The Clown Car Commeth…

The Arizona Legislature convenes tomorrow, which means that our civil liberties and public institutions will once again come under assault by the religious zealots, conspiracy nuts, and fascist traitors of the AZGOP.

We all need to keep an ear closely tuned to what these legal vandals will try to do to us. My favorite means of staying informed is Arizona’s Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, (on FB, and Twitter). They have an excellent newsletter and weekly happy hour to help voters keep up with the tom-foolery at the Capitol.

Here’s an except of their newsletter (linked above) previewing some of the truly bad ideas already in the hopper:

Session Preview: Top Issues

Budget battles. The Arizona Supreme Court has spoken: the way lawmakers have been piling unrelated issues into budget bills violates our state Constitution. That means our lawmakers have to find a new way to pass a budget, rather than their previous process of promising individual majority legislators the moon in the form of tacking on various provisions that often lacked the support to pass on their own. Fortunately, our state already has a model to fall back on. It appears the House will go back to the long-ago practice of appropriations subcommittees, which is a good thing. But as for what goes into the budget, majority lawmakers are splitting into two factions. One includes JD Mesnard (R-17) and Ben Toma (R-22), who are intent on repealing and replacing last session’s flat tax rather than giving Arizonans the chance to vote on it in November. The other includes David Cook (R-8) and David Livingston (R-22), who, based on the bills they’ve already introduced, seem to be intent on spending the surplus instead. This heralds an excellent opportunity for us to use our voices to demand badly needed investments toward the public good. 

Averting huge cuts to education. Arizona public schools are facing a ticking time bomb: the catastrophic prospect of being legally unable to spend $1.2 billion in funds that are already being collected. Unless the Legislature waives the little-known Aggregate Expenditure Limit with a two-thirds majority before March 1, schools will have to cut spending for this school year by 16% across the board. This will mean teacher layoffs, program cuts, and school closures. Lawmakers have waived the constitutionally mandated limit before without issue, but this year, some are trying to leverage the crisis for their own goals: killing Prop 208, expanding ESA vouchers, banning right-wing bugaboos like “critical race theory” or masks and vaccines, or all of the above. 

Further attacks on our freedom to vote. Despite the failure of the Cyber Ninjas ballot review to prove the 2020 election was rigged or stolen, some lawmakers on the extreme right continue to insist without evidence that our election system is somehow fatally flawed. The new chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is asking lawmakers not to try to legislate based on “the so-called findings” of the audit, but Senate President Karen Fann is undeterred, saying she plans to do just that. A number of elections bills have already been introduced by conspiracy-minded lawmakers, with more to come. 

2022 Session Timeline

Monday, 1/10 2022 Legislative Session begins

Thursday, 1/13 Last day to introduce House bills before the 7-bill limit begins 

Monday, 1/31 Senate bill introduction deadline

Monday, 2/7 House bill introduction deadline 

Friday, 2/18 Last day for a bill to get out of committees in its originating house

Monday, 2/21 Crossover Week begins (traditionally, committee hearings are suspended this week)

Friday, 3/25 Last day for a bill to get out of committees in its crossover house

Saturday, 4/23 100th Day of Session (the magic ending point we hope for; can be changed)

Confused on which committees meet when? Can’t remember which committees your lawmaker sits on? Flag this handy list of committee chairs and assignments, freshly updated for 2022.

Introduced Bills: An Early Look

The floodgates of introduced bills have yet to open — we saw over 1800 bills in 2021, but so far this session shows only around 150. RTS isn’t available on these yet, as none are on committee agendas. But take this time to set up lists in apps.azleg.gov and add bills to them. It will help you later, as the system will generate alerts when your flagged bills are assigned a hearing. 

SB1010, sponsored by Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-23), would force schools to allow protesters at school board meetings and other events after school hours. It would also make school board elections partisan, a move being pushed by national partisan organizations in an effort to galvanize their base. Opponents argue that school boards should stay above party politics the same way judges are supposed to, in order to avoid the conflict that can keep school boards from doing their job. (At least one Republican lobbyist is calling the bill a “dumb idea.”) Making school boards partisan turns them into just another venue for toxic political tribalism. OPPOSE.

SB1011, sponsored by Kelly Townsend (R-16), would prohibit school districts from using tax dollars to pay for membership in a state or national school board association. These associations provide valuable training, leadership and other services to nearly all school boards (240 in Arizona alone). The root idea is being pushed by the powerful libertarian special interest group Goldwater Institute. They contend that the centrist, nonpartisan Arizona School Boards Association is “forcing schools to fund a radical political agenda with public tax dollars,” teaching “critical race theory,” and coercing board members to remain members. In the absence of Trump on the 2022 ballot to turn out far-right voters, well-funded national special interest organizations are pushing polarizing culture-war issues such as this one to galvanize their far-right base. Bills like this one are a distraction from the work Arizona needs to do in improving its public education system. They attack the fundamental idea that every school should have the resources necessary to deliver quality education that prepares every child for the future, no matter their color, background, or zip code. OPPOSE.

