AZ GQP Plans To Defy The Will Of The Voters With Special Session To Save Their ‘Flat Tax’ Giveaway To The Wealthy

The Arizona Daily Sun reports that the evil GQP bastards in the Arizona legislature who are the lickspittle lackeys of Arizona’s wealthiest residents are planning a Special session to replace huge Arizona tax cuts to circumvent a citizens referendum that thousands of Arizonans signed petitions to put on the ballot in November:

Talks among Arizona Republican lawmakers who want to sidestep a voter referendum that has blocked the nearly $2 billion income tax they passed last year are heating up, and a special session to repeal and replace the tax cuts could be called at any time.

Lawmakers have been talking for months about repealing last year’s flat tax plan to get around opponents who collected enough signatures last summer to put it on hold until voters can affirm or reject them in November.

GOP House and Senate leaders must line up the support of all their members before a special session is actually called by the governor. House Majority Leader Ben Toma said Tuesday that those talks are ongoing. All 31 House Republicans and 16 GOP senators must agree on the plan in order for it to pass with no Democratic support.

Minority Democrats are powerless to stop the effort, and they were seething when it became clear Tuesday that a special session was closer to reality.

“A blatant undermining of Arizona voters,” Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios said on Twitter. “This move is to prohibit AZ voters from voting against (Ducey’s) 2 billion dollar tax cut for Arizona’s wealthiest. He does not want voters to decide. I wonder why.”

Republican Senate President Karen Fann said she’s not sure when or even if a special session to repeal last year’s tax cuts will be called. C.J. Karamargin, spokesman for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, said he’s open to calling one.

“We are always open to any and all ideas that reduce taxes and advance the governor’s agenda,” Karamargin said.

“Fuck what the voter want! I’ve got rich campaign donors to serve.”

Toma was one of the key architects of the flat tax proposal and bills that also sidestepped Proposition 208 last year.

This evil GQP bastard move was recenly upheld by the Ducey-packed Arizona Supreme Court, which tied the hands of the Superior Court trial judge who disagreed with their opinion. Court permanently blocks Prop. 208 education tax on wealthy:

[I]t was the Supreme Court which, having upheld the right of voters to impose the levy, then directed Hannah to determine whether the money can legally be spent.

More to the point, Hannah said the justices effectively tied his hands by directing him to issue an all-or-nothing order instead of deciding that only some parts of the initiative were unconstitutional but others were legal and “severable.’’ That precluded him from concluding that the money can be collected, that some of it likely was legally spendable, and that voters or lawmakers should be given a chance to find a way to legally spend the rest of it.

And the judge made it clear he was not pleased by the constraints.

“The logic of (the Supreme Court ruling) entirely relieves the legislature of any political responsibility to accommodating the policy decisions the electorate makes by initiative,’’ Hannah wrote.

“If legislators can find a legal flaw in a measure they disagree with as a matter of policy, their incentive is now not to fix it but instead to exploit it,’’ he said, noting it was Republican legislative leaders who opposed the initiative who sued to block it with the argument that it would exceed the expenditure limit — something they have the power to waive. “They can then point to the political obstacles created by their own opposition as a reason for the courts to stop the political fight and declare the legislature the winner.’’

* * *

Hannah acknowledged that the legislature can waive that spending cap. In fact, he noted, that’s precisely what happened earlier this year when lawmakers voted to allow the spending of money collected from a Proposition 301, a 0.6-cent sales tax for education, to be used in classrooms this school year.

But the judge said that, based on the constraints he was given by the Supreme Court, he can’t declare Proposition 208 to be legal and allow the funds to be collected based on whether lawmakers might do the same thing in the future with this measure — even though he said that’s exactly what happened with Proposition 301.

“Yet that tax will remain in place, even as Proposition 208 is struck down,’’ Hannah wrote.

He did concede that it is unlikely that the legislature, at least as currently made up, would agree to waive the cap to spend money that the initiative sought to raise.

“The legislators responsible for ‘years of underfunding’ are unlikely to enact such legislation — so unlikely, in fact, that no rational voters could have thought otherwise,’’ Hanah wrote.

Tax rates for most taxpayers would drop to a flat 2.5%, and revenue would be cut by $1.9 billion once the tax cuts are fully in place. That’s down from a range of 2.59% to 4.5%.

The cut were to start at $1.3 billion this year go to $1.9 billion once revenue targets were hit.

Toma said that those revenue targets have been reached much earlier than many expected, and the Legislature can accelerate the tax cuts and avoid the phase-in. He said he’s ready for a special session to act.

“I can’t speak for the Senate or the governor — at this point, I don’t know that they’re ready to go,” Toma said. “But whenever they are ready to go, I’m more than supportive of us going as well.”

The tax cuts mainly benefit the wealthy. The average Arizonan earning between $75,000 and $100,000 will save $231 a year in state income taxes, while the average taxpayer earning between $500,000 and $1 million a year will save more than $12,000, according to the Legislature’s budget analysts.

By repealing and replacing last year’s “flat tax” giveaway to the wealthy with a new law, this would render the referendum moot, and force voters to start all over again with a new referendum against the new law.

Authoritarian Republican legisators continue to disregard the will of the voters and to undermine your constitutional right to citizens iniative and referendum. Are you going to continue to tolerate this obscene abuse of power? Kick every one of these corrupt authoritarian Republicans out of office.