP are blowing a mind-blowing amount of money on a private and home school voucher scheme that mostly just stuffs the pockets of wealthy folks who are too good to send their kiddos to our ‘failing’ public schools. Our public schools would be much better off if they weren’t being squeezed by all the fat checks to wealthy country club types and homeschooling weirdos for ESA vouchers. Some of these elitists are even forcing our public schools to pay for special education assessments for their princesses and princelings just so they nab up to $20 – $30K of taxpayer dosh to educate their precious offspring in posh private academies at our expense.

What’s worse is now that they have gotten the whole camel of private education inside the public’s tent, by stacking our state Supreme Court and SCOTUS with ideologues who have essentially rewritten Arizona and American jurisprudence to elide their program’s defiance of clear prohibitions on public funding private and religious education, they absolutely refuse to enact even the most modest controls on the program; NO means testing and NO accountability for how these vouchers are spent. They are more than delighted to bust our state budget and cut everything else the state is supposed to pay for to keep pumping money into the pockets of their wealthiest donors, while leaving the rest of us who can’t afford to private academies – even with an ESA voucher – with our 90% of kids in underfunded, understaffed, and falling down public schools they refuse to properly fund.

The state is under our own courts’ orders to properly fund the upkeep of our schools. But these MAGAGOPs just don’t care! “Sue us again!” they cry as they throw more taxpayer money at fancy lawyers at their ideological lawfare foundations to defend their unconstitutional neglect of our public schools. So, of course, public school advocates are being forced to sue again to make the legislature do just the bare minimum they are supposed to be doing for public schools. And worse, even though the AZGOP forced voters to impose a regressive sales tax on themselves in order to partly compensate for their criminal neglect of our public schools, they are now refusing to negotiate a new deal to fill the budget hole that the coming expiration of Prop 123 will blow in our education funding when it expires in 2026. I have a solution for that: remove them from any position from which to negotiate.

But that’s not the only wholly unconstrained spending the MAGAGOPs want for their little kuturkampfs; they also want voters to pass an unconstitutional grab at federal responsibilities by forcing state and local police and jails to arrest and house any suspected illegal immigrants to stoke and then slake their racist base’s fears of illegal immigration.

They will be putting a referendum measure on the ballot (because Governor Hobbs would otherwise veto this nonsense) that will cost AT LEAST $325 million a year to implement and enforce, based on how much Texas is spending to pursue this same kind of policy. Add to this a further blackening Arizona’s reputation – costing us in development of business and jobs and opportunities, and then cost us yet more millions in the inevitable and likely unsuccessful litigation in the meantime. How are the MAGAs proposing to pay for all that? They aren’t. Due to the unfunded mandates the whole scheme is likely unconstitutional under Arizona’s own constitution, on top of the whole shebang being a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which reserves immigration, naturalization and foreign policy to the federal government exclusively.

Not only is state enforcement and administration of immigration just a stupid and unconstitutional idea, it is a self-defeating spiral of waste. Texas is already trying to pull off this nativist, racist scheme to satisfy the most radical hate-mongers in their own state. Guess what the result has been? It hasn’t had any measurable impact on total immigration numbers, but it has pushed those seeking to cross the border illegally elsewhere: specifically to the other border states of New Mexica, California… and Arizona, of course.

Now let’s imagine that Arizona votes to imitate Texas. What would happen? Immigration might be possibly deterred at our great expense only to be pushed elsewhere – more for New Mexico and California. Now let’s follow this ‘logic’ to the natural conclusion: New Mexico does the same, spending hundreds of millions on additional immigration enforcement, as does California. Now what? We would have a spending race to spend more than your neighbor states to push the illegal border crossings anywhere else. Does it stop illegal border crossing? No. Not even a stupid wall would do that. There is too much money and too much desperation for a better life to even put a dent in the flow. All it does is spend billions more, fractures united control of the border by the Federal Government and make border state taxpayers pay for the arms race. Immigration solutions have to be holistic, and comprehensive and part of wise foreign policy to have any real effect. Throwing more money at the issue has NEVER worked, but the insane clown posse that the MAGAGOP have become are absolutely ready to do more of the same failed ideas – because they haven’t any better ones to offer. Democrats do. And we have. And we were turned down flat by the insanest clown of them all – the convicted-felon circus-master of ceremonies Donald “Hush Money” Trump. Why? So that he can keep the idiots afraid and frothy to vote for his criminal ass in November, that’s why.

Stupid, self-defeating, expensive, inequitable, inhumane, and wholly unconstitutional for the very good reason that we MUST have unified control of these government functions to have effective policy. But continued immigration problems sure make for a good TV ad with scary brown-skinned hordes, and cherry-picked cases when a very few bad eggs do something disgusting and criminal to an American.

So how do Arizona’s voters stop these mad and bad polices that MAGAGOP are pursuing willy-nilly the sound and censorious opinions of most Arizonans? How do we stop these naughty and short-sighted and irresponsible children from their reckless spending spree on our credit card?

There is really only one way: vote them out of the majority. Everywhere.

If they insist on doing expensive, ineffective, iniquitous, and stupid things with our tax money, there is only one way to put a stop to it: vote Democratic ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BALLOT this year, even if you are by inclination a conservative.

Because these #MAGAGOP wackos are NOT conservatives – they are radicals seeking to bankrupt our state, overthrow our democracy, and install a convicted felon as dictator for life.