Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
AZ Sen. Barbara McGuire
The Arizona legislative session began last week and, as has been the case for most of the past decade or five, the Democrats are in the minority. If you pay attention to the doings at 1700 W. Washington St. you know that being the opposition party means that Democratic lawmakers, armed with facts and logic, argue valiantly (and futilely) against atrocious harebrained GOP bills in committee hearings and make impassioned speeches against said bills and ever crueler budget cuts on the floors of the Senate or House. They are, of course, mostly ignored as the terrible bills and budgets pass.
Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
When the Governor drops by your office to say you "don't care about kids" if you don't vote yes on his flawed plan. pic.twitter.com/EUc4fMQ9ZJ
— Steve Farley (@SteveFarleyAZ) October 29, 2015
There’s something that feels very inevitable about the way this Arizona school funding “settlement” is playing out.
The plan ends a lawsuit filed by schools in 2010 after the Legislature stopped giving required yearly inflation increases to basic school funding. It would funnel $3.5 billion to K-12 schools over 10 years. About $2 billion comes from increasing land trust withdrawals, and the $1.4 billion from the state’s general fund. The deal also contained several triggers that would allow the Legislature to stop mandatory inflation boosts in tough economic times.
If passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor, voters would have to approve the changes in a May special election.
AZ Rep. Ken Clark (D) and Sen. Debbie Lesko (R) were on Channel 3’s Politics Unplugged to discuss the recently ended legislative session (one of the quickest in history).
(Link to video since, of course, it autoplays when embedded.)
I’m not singling out host Dennis Welch because he’s far from the only news person in Arizona who does this, but this interview is the latest example of the infuriating habit they have of pretending to be utterly ignorant of our state’s political realities so as to appear “balanced”. On the topic of the budget Sen. Lesko stuck to the GOP/Governor Ducey script of how a parsimonious spending plan was what they were elected to do and how education funding wasn’t cut at all (if you squint really hard). Clark criticized Lesko’s dubious math on spending-per-pupil and decried the GOP majority’s abandonment of investment in education and infrastructure in favor of 23 years of tax cut magic. It was what you’d expect from a bipartisan panel. The part that irritated me the most was Welch demanding to know what the Democratic plan was.
Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
www.phrases.org.uk
I stayed up past 3am to watch the AZ House vote on final bills before Sine Die last Friday morning. The very last bill the Committee of the Whole was debating when it was announced that the Senate would be skedaddling, thus, not hearing any more bills was SB1339, which would have forbade so-called “ballot harvesting”. It was directed at Democratic volunteers, under spurious allegations that they are stealing thousands of ballots or forging them, or something. Democratic Reps were understandably impatient with this slander and took to the floor to say so.