Caitlin Sievers, Arizona Mirror

Congressional Democrats have wasted no time in going after Republicans who voted for the federal tax and spending bill that will cut health insurance and food benefits for the impoverished and disabled to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly did just that during a Friday morning press conference at the IBEW Local 640 electrician’s union building in Phoenix, where he slammed Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell for saying that people will “get over” losing their Medicaid coverage.

“Trump and Republicans in the House and the Senate, they were hell-bent on passing tax cuts for rich people and tax cuts for big corporations, and, to be honest with you, they did not care about anything else,” Kelly told reporters, community members and advocates for the programs facing cuts.

Just one week earlier, President Donald Trump signed into law his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” after it narrowly passed through both chambers of Congress with only Republican support, including from all of Arizona’s Republican Congressmen: Andy Biggs, Juan Ciscomani, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar, Abe Hamadeh and David Schweikert.

The bill will make permanent the 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term and provide billions of dollars to carry out his plans of mass deportations. Those tax cuts, which primarily benefit the wealthy, will be paid for in part through deep cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Those programs, respectively, provide health insurance and food assistance to low-income and disabled people.

Even with those spending cuts, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill could add $3.4 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years.

The bill is expected to shrink the federal funding for Arizona’s Medicaid program by $35 billion over the next decade, which will force an estimated 300,000 people off the program, on top of cuts in services for those still covered.

The Urban Institute estimates that nearly half of the 900,000 Arizonans who rely on SNAP benefits for food could be kicked out of the program, which would put intense pressure on the state’s food banks.

“It is a colossal mistake that this government has made, that my Republican colleagues have made and that this president has advocated for,” Kelly said.

The bill’s passage has caused panic for some Arizonans who rely on Medicaid for their children’s medications and for programs that help people with disabilities stay in their homes and gain important skills. Some two million people are enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS, the state’s Medicaid program.

But Democrats like Kelly have promised to try to reverse the cuts in the bill, an uphill battle with Republican majorities in both chambers of U.S. Congress. He said the best way to do that was to flip both chambers in 2026 and win the presidency in 2028.

“We’ve got to win elections,” Kelly said. “Elections do matter. There are consequences. We’re seeing the consequences of the last election, where the wealthiest Americans are going to benefit and folks that have a hard time putting food on the table are going to be further at risk.”

Quianna Brown, a Phoenix mother of three, gets health insurance for two of her children through a Medicaid program for adopted children, while her oldest child is covered by private insurance.

“I have a perspective of what our health care system looks like as a whole, and it is an ecosystem,” Brown said. “None of it stands on its own.”

She added that cuts to Medicaid will impact the entire system, not just the people kicked off of it.

Brown said she knows that her daughter who has disabilities won’t be kicked off Medicaid, but she might lose important services.

“The coverage means nothing if they don’t have access to services,” Brown said. “I don’t know how to explain to you the current feeling of hearing that your child needs a specialist and you can’t find one that doesn’t have a six month waiting list.”

January Contreras, executive director for Children’s Action Alliance, told the crowd that times are tough already with the high cost of groceries and housing, and that the bill will make things even more difficult for families.

“We will see hunger become a reality for more kids and families, and we will see more families not be able to go to a doctor,” she said.

Contreras said that her organization will work with Kelly and others to “mitigate the harm and to document the harm” caused by the cuts.

That means attempting to reverse the cuts in Congress, and holding the Arizona governor and state legislature accountable for doing everything they can to lessen the harm the cuts will cause to people, she said.

Alexis Aguirre teaches English language learners in the Osborn Elementary School District and is a former member of the Roosevelt School District Board. Aguirre criticized the Trump administration’s withholding of $6.8 billion that was set to go to public schools July 1 — money that was already allocated by Congress for before- and after-school programs, migrant education and English-language learning, among other initiatives.

“I’ve seen firsthand what happens when we fund schools and when we don’t,” she said.

This year, Osborn middle schools students doubled their English proficiency rate, she said, but that progress takes staff, training and curricula, which all require money.

“When federal funding disappears, we’re not trimming excess,” Aguirre said. “We’re trimming to the core of our public education system.”

Terri Shoemaker, the executive vice president of the Arizona Food Bank Network, warned that more Arizoans than ever are visiting food banks across the state. She said 700,000 people visited a food bank in the last month.

Arizona doesn’t have the money to make up for the 30% cuts to the SNAP program that are coming. The cuts mean that people will go hungry, she said, including children and military veterans. The state’s food banks will not be able to make up the difference, either, Shoemaker said.

The bill also gets rid of work requirement exemptions for people experiencing homelessness, who might not have transportation to get to a job or proper attire.

“So, what can we do?” Shoemaker asked. “Voice your concerns. Make sure all legislators understand the impacts of the bill. Make sure your friends, family and neighbors know the impacts of this bill.”

Kelly promised to keep doing whatever he can, including advocating for restored SNAP benefits as part of a Farm Bill, to reverse some of the cuts, but admitted that it won’t be easy.

“We didn’t win this fight, but I’m not over it and you shouldn’t be, because this is a defining moment, a turning point for our state and for our country,” Kelly said.

He slammed Trump and his Republican supporters for taking lunch away from children to give money to billionaires.

“This is not a political issue, this is a human issue,” Brown said. “My kid’s very life has been reduced to a line item, and it is p---ing me off.”

The same legislative Republicans who have accused Arizona’s governor of appointing unqualified people to head state agencies just nixed qualification requirements for their own appointments to a litany of state boards and commissions.

