They’re Baaack! A Decade After the ‘Show Me Your Papers To Pee’ Bill Failed, The Christian Taliban Wants To Demonize Transgender Kids Again

Back in 2013, Mullah Cathi Herrod and her Christian Taliban at the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) got then-Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) to sponsor its transphobic “show me your papers to pee” bill based upon ignorance, fear and loathing for a distinct class of individuals whom they want state law to sanction discrimination against on the basis of gender.

Rep. Kavanagh’s Tea-Publican-controlled Appropriations Committee voted to void parts of local anti-discrimination ordinances designed to give protections to transgender individuals on a 7-4 party-line vote. Phoenix transgender restroom bill clears House committee:

Senate Bill 1045 [a strike everything amendment] would prohibit local governments from passing ordinances that could subject businesses to lawsuits or criminal penalties if they forbid a transgender person from using a restroom.

Bill sponsor Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said the measure is a response to Phoenix’s new city ordinance, which bans discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents. The law applies to public accommodations such as stores, restaurants and hotels.

City attorneys have said the ordinance could extend to bathroom use in some cases. For instance, a person with male genitalia who identifies as a woman might have a discrimination claim if the facility bars that person from using the restroom, and vice versa.

“We’re simply saying that government has no business in this area,” Kavanagh said. “The store owners can work it out as they have always done.”

Kavanagh added the feelings of the “overwhelming majority” of the population do matter and cannot be ignored. “This bill is about civility,” he said. “Society has mores and customs.”

The “show me your papers to pee” bill eventually died and did not become law.

I recently came across this bill filing for the new legislature this coming January. The “Don’t Say Pronouns” Bill?

AZ senator Kavanagh introduced a bill that would force teachers to misgender their transgender students (unless they have parental permission) and protect the teachers/staff who are willfully transphobic due to their “religious or moral convictions.” https://t.co/QqXCvNaV9C pic.twitter.com/XzsRiwOsQn

— AZ Right Wing Watch (@az_rww) December 22, 2022

This is part of the Christian Taliban’s “anti-woke agenda” against “pronouns” and transphobia against transgender kids, but they will cast it in terms of their “religious freedom” to discriminate freely. Because WWJD?

Are we really going to be wasting our time on Cathi Herrod’s culture war religious bigotry again? The New York Times editorializes, How Americans Can Stand Against Extremism (excerpt):

[E]very American citizen has a part to play, and the most important thing we all can do is to demand that in every community, we treat our neighbors — and their civil liberties and human rights — with respect.

One way to do that is to call out and reject the dehumanizing language that has become so pervasive in online discussions, and in real life, about particular groups of people. Calling L.G.B.T.Q. people pedophiles is an old tactic, and it makes ignoring or excusing any violence that may come their way easier. While direct calls for violence are beyond the pale for most Republican politicians, and the causes of specific violent acts are not easily traced, calling transgender people pedophiles or “groomers” is increasingly common and usually goes unchallenged.

[T]he silence from a great majority of Republicans on the demonization of, and lies about, trans people has indeed meant complicity — complicity in what experts call stochastic terrorism, in which vicious rhetoric increases the likelihood of random violence against the people who are the subject of the abusive language and threats.

Shouldn’t the Arizona legislature be focused on the existential crisis of our impending water shortage next year?

Natalie Koch, professor of geography at Syracuse University and the author of a forthcoming book about the relationship between Arizona and Saudi Arabia, explains at the New York Times, Arizona Is in a Race to the Bottom of Its Water Wells, With Saudi Arabia’s Help:

Arizona’s water is running worryingly low. Amid the worst drought in more than a millennium,  which has left communities across the state with barren wells, the state is depleting what remains of its precious groundwater. Much of it goes to private companies nearly free, including Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company.

Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published a report showing that the Arizona State Land Department has been leasing 3,500 acres of public land to Almarai for a suspiciously low price.

The case has prompted calls for an investigation into how a foreign company wound up taking the state’s dwindling water supplies for a fee that might be as low as one-sixth the market rate. But the focus on the Saudi scheme obscures a more fundamental problem: pumping groundwater in Arizona remains largely unregulated. It’s this legal failing that, in part, allows the Saudi company to draw unlimited amounts of water to grow an alfalfa crop that feeds dairy cows 8,000 miles away.