SB1012, sponsored by Kelly Townsend (R-16), would force the Secretary of State to hand over the statewide voter registration database to a third party chosen by the Legislature, for the purpose of investigating whether voter registration practices comply with federal laws on federal-only voting. Based on the legislature’s track record with last year’s “audit,” handing Arizona’s entire voter database to a third party would be incredibly dangerous. Townsend has spent much of her time in the legislature pursuing the red herring of federal-only voting. Many conservatives dislike it, viewing it as potentially allowing non-citizens to vote; however, very few voters cast a federal-only ballot, and cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare. Arizona’s voter registration law is far stricter than federal law, requiring voters to prove citizenship when they register. The commonly used federal form doesn’t, and the US Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Arizona can’t reject those federal forms. OPPOSE.

SB1051, sponsored by Kelly Townsend (R-16), would expand the legal definition of homeschooling to include anyone who is hired by a parent to teach a child in any location. This is a back-door way of expanding microschools, one of the newest schemes in a decades-long trend of draining taxpayer dollars out of Arizona’s public schools. Microschooling places children as young as 5 years old in groups of 5+ in a private home or facility subsidized by taxpayer dollars with no teacher, just an untrained, unlicensed and unsupervised adult. This business model is barely regulated; it involves far too many unknowns to make expansion a responsible option for our children. OPPOSE.

SB1058, sponsored by Wendy Rogers (R-6), would ban county recorders from allowing voters to receive ballots and vote from their cars, as well as banning drop boxes anywhere but inside county recorder buildings and polling places. Trained election workers would be required to monitor drop boxes. The Pima County Recorder called the bill “grossly ableist,” saying, “Unmanned ballot drop boxes are meant to remain accessible to all voters and are especially beneficial to those living in rural locations, those who work non-traditional work hours and those who may be concerned about their mail ballot arriving on time.” OPPOSE.

SB1094, sponsored by JD Mesnard (R-17), would require petition circulators to read the descriptions on initiative and referendum petitions aloud to signers. Each signer would have to affirm to the circulator before signing that they read and understood the description. Signatures which do not follow these rules would be invalid. This move away from personal voter responsibility has one purpose: to make it more difficult for citizens to pass laws lawmakers don’t like. Redo of SB1531 which never received a house floor vote. OPPOSE.

HB2009, sponsored by Steve Kaiser (R-15), would punish schools that don’t obey lawmakers’ whims by withholding their funding. The bill allows any single lawmaker to complain to the Attorney General if they feel a district or charter school is doing something illegal. The AG could then order school funding to be withheld. The sponsor is targeting some schools’ decisions to require masks on campus, in accordance with CDC guidance, despite the legislature’s attempt to ban such requirements. That attempt was halted by the courts and never became law, but Kaiser argues schools should have followed it anyway. The bill is patterned after a 2016 law that allows the Attorney General to investigate actions by cities and counties, complete with the same ability to cut off state dollars. OPPOSE.

HB2020, sponsored by Steve Kaiser (R-15), would exempt those who have previously tested positive for covid from being required to receive the covid vaccine. Health officials have made it clear that people can test positive more than once. A new report from the Arizona Department of Health Services found that unvaccinated Arizonans are 31 times more likely to die of COVID-19 and nearly 5 times more likely to test positive for the virus than their vaccinated counterparts. OPPOSE.

HB2041, sponsored by Leo Biasiucci (R-5), mandates special ballot paper with no fewer than 19 anti-fraud countermeasures, including proprietary holographic foil, banknote-level background designs, infrared ink that requires a mass spectrometer to read, a QR code for voters to track their ballots as they are processed, and a perforated paper receipt. The bill includes a blank line for an appropriation, and mandates the use of this paper for all statewide and federal elections beginning in November 2022, likely giving elections officials just four months to comply. When Republicans added a similar provision to the budget last June (later axed by the Supreme Court), the Arizona Association of Counties opposed the measure, saying the additional requirements would delay ballot tabulation and results, the required paper would preclude a competitive bid process, and the mandated security standards could even be unworkable. See mirror bill SB1120, sponsored by Sonny Borrelli (R-5). Similar to SB1028, sponsored by Wendy Rogers (R-6), which would require 3 of these measures.