On May 5, the Arizona House of Representatives voted along party lines to axe requirements for legislative appointments to various boards and commissions. The bill that the House approved, Senate Bill 1649, is sponsored by Senate President Warren Petersen, the top Republican in the Senate.

On Tuesday, Petersen issued a statement touting the importance of the Senate Committee for Director Nominations, which he said is ensuring that agency directors nominated by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, are qualified.

Petersen told the Arizona Mirror via email that the two situations did not make for an apples-to-apples comparison.

“The difference is that the confirmation process on director nominees exists to further the system of checks and balances,” he said. “The Legislature amending the way the Legislature makes board selections has nothing to do with separation of powers or checks and balances. The (current) qualifications are so narrow that they may eliminate more qualified individuals.”

The Director Nominations Committee, which Petersen created in 2023 specifically to vet Hobbs’ director nominees, has held a series of contentious and combative nomination hearings since then. A number of Hobbs’ choices to head up state agencies have faced intense partisan questioning of their past political activity and demands that they explain their views on culture war issues far outside the scope of their jobs.

Petersen’s proposal, which already passed through the Senate, also on a party-line vote, will head back to that chamber for final approval after being amended in the House before it’s sent to Hobbs to either sign or veto it.

Senate Bill 1649 eliminates requirements for entities such as special taxing districts, the Arizona Water Protection Fund Commission and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to have specific expertise or interest in the issues that they govern.

For instance, it removes the requirement that legislative appointees to the Economic Estimates Commission be knowledgeable about economics and that appointees to the Arizona Water Protection Fund Commission “have demonstrated an interest in natural resources” — and that they represent geographically diverse areas of the state.

It also throws out a requirement for legislators appointed to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to be selected “based on their understanding of and interest in legislative audit oversight functions.”

Democratic Sen. Lauren Kuby, of Tempe, said during a March 6 debate on the Senate floor that, as a former Tempe City Council member who voted on board appointments, she sympathized with the struggle to find willing and qualified applicants.

“I’m really worried about the wholesale removal of expertise from 11 different boards and commissions,” she said.

Kuby is a member of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, which makes recommendations to the Legislature on all facets of the complicated state budget.

“It’s really not clear to me what this bill is trying to accomplish,” she said.

Petersen told the House Government Committee on March 26 that it was a “very straightforward” bill, the same way that Sen. Jake Hoffman described it in the Senate Government Committee meeting on Feb. 19.

“This just simply opens it up so that we have more applicants available for these appointments to boards and commissions,” Petersen said, adding that it’s been difficult to find applicants who meet all the qualifications laid out in statute, but that “we’ve been able to find people that are otherwise qualified for these positions.”

House Government Committee Chairman Walt Blackman initially voted against Petersen’s proposal on March 26, but after a recess during which Blackman said they “worked out some legal issues, so we don’t end up in jail,” he voted to approve the bill.

During an April 1 Republican Caucus meeting, Blackman said that he wasn’t sure if Senate Bill 1649 would pass a vote of the full House, given that there were a lot of questions about it.

Blackman never explained his concerns about the bill and did not respond to requests for comment, but he ultimately voted to approve the proposal on May 5.

Between the Government Committee hearing on March 26 and the May 5 vote, Petersen’s bill was amended to remove proposed changes to qualification requirements for appointees to the Arizona Commerce Authority. The ACA is an economic development organization that was accused by Attorney General Kris Mayes last year of violating the Arizona Constitution’s gift clause by hosting forums that amounted to pricey gifts to the CEOs who attended them.

During an April 16 floor debate, after SB1649 had been amended, Democratic Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, of Tucson, called the proposal “dangerous.”

“I just want to point out that this takes away that the appointees have to have any kind of expertise or knowledge of the board that they are sitting on,” she said. “This sets Arizona up to have boards and commissions with people who literally have nothing to do with them.”

During the same discussion, Democratic Rep. Betty Villegas, also of Tucson, said she was confused about whether Republicans wanted qualified people on the job or not, referencing a push from legislative Republicans this year to ban diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring, to be replaced with a focus on “merit.”

“I’ve been on plenty of commissions and boards where I was qualified, and when you have people that are not qualified, it really hurts moving forward on your goals,” she said.

Phoenix May Day march unites unlikely allies against Trump’s ‘hate and fascism’

by Caitlin Sievers, Arizona Mirror
May 1, 2025

Senior citizens and students, anarchists and elected leaders, Democrats, Republicans, union and religious leaders marched down Washington Street in Phoenix, carrying with them pithy signs and motivated by their outrage over the actions of President Donald Trump.

Approximately 3,000 people gathered at the state Capitol Thursday morning to march to the Sandra Day O’Connor U.S. Courthouse for a May Day protest, one of around 1,000 similar rallies planned across the country.

They showed up to demand an end to the economic chaos spurred by Trump’s tariffs, to call for workers’ rights, advocate for a stop to deportation without due process and request respect for LGBTQ rights.

They marched to protest the attempts to erase Black, Native and Latino history from schools, government archives and museums, and to call for affordable housing, funding for public schools and access to quality health care.

“Escucha, escucha, estamos en la lucha!” (Listen, listen, we are in the fight!) protestors shouted in Spanish.

The protest against the Trump administration’s executive overreach, flouting of court orders and disregard for the U.S. Constitution, was organized by former state Sen. Raquel Teran, local labor unions and advocacy groups.

Sheena Newkirk, 48, of Scottsdale, said that she was marching because she feels that the civil rights of Americans are at risk. Newkirk, who is Black, said that her ancestors fought for civil rights and freedoms and she doesn’t want to see the country regress.