Even if Fondomonte leaves the state, it will be only a matter of time before Arizona sucks its aquifers dry. While a 1980 state law regulates groundwater use in a handful of urban areas, water overuse is common even in these places. The situation is worse in the roughly 80 percent of Arizona’s territory that falls outside these regulations. In most of rural Arizona, whoever has the money to drill a well can continue to pump till the very last drop.

Many more agricultural operations are drawing down the state’s underground water reserves for free. And most of them are U.S.-owned. Minnesota’s Riverview Dairy company, for example, has a farm near Sunizona, Ariz., that has drained so much of the aquifer that local residents have seen their wells dry up. Meanwhile, some California-based farms, facing tougher groundwater regulations at home, are looking to relocate to neighboring Arizona for cheap water. These companies and other megafarms can afford to drill deep wells, chasing the rapidly sinking water table.

And it’s not just farming operations. Other sectors like mining and the military, which have a huge presence in the state, also benefit from Arizona’s lax water laws. It’s difficult to know how much water is being used up by one of the state’s largest employers, Raytheon Missiles and Defense, which, like Almarai, has a footprint in Arizona and Saudi Arabia. But manufacturing missiles has a water cost, too. And like Fondomonte’s alfalfa, Raytheon’s product is being shipped to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi farm scandal may have helped to spotlight the severity of Arizona’s water crisis, but the state will have to go further to address the root cause. Arizona needs to apply groundwater pumping regulations across the entire state, not just in its metropolitan areas. It won’t be easy. This year special interest groups scuttled a far more modest effort that would have allowed rural communities to opt in to groundwater enforcement. In all likelihood, when these groups have to pay fair prices for water, they will have to give up on growing water-hungry crops like alfalfa in the desert. This kind of race-to-the-bottom approach to water in Arizona is insupportable today, if it ever was.

Arizona is one of the last places in the United States that should be reckless with its water resources. The state is dependent on the Colorado River, which has been depleted by overuse and climate change and hit extreme lows this year. Water managers from seven states in the river basin failed in August to meet a federal deadlineto make dramatic reductions. As a result, the Bureau of Reclamation ordered Arizona to cut its use of water from the river by 21 percent. Arizona’s cities and rural areas alike are at risk if they lose access to Colorado River water only to find their groundwater reserves sucked dry, too.

In August, Kris Mayes, then a candidate for state attorney general, released a 16-point plan to stop what it called the “Saudi water grab.” Ms. Mayes, who narrowly won the November election (though results of an automatic recount are pending), has some good ideas. In her plan, she promised to seek back payment for Almarai’s underpriced water and land usage since 2015, urged support for counties that want to manage their groundwater and said the legislature should update Arizona’s water code to prevent overuse in rural areas. But she failed to clearly state the action that it needed: groundwater regulation across the entire state.

A few months after that plan was released, Saudi-U.S. relations deteriorated after Saudi Arabia announced oil production cuts. “Saudi Arabia has stated their intention to rob Arizonans at the gas pump, but they are already stealing our water,” said Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, one of many politicians in the state to take aim at the Saudi agriculture deal.

As a geographer who studies Saudi Arabia’s history, I can’t help but think about how muddy the lines between victim and victimizer are when I hear this rhetoric. Ironically, American farmers helped kick-start the Saudi dairy industry. In the 1940s the U.S. State Department sent Arizona farmers to Saudi Arabia and coordinated two Saudi royal visits to Arizona to tout the state’s spectacular desert agriculture. The unsustainable alfalfa and dairy enterprise that Saudi Arabia set up in the wake of these visits drained the kingdom’s groundwater, sowing the seeds for Saudi companies to look to Arizona for cheap water.

It’s a cycle that has to end: Arizona should put a stop to Fondomonte’s shady deal, and the sooner the better. But Arizona is not the victim of evil outsiders; it’s the victim of its own hubris and political failings that allow such a system to exist. Blaming the Saudis may be a good political play, but the problems won’t go away until state lawmakers properly reform Arizona’s groundwater laws.

