Senate Leader Says AZ Legislature is Grim and Scary

The upcoming Arizona Legislative session will be “grim” and “scary,” according to Arizona Senator Priya Sundareshan (D-LD18).

She is the AZ Senate Democratic Minority Leader and co-chair of the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Sundareshan spoke at a recent meeting of the Democrats of Greater Tucson.

Republicans have a majority in the state Senate and House. “They’re leaning into this feeling that Trump won everything. So they’re going to lean hard. We need to be prepared for a lot of extreme everything.”

“There aren’t the moderate Republicans that we used to have in the legislature in the state Senate,” she said, citing the defeat of Sen. Ken Bennett (R-LD1) by right-wing nut job Mark Finchem.

“Democrats are fighting back and doing what we can to protect our neighbors who will be hurt,” she said. “Some very bad bills already were assigned to committees.”

She cited Sen. President Warren Peterson’s SB1011, a voter suppression bill. It cuts off four days from when voters can submit an early ballot by imposing a deadline of Friday before an election on Tuesday.

“It’s driven by this supposed desire to get the elections counted faster,” she said. “So that’s going to that’s going to lead to a huge amount of voter suppression. The only way to vote after that point would be to stand in line on election day and fill out a completely new ballot. So now the lines will be even longer because you’re transferring all these extra people into the line.”

Six Democratic Priorities

Democratic legislators identified six priorities for 2025, including the right to privacy, securing the state’s water, safeguarding the right to vote, and lowering healthcare, housing and childcare costs.

“We’re seeing that many voters are concerned with affordability issues. We’ll continue to push to lower the cost of housing and child care and make health care more affordable. Affordability is central to our messaging,” she said.

She blamed high prices on unchecked corporate greed for causing “greedflation.” Private equity investors and corporations are buying and keeping housing units off the market.

However, state barriers or “pre-emptions” forbid local governments from regulating local housing.

Meanwhile, child care is expensive and hard to find, but Republicans refuse to address this issue or the high cost of prescriptions.

Regarding water, large out-of-state corporations are pumping rural water sources dry. “The legislature so far has failed to get us something better suited for rural areas and one that will protect rural residents and small family farms,” Sundareshan said.

Another state pre-emption forbids the measurement of greenhouse gases to see their effect on climate change.

Public education is a Democratic priority. Republicans refuse to deal with the fraud-ridden ESA voucher disaster, which sucks $1 billion away from public schools and lets parents spend it on private and religious schools.

“That remains a very, very top priority for your legislative Democrats,” she said.

Finally, Democrats want to keep the government out of our private lives. “This means when it comes to reproductive issues, do not get between me and my doctor. When it comes to LGBTQ issues, we don’t need the government telling us who we should be marrying or who we’re allowed to spend our lives with. Honestly, we don’t need the government asking questions about what gender we should be declaring,” she said.

These priorities will be distilled for voters. “We are also learning from this past election that complex messaging is not coming across to voters. The average voter doesn’t even know that we have a state legislature when we’re at the doors.”