“We fought for this, and we are not going to lose it or have it dismantled by a bunch of oligarchs and racist people who feel as though they want to go back in time,” she said.

The erasure of Black history from government websites, museums and schools in the name of banning diversity, equity and inclusion is especially concerning to Newkirk.

“You can’t have history in American culture without Black history,” she said.

Fred Yamashita, the executive director of Arizona AFL-CIO, called for marchers to remember those who died during a peaceful protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886. The protest, aimed at securing an 8-hour work day, later became a symbol for the fight for workers’ rights.

“Their call to action still echoes with all of us today, because so many of the rights and benefits that workers and unions have fought and died for over the years have been clawed back and stripped away,” Yamashita said.

Marisa Mata, 30, said she showed up to protest on behalf of immigrant workers — especially those who came into the country illegally. Many of her family and friends who are immigrants literally built some of the structures that she marched past on Thursday, she said.

Some of her friends are young people who came to the U.S. without proper documentation, but who rise at 4 a.m. to work physically demanding construction jobs, she explained.

“They do the hardest jobs and they get paid the least, they have no benefits and they have no hopes of retirement, and they pay their taxes because they’re hoping and praying that, one day, there will be immigration reform and they’ll be able to get all their papers together,” Mata said.

Patrick McCarthy, a conservative and a registered Republican voter who lives in Waddell, said he was at the protest “to fight fascism.”

“We came out to ask for a government for the people instead of a government for the oligarchs,” he said.

Lisa McCarthy, an independent voter who is married to Patrick, said that her grandfather fought facism in World War II and would be heartbroken to see the state of the country today.

“Human rights are human rights are human rights are human rights, and our Constitution means something,” she said. “So, regardless of what you think of religiously or personally, our Constitution should matter if you call yourself an American.”

Patrick McCarthy said that they decided it was imperative to protest on behalf of those who can’t for fear that they’ll be arrested and possibly deported.

“The people who are MAGA aren’t conservative Republicans,” Patrick McCarthy said, instead describing them as Christian nationalists and white supremacists. “Trump’s not a conservative Republican. These are people who are pushing a narrative of hate, of division, of fascism, plain and simple.”

CJ Kennedy, an 80-year-old Anthem resident, said she was concerned about possible cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security benefits, as well as the erosion of voting rights and the right to free speech.

“Everything is under attack right now and (if it goes away) will we be able to get it back?” Kennedy asked.

Newkirk said that, even though it was encouraging to see so many people protesting, she’s still floored at how many people continue to support the Trump administration, especially after he began deporting U.S. citizens and immigrants who have legal status.

“It’s a trickle down effect,” she said. “Eventually, you’re gonna f*** around and find out that everybody is in the same boat and nobody is exempt.”

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

A Republican proposal to force voters to cast their ballots at neighborhood voting sites would cost Arizona counties more than $50 million the first year and more than $20 million every election year.

And the plan to limit those voting precincts to just 1,000 voters means counties would have to find nearly 4,000 new voting locations.

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, has repeatedly told lawmakers that the proposal would put a financial burden on the counties and would be logistically impossible to implement.

Earlier this year, Rep. Alexander Kolodin, a Scottsdale Republican, told the Arizona Mirror that he didn’t necessarily believe it when county representatives told him and other members of the House Elections Committee that some of their election reform plans would be too costly and difficult to carry out.

Kolodin and other supporters of 1,000-voter precincts have claimed that it would cut down on long lines and sidestep printer problems that occurred during the 2022 election in Maricopa County. Kolodin also said that it would make voting more convenient for voters in his Scottsdale-based district, because precincts would be located close to home, within their neighborhoods.

But legislative budget analysts have confirmed the accuracy of the numbers that spurred the Arizona Association of Counties to oppose House Concurrent Resolution 2002.

“I’m not worried when people say that they don’t trust our numbers because I know that they’re right,” Marson told the Arizona Mirror. “I just don’t have time to worry about people who choose not to believe the facts.”

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee wrote in an April 11 fiscal note that information submitted by the Arizona Association of Counties showed that HCR2002 would cost the counties a total of around $53 million in its first election year and more than $21 million each election year after that.

“It’s not a surprise to us at all,” Marson said of the fiscal impact outlined by the JLBC. “We’ve been saying for years that a move in this direction is incredibly costly in terms of manpower and dollars.”

The initial cost would include about $31.5 million for new equipment at each of the 3,957 additional voting locations the counties would be forced to open, an estimate that JLBC said “appeared generally reasonable.” The estimate accounts for around $8,000 to purchase electronic poll books, which cost around $1,400 each, and devices for voters with disabilities to use, which cost about $3,700 apiece.

If the resolution became law, each primary and general election after that would cost the counties around $10.8 million to rent out voting locations and pay seven workers to staff each site. Because there is a primary and general election, that means there would be an additional $21.6 million cost to the counties every election year.

The budget analysts wrote that counties could potentially see some offsetting savings from the legislation’s elimination of early voting locations and emergency voting centers, but those would likely be miniscule in comparison to the increases.

“I think it’s a huge impact cost-wise, regardless of county,” Marson said.

The resolution would ask voters to enact the precinct-only voting scheme in 2026, and is a mirror of House Bill 2017, which would directly make the change in state law. Both were introduced by Rep. Rachel Keshel, a Tucson Republican and member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus.

Both have already been approved along party lines in the House of Representatives and could be brought for a vote in the Senate at any time. But HB2017 would almost certainly meet its end with a veto from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. HCR2002 is a workaround that would bypass Hobbs’ desk to be sent to the ballot.