Standing up to special interests tied to Arizona’s free-for-all water system won’t be as easy as the anti-Saudi saber rattling seen across the state, but it is the step that is needed to prevent Arizona’s water crisis from becoming a water catastrophe.

Or how about the impending fiscal cliff in public education funding if the legislature does not lift the aggregate expenditure limit before March?

Laurie Roberts of The Republic recently wrote, Are Republicans really willing to hold Arizona’s school children hostage? (excerpt):

Republican legislators are already talking about holding the kids hostage to their own demands in January.

Restore GOP rule or lay off teachers?

Rep. Jacqueline Parker [MAGA/QAnon-Mesa] on Wednesday called on her fellow Republicans to go slow on lifting what’s called the “aggregate expenditure limit.”

“Anyone who votes for AEL expansion in the upcoming special session WITHOUT meaningful election integrity reforms, is handing our state over to the Democrats in 2024 & then goodbye ESA’s, goodbye gun rights, goodbye freedom,” she tweeted. “That will be the @DougDucey legacy. Pictures to follow.”

Put another way, if Republicans can’t pass a bunch of new election laws aimed at restoring Republican rule … then teachers should be laid off and the schools shut down?

There’s a winning plan.

Mark April 1 on your calendar. That’s the day Arizona’s schools will see $1.4 billion disappear from their bank accounts.

Oh, the money will still be there. They just won’t be allowed to spend it.

Ducey promised to call a special session

The spending limit was set by voters in 1980 but recent declines in enrollment, coupled with a decision to move Proposition 301 money under the spending cap when they extended the half-cent sales tax for schools in 2018 – not to mention major expenses never contemplated 42 years ago – have brought our schools to the brink.

To avoid disaster, the Legislature must waive the aggregate spending limit by March 1 or the schools will be forced to cut their annual budgets by 17% a month later to get under the aggregate cap. This, with less than three months to go in the school year.

The spending limit doesn’t apply to charter schools because they weren’t around in 1980 when the constitutional limit was passed.

Ducey in July promised Democrats that he’d call a special session of the Legislature to waive the spending cap if only they’d vote for his budget – one that added both a $1 billion boost to K-12 funding and his signature universal voucher program.

So they did. The deal was prefaced on a showing that they could get the two-thirds support needed to override the spending limit.

Ducey reneged on his promise. The new legisature will take office in January without any special session.

Lawmakers would rather shut schools down?

Of course, everything changes in January, when Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs replaces Ducey.

Thus comes Rep. Parker’s call to tie a waiver of the spending limit to the coming raft of election “reform” bills Republicans want to enact after their 2022 losses.

Never mind that those electoral losses have more to do with who they nominated than it does with how we vote. (See: Republican Kimberly Yee, the non-Trump candidate who cruised to reelection as state treasurer.)

“Anyone who votes for AEL expansion in the upcoming special session WITHOUT meaningful election integrity reforms, is handing our state over to the Democrats in 2024,” she tweeted.

Translation: She’s willing to force her home district, Mesa Unified School District, to cut its budget by $83 million. And Phoenix Union by $52 million and Scottsdale by $28 million and tiny Chino Valley by $3 million.

“The only way to manage that would be to lay people off,” Superintendent John Scholl warned earlier this month. “That $3 million (cut) in our community would be devastating.”

Imagine the blowback if that happens

Michael Wright, superintendent of the Blue Ridge Unified School District, said that a $2.5 million hit to his budget, with just three months left in the school year, would require teacher layoffs and maybe even school closures.

More likely, definite school closures – or at least massive upheaval as classrooms are left empty because schools can’t use money that was appropriated to pay them.

Can you imagine the blowback? Don’t think Red for Ed.

Think Red for Ed multiplied by purple with parental rage all across the state.

Gee, and I remember once upon a time – two years ago – when Republicans worried about things like closing schools and the impact on children.

Now they’re willing to do it again to try to gain a political advantage in 2024?

I previously warned you that this MAGA/QAnon GQP legislature will be the most extremist ever.

Thank God Gov. Katie Hobbs has a veto stamp, and there are a nearly equal number of Democrats in the legislature to block any veto override. But we are looking at political stasis from these extremist GQP obstructionists. As Laurie Roberts said, “There’s a winning plan.”