Both of Keshel’s proposals would ban the use of voting centers and require all in-person voters to cast their ballots at precincts capped at 1,000 registered voters apiece. Most counties use voting centers, which allow any registered voter to show up and cast a ballot at any polling site in the county. Under the precinct model, only voters assigned to a precinct can vote there, and if they vote at the wrong location, their ballot won’t be counted.

If they became law, the proposals would force a significant shift for the counties, since eight of them — including Maricopa and Pima, where 75% of voters live — use only vote centers. Four more use a hybrid system with both vote centers and precincts. Only three counties use precincts exclusively.

Keshel’s proposal would require Maricopa County alone to open more than 2,400 new voting locations and to hire more than 17,000 additional poll workers. In the 2024 general election, Maricopa County operated 246 Election Day vote centers and hired more than 4,000 workers.

In 2016, the last time Maricopa County used only precinct-based polling places, it had 671 polling sites.

“We are confident we would not be able to find enough locations or people,” Marson said. “We struggle to staff 245 vote centers, so a tenfold staffing increase seems undoable.”

Both proposals are repeats that Keshel introduced last year but that failed in the Senate, where former Secretary of State Ken Bennett was the only Republican who voted against it. Keshel said during a Jan. 22 House Federalism, Military Affairs and Elections Committee meeting that she was hopeful her proposals would make it through the chamber this year, since Bennett was not reelected.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican and former state representative who supported last year’s version of the 1,000-voter precinct cap, acknowledged during a January committee hearing that it would be a challenge to implement. Heap, who was a former member of the Freedom Caucus, said that a 1,500-voter cap might be more realistic in Maricopa County.

Senate President Warren Petersen did not respond to questions about whether legislators in the chamber were supportive of bringing HCR2002 to the floor for a vote, following the confirmation of the increased cost to the counties from JLBC.

Legislative Republicans and Democrats, along with the governor, are in a political battle over funding for the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities, which will run out April 30. The DDD needs $122 million in supplemental funding to get it through the end of the fiscal year on June 30, but both parties have been fighting since January about how to accomplish that. Some Republicans have said they are dedicated to cutting programs that parents of children with disabilities say are vital, while the nearly 60,000 people with disabilities and their families who rely on DDD face the potential loss of services in May.

All of the House Republicans who are advocating for cuts to the DDD program that accounted for a large chunk of the funding gap voted in favor of Keshel’s proposal before JLBC published its fiscal note. Neither of Keshel’s proposals include funding for the added costs to the counties.

Keshel didn’t respond to a request for comment on the fiscal note.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got an enthusiastic welcome from the Grand Canyon State’s Make America Healthy Again crowd during a stop at the Arizona Senate on Tuesday.

A small but noisy crowd that gathered in the Arizona Senate building — including comedian and prominent anti-vaxxer Rob Schneider, a Scottsdale resident — cheered and applauded while Kennedy praised two Republican-backed health bills that have already passed through the legislature.

One would direct the state to request a federal waiver to ban recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps, from using them to purchase soda. Another, which garnered unanimous support from legislators in both parties, would ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches.

“This is a historic moment of leadership for our state,” Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise, said on Tuesday. “Arizona is once again proving that we will stand up for what is right, even if we face opposition. We are prioritizing the health of our citizens, our children, over corporate interests. We are choosing science over profit.”

But the same crowd that cheered for the Republicans’ nutrition legislation booed and yelled insults at a reporter who asked Kennedy about the government’s response to a measles outbreak that has killed two children and one adult so far. The outbreak has primarily sickened the unvaccinated, including all three the people who died.

“Let’s talk about food!” Kennedy yelled into the microphone as the moderator and crowd shouted down the Associated Press reporter who asked the question.

Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccine activist, but since taking office has given lukewarm support to the MMR vaccine — the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella — finally saying on April 6 that it’s the best way to prevent the measles. Shamp, who is a former nurse, said she was forced out of her previous job because she refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

House Bill 2164, which would ban “ultra processed” food from being served at any school that receives federal funding for its meal program, passed unanimously through both chambers of the Arizona Legislature and has a chance of being signed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

Hobbs is not shy about vetoing legislation that’s lacking support from Democratic legislators. For that reason, the other piece of “MAHA” legislation that Kennedy was there to support, House Bill 2165, is likely headed for a veto.

Both measures were introduced by Rep. Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu City, who said that for too long people talked and worried about what the harmful ingredients in foods are doing to Americans’ health, but no one listened until Kennedy started talking about it.

It certainly hasn’t ever been a priority for Republicans. Michelle Obama’s efforts as first lady to reform the school lunch program by making meals healthier and to get kids exercising were met with derision from Republicans, many of whom disagreed with the idea that the government should closely regulate the contents of school lunches.

On Tuesday, Biasiucci mentioned the various food dyes and chemicals that are banned in Europe but are allowed in food in the U.S., as well as the country’s high rates of obesity and chronic disease. Several of those chemicals are listed in the description of ultra processed foods in his school lunch bill.

The SNAP legislation initially would have sought a waiver to ban recipients from using their benefits to purchase candy and soda, but was later amended to include only soda after opponents, including some in the food and beverage industry, argued that it was too difficult to pin down a definition of candy that didn’t encompass foods like cereal and granola bars.

Democrats didn’t support the proposal, arguing that legislators should do more to ensure the people who rely on SNAP, especially those who live in food deserts, have access to healthy foods instead of banning them from purchasing unhealthier options.

Kennedy claimed, without evidence, that any politician who voted against the SNAP bill did so because they’re taking money from the soda industry.

“There’s no reason to vote against this bill except for corruption,” he said.

A proposed amendment to HB2165 from Democratic Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, of Coal Mine Canyon, that would have banned legislators from using their travel-expense money to purchase soda failed on the Senate floor when all Republicans voted against it.

Biasiucci claimed that legislation like his would “save the lives” of school children, including a small group of them gathered at the Senate on Tuesday. But neither he or anyone else there to celebrate and prompt the MAHA agenda mentioned that President Donald Trump’s administration canceled roughly $1 billion in spending that was already promised for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers.

That includes $21 million for Arizona, of which more than $13 million was slated for schools for healthier student meals.

They also didn’t mention that the Trump administration has rolled back pollution regulations, including those for mercury, soot and coal ash. Pollution has a bigger impact on children than it does on adults, according to the Children’s Environmental Health Collaborative, and can cause asthma, cancer and have negative impacts on their cognitive abilities.

Arizona Democrats held their own press conference on Tuesday, just before Kennedy spoke in the Senate, during which Attorney General Kris Mayes criticized the Trump administration’s supposed commitment to Make America Health Again while also canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health to fund medical research in Arizona.

Hatathlie, who is Navajo, also criticized the Trump administration for its talk about the importance of health while there are still hundreds of open uranium mines on the Navajo Nation that cause higher rates of cancer and birth defects.

As families anxious that they’ll lose vital services for their kids with disabilities at the end of the month gathered at the Capitol, Republican Rep. Neal Carter told them that Republicans are “on their side.”

That was right after he compared the impending funding lapse at the Arizona Division of Developmental Disabilities, which could leave families broke and their kids institutionalized, to a person having their car repossessed because they couldn’t handle the monthly payment.

Some of those families laughed after Carter then described GOP lawmakers as the “adults in the room.”

Even as the Republicans on the Ad Hoc Committee on Executive Budget Mismanagement promised their support, they didn’t propose any legislation or take any action to fund DDD, but they did blame the shortfall on Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

“Today’s hearing is not just about financial figures. It is about the families who rely on Arizona’s developmental disabilities program,” said Committee Chairman Matt Gress, R-Phoenix. “These are families who provide extraordinary care for their loved ones, who navigate complex systems daily and who deserve stability not uncertainty. They should never have to fear that the services they depend on will be jeopardized by financial mismanagement.”

But lawmakers didn’t hear a word from those families who Gress said should be at the center of the hearing because he didn’t allow them to testify. Instead, the GOP lawmakers heard testimony about DDD finances and spoke at length about how the entire situation was Hobbs’ fault.

Gress, the former budget director for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, accused Hobbs of putting the entire DDD budget at risk when she expanded the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program after the legislature refused to explicitly fund it last year.

The Parents as Paid Caregivers Program was implemented in Arizona in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when parents couldn’t find in-home workers to care for their children with disabilities.

The program, which was initially completely federally funded, pays parents to provide care to their own children, but only if they require “extraordinary care” above and beyond typical parenting tasks. That might include things like assisting a teenager with bathing, dressing and eating. But that enhanced federal funding has run out, putting the state on the hook for around 35% of the program’s costs.

If lawmakers don’t pass legislation to provide more funding, it won’t just impact the caregiver program, but all DDD services. The department won’t be able to pay its care providers, potentially putting them out of business and making what seemed a temporary problem permanent.

Since January, when Hobbs requested an additional $122 million to cover the shortfall in DDD funding, Republicans have accused her of bankrupting the division by expanding the scope of the Parents as Paid Caregivers program.

The Democratic legislators assigned to the panel skipped out on Thursday’s meeting, calling it a “shameless political stunt.” Instead, they held a press conference alongside advocates in the DDD community who have been begging the legislature to pass a supplemental funding bill for months now. The advocates staged a protest prior to the committee meeting and many of them attended the meeting afterward.

“We’re being cornered into institutionalizing our children or going broke trying to keep them safe at home,” Brandi Coon, an advocate for the PPCG program said. “This cannot continue. We are not going away. We believe in fiscal responsibility and we believe that every person who qualifies for services deserves to receive them at home and in their community.”

Many of the children whose parents care for them with help from the PPCG program can’t be left alone, and their parents cannot care for them while also holding a job. That means parents might have to make the painful decision to institutionalize their children if funding for the program isn’t restored.

But they’ve also said they want to cut the program — with the GOP head of the budget committee in the House saying he’d support slashing its funding by up to half.

Jamie Kelly, the mother of a child who she said requires hospital-level care at home, accused the Republican legislators of displaying their priorities by delaying funding for DDD just weeks before it lapses.

“Why should I, as a conservative, adoptive mother, have to come to the Capitol daily and plead with the very legislators I voted for to do their jobs?” Kelly asked. “Why must I continually remind them that there is nothing fiscally responsible about the dismantling of support systems for individuals with disabilities?”

During the hearing, Gress said he was disappointed that Democratic legislators, as well as the agency directors of Arizona’s Medicaid program and the Department of Economic Security, did not attend at Hobbs’ direction.

“This Legislature asked for answers. The Governor responded with a tantrum,” Gress said in an emailed statement. “What she calls a ‘political stunt’ is actually legislative oversight — a constitutional duty that we will carry out whether she likes it or not.”

Supplemental funding

Since January, Republican legislators have been criticising Hobbs’ request for supplemental funding and accusing her of fiscal mismanagement. Costs for DDD have increased substantially over the past year, but that change is due to multiple factors, including growth in the PPCG program, increased payment rates to providers and larger than expected enrollment in DDD services overall.

Hobbs initially requested just $4 million in January 2024 to replace the lost federal funding for the PPCG in the 2025 fiscal year, but updated that estimate to $57 million last fall. In late January, the total ask for supplemental DDD funding grew to $122 million.

Gress and other Republicans on the committee have hammered Hobbs for delaying a rule set to go into effect in October that would cap the PPCG program at 40 hours per child, per week. Now, that cap is set to take effect in July. A spokesman for Hobbs didn’t respond to a question about why the implementation of the cap was delayed.

Democrats pointed out that Republicans reacted differently when Ducey requested a total of more than $3 billion in supplemental funds during his eight years as governor.

In 2024, the legislature approved around $274 million in supplemental funding for the Republican-backed universal school voucher program, another program that grew much more quickly than predicted in original budget estimates.

During the Thursday meeting, Republican legislators turned to advice from former Idaho Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, who told the lawmakers via video call that they should require any Medicaid waiver requests that would increase state spending — like the one that gave the go-ahead to continue the PPCG program — to be approved by the legislature.

Blanksma sponsored a bill last year doing just that in Idaho, which the state’s Republican governor signed into law. But Idaho Gov. Brad Little later said that the bill could cause disruption in Medicaid services if waiver renewals are necessary when the legislature isn’t in session.

Gress and others who praised Blanksma’s waiver-approval fix, spurred by skyrocketing costs in Idaho’s own version of the PPCG program, didn’t mention that the Gem State plans to end that program.

Stadium funding frustration

With the future of DDD funding still up in the air, advocates planned to attend an April 1 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting to protest House Bill 2704, which would provide $500 million in state tax dollars for updates to Chase Field. The stadium is home to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the state’s professional baseball team that has an estimated worth of $1.6 billion.

Coon told the Arizona Mirror that the bill was removed from the agenda when its backers learned of the protest plans.

A spokeswoman for the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce told the Mirror that discussion of the bill was postponed as negotiations on its final form are worked out.

Coon said she thinks the fact that the stadium bill is still on the table is an indicator of where lawmakers’ priorities lie.

“Legislators are more concerned about funding their friends and their donors versus funding the essential services that children and disabled adults need,” she said

The bill passed through the House Feb. 26 by a vote of 35-25, with a mix of Republicans and Democrats voting for and against. Gress was one of the Republicans who voted in favor.

Republican politicians who accuse public school teachers of indoctrinating students with a “woke agenda” are pushing to bring religious chaplains into the same schools to provide counseling to students.

“I think Jesus is a lot better than a psychologist,” Rep. David Marshall, R-Snowflake, said during a March 11 meeting of the Arizona House of Representatives’ Education Committee.

Marshall said that he’s been a chaplain who provides counseling for 26 years.

Senate Bill 1269, sponsored by Flagstaff Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers, was modeled after similar legislation passed in recent years in Texas and Florida.

The proposal would give school districts the option of allowing volunteer religious chaplains to provide counseling and programs to public school students. Districts that decide to allow chaplains would be required to provide to parents a list of the volunteer chaplains at each school and their religious affiliation, and parents would be required to give permission for their child to receive support from a chaplain.

Despite ample concerns that the proposal violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and that it would open up schools to legal liability for any bad mental health advice a chaplain might provide, the bill has already passed through the Senate on a party-line vote. The House Education Committee also approved it along party lines.

Rogers told the Education Committee that the existence of any requirement for the separation of church and state in U.S. law “was a myth,” adding that she sees no harm in bringing religion into public schools.

Rogers, a far-right extremist, has embraced white nationalism, and in 2022 spoke at a white nationalist conference, calling the attendees “patriots” and advocating for the murder of her political enemies.

She has also said she is “honored” to be endorsed by a prominent antisemitic Christian nationalist and regularly trafficks in antisemitic tropes. And Rogers has advocated racist theories, appeared on antisemitic news programs and aligned herself with violent anti-government extremists.

Democrats on the committee raised the alarm that Rogers’ bill would violate the Establishment Clause by allowing chaplains with religious affiliations to counsel students, while not providing the same kinds of services to students who don’t follow a religion or who follow a less-common religion with no chaplains available to the school.

An amendment to the bill, proposed by committee Chairman Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican, requires that the chaplains be authorized to conduct religious activities by a religious group that believes in a supernatural being. The amendment would also allow a volunteer chaplain to be denied from the list if the school’s principal believes their counsel would be contrary to the school’s teachings.

Both of these changes would allow districts to exclude chaplains from The Satanic Temple of Arizona, a group that doesn’t believe in a higher power but promotes empathy and has chapters across the country that challenge the intertwining of Christianity and government.

Oliver Spires, a minister with The Satanic Temple of Arizona, voiced his opposition to Rogers’ bill during a Feb. 5 Senate Education Committee meeting.

The legislation, Spires said, would disproportionately impact students from minority religions who see Christian chaplains providing support to their peers while no chaplains representing their religion are available.

“If a district listed a Satanist on their chaplain list, would they have your support?” he asked the committee members.

Gress’s amendment would preclude that.

Gaelle Esposito, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told committee members on Tuesday that school counselors are required to undergo specialized training to prepare them to help students — requirements that religious chaplains wouldn’t have to meet, even though they’d be providing similar services.

“They will simply not be equipped to support students dealing with serious matters like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self harm or suicidal ideation,” Esposito said. “Religious training is not a substitute for academic and professional training in counseling, health care or mental health… Even with the best intentions, chaplains may provide inappropriate responses or interventions that could harm students.”

But as Democrats on the House Education Committee argued that Arizona should provide more funding for trained counselors and social workers to help students with mental health issues, the Republicans on the panel said that students are actually struggling with mental health issues because they don’t have enough religion in their lives.

“I’ve heard that there is a mental health crisis afflicting kids,” Gress, a former school board member, said. “Now, I don’t necessarily think in many of these cases that something is medically wrong with these kids. I think, perhaps, there is a spiritual deficit that needs to be addressed.”

Rep. Justin Olson, R-Mesa, said he’s been frustrated by the federal courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment to require the separation of church and state, claiming it has made the government hostile to religion instead of protecting it.

“I heard comments here today that this is going to harm kids — harm kids by being exposed to religion? That is absolutely the opposite of what is happening here today in our society,” Olson said. “We have become a secular society, and that is damaging our society. We need to have opportunities for people to look to a higher power, and what better way than what is described here in this bill?”

Democratic Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, of Tucson, called SB1269 “outrageous” and “incredibly inappropriate.”

And Rep. Stephanie Simacek, of Phoenix, pointed out that the courts have repeatedly ruled against allowing religious leaders to be invited to share their faith with public school students. She described Rogers’ bill as indoctrination that gives preferential treatment to students who have religious beliefs over those who don’t

“No one is saying that you may not go and celebrate your God, however you see fit,” Simacek, a former teacher and school board member, said. “But this is not the place, in public education, where our students go to learn math, reading and writing and history.”

Florida’s school chaplain law, which went into effect last July and is similar to Rogers’ proposal, has received ample pushback from First Amendment advocacy groups, as well as some church groups who said that allowing untrained chaplains to provide mental health support to students would have unintended negative consequences.

The option to bring chaplains into schools in Florida has not been particularly popular, with several large school districts deciding not to implement a program allowing them.

Proposed legislation similar to SB 1269 has been introduced in red states across the country this year, including in Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana and North Dakota.

The bill will next be considered by the full House of Representatives. If it passes the chamber, it will return to the Senate for a final vote before heading to Gov. Katie Hobbs.

by Caitlin Sievers, Arizona Mirror

March 6, 2025

MAGA loyalists across the country are eager to pay fealty to President Donald Trump by attempting to put his name or likeness on U.S. currency, airports, roads and even Mt. Rushmore.

The Trump administration has made it clear that the president, who has a habit of plastering his name in huge letters across his real estate, values loyalty over all else.

ALSO READ: 'Absolutely unconscionable': Ex-Republican demands Trump removed from office after fight

But on Thursday, Arizona’s Senate Republicans couldn’t find the votes they needed to recommend that State Route 260, which runs through rural areas between Cottonwood and Show Low, be renamed “Donald J. Trump Highway.”

Senate Concurrent Memorial 1001, sponsored by MAGA die-hard Sen. Wendy Rogers, of Flagstaff, would have urged the State Board on Geographic and Historic Names to rename the highway that runs through Rogers’ district after Trump.

But one Senate Republican, Frank Carroll, of Sun City West, voted against the proposal, resulting in its failure on a 15-9 vote. Republican Sen. Shawna Bolick was absent from the vote. But because memorials don’t have the power of law, even if Carroll or Bolick had voted for the proposal, the renaming would remain merely a suggestion.

Carroll said that many of his constituents would love to see a highway named after Trump, who he predicted would “be recorded in history as the greatest president in the 21st century.” But the proper time to do that would be after Trump had completed his second term, Carroll explained.

Rogers, who can often be seen around the Capitol showing off her gold Donald Trump sneakers that retail for $399, promised to continue proposing SCM1001 each year until it is approved. This is the third time she’s introduced the measure: Previous efforts in 2021 and 2022 never earned a committee hearing, much less a vote on the Senate floor.

Before voting against the memorial, Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, D-Coal Mine Mesa, pointed out that the Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names, which follows the naming rules of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, doesn’t consider naming a landmark after a person until they’ve been dead for at least five years. The board also requires some sort of connection or contribution to the landmark or area from the person being memorialized.

Sen. Mitzi Epstein, D-Tempe, said she was appalled by Rogers’ proposal.

“We should name our public places after people who have led exemplary lives, not after a person who has led a disgraceful personal life,” Epstein said, describing Trump’s failures to pay his employees and felony convictions related to his attempt to cover up an affair.

She added that Trump made a mockery of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021, when his followers stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the transition of power from Trump to Joe Biden.

Sen. Mark Finchem, R-Prescott, one of the state’s most prominent election deniers, claimed that Epstein’s complaints about Trump were nothing more than “propaganda.” Finchem was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and posted favorably about the events on social media as rioters were fighting with police and storming the seat of American government in an attempt to keep Trump in office, even after he lost an election to Joe Biden.

The language of SCM1001 is a tribute to what Rogers sees as Trump’s accomplishments, including his establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency, “which will dismantle government bureaucracy, eliminate excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

So far, DOGE, which is directed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk, has pushed the federal government into chaos by firing federal employees indiscriminately in the name of “cutting out waste, fraud and abuse,” but then several times has backtracked and asked those employees to return to work after finding that their jobs were vital to public safety.

A series of lawsuits have argued that DOGE’s actions are illegal, and some judges have already blocked some of the group’s efforts.

In the proposal, Rogers also praises Trump for building 400 miles of “the world’s most robust and advanced border wall,” cutting taxes and dropping out of the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement.

Arizona is far from the only state where Republicans are looking to ingratiate themselves to Trump by naming things after him. Republicans introduced proposals to create their own Donald J. Trump Highway in Missouri, Kentucky, Wyoming and Utah, Politico reported.

Republican lawmakers in West Virginia just recently proposed a resolution to rename Spruce Knob, the highest point in the state, “Trump Mountain.” And a state representative in Tennessee wants to rename Nashville’s airport after him.

Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation to rename Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia after Trump.

Republican congressmen have also introduced proposals to put Trump’s likeness on $100 bills and to create a new $250 with Trump face on it, as well.

A congresswoman from Florida proposed legislation shortly after Trump took office in January to feature his visage on Mount Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Much like the text of Rogers’ proposal, statements about proposed name changes to honor Trump heap ample praise on the president, with some members of Congress calling him “the best president of their lifetime,” even though it’s only six weeks into his second term.

“Donald J. Trump’s top priority as president is the best interests of American workers and American families,” SCM1001 reads.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

Cathi Herrod, who led the decades-long fight to enact dozens of anti-abortion laws in Arizona, left her post as president of the Center for Arizona Policy last month.

Herrod helmed Center for Arizona Policy, an evangelical Christian advocacy group that has fought for — and in many cases succeeded — laws restricting abortion and curtailing rights for gay and transgender people, for nearly 20 years before retiring in January.

Center for Arizona Policy is a powerful lobbying group that had a hand in most of the Grand Canyon State’s abortion restrictions passed over the past 30 years, including the 15-week ban signed into law in 2022. That ban was nullified when voters in November approved the Arizona Abortion Access Act, which enshrined the right to abortion into the state constitution, and set the stage for the courts to unravel much of the abortion regulation that Herrod and her organization worked to place in state law to make it more difficult for women to access reproductive health care and for doctors to provide it.

“Arizona will come to regret passing Prop 139 — when girls and women lose their doctors and safeguards, when parents get shut out, when a staggering number of unborn lives end before they even begin, and when voters realize they have been lied to by proponents who would say anything to pass their extreme abortion amendment,” Herrod wrote in a statement shortly after the election.

Herrod and the Center for Arizona Policy were vocal opponents and fought to defeat the measure.

Also last year, Herrod fought to keep the legislature from overturning a near-total abortion ban that was written in 1864, which she called “the most protective pro-life law in the country.” Lawmakers ultimately repealed that Civil War-era law.

She and the Center for Arizona Policy also backed an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that effectively made in vitro fertilization illegal in that state.

On Jan. 16, Herrod quietly announced her retirement through a post on the Center for Arizona Policy website. In a letter to supporters, she wrote that she decided in 2022 that her time as president was coming to an end.

“Serving God through His work at Center for Arizona Policy has been a blessing for me,” she wrote. “I have had the joy of knowing I was called to this work and this ministry. You all have been an encouragement and blessing. Your prayers mean more to me than I can say.”

In the same missive, Herrod introduced her successor, Peter Gentala, who served as an attorney for the CAP from 2004 to 2008. That year, he was hired as a GOP caucus attorney for the Arizona House of Representatives, and he later worked for Childhelp. Gentala officially took over as the organization’s president on Feb. 10.

“I consider it a high honor and blessing for Peter to follow me,” Herrod wrote. “I can’t think of anyone more qualified and suited to lead CAP forward. Peter loves the Lord and lives out a biblically-formed worldview.”

In an adjoining statement, Greg Fraley, chairman of CAP’s board of directors, wrote that throughout his career Gentala has focused on the issues that matter most to the Center for Arizona Policy.

Prior to his previous stint with CAP, Gentala worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Scottsdale-based advocacy group that files lawsuits aimed at advancing far-right policy goals..

“I am so happy and honored to follow Cathi Herrod as CAP’s next president,” Gentala wrote in a statement. “I admire Cathi — and I know that admiration is shared throughout our great state. Through the years, she has been a dynamic leader, a redoubtable advocate for the truth, and a compassionate reflection of God’s love.”

In addition to its advocacy for restrictions on abortion, the Center for Arizona Policy supported Arizona’s universal expansion of state-funded vouchers to pay for private school tuition, as well as a litany of anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation.

The organization’s “statement of faith” posted on its website says that its members believe marriage “has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture” and that sex should only occur in a marriage between a man and a woman.

The statement goes on to say that “the rejection of one’s biological sex and adoption of a transgender self-conception is inconsistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and a departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.”

In Gentala’s statement, he praised CAP’s work over the past 30 years, saying that it had contributed to more than 200 pieces of legislation that he said affirmed the value of every human life, the importance of families as the foundation of society and freedom to practice religion.

“As my season of leadership begins, please know that my overarching ambition for this organization is to be ready and willing to answer the call of the Lord, to entrust all results in His hands, and to give Him the Glory every step of the way,” Gentala wrote.

Herrod did not respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Marana High School physics teacher Les Beard learned about a chromosomal disorder with relevance to current events and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

This week, followers of right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe are calling for Beard to be fired for defying an executive order from President Donald Trump in which he declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Beard is a former geophysicist who has taught physics at Marana High for six years.

It started when Beard was doing some nighttime scrolling on his phone and came across a news clip about a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

Those with the syndrome have the XY chromosomes of a male but their bodies don’t react to the hormones that cause development of male sex characteristics. Many of those with the syndrome outwardly appear to be female, but have internal sex organs of a male, according to the National Library of Medicine. Some have characteristics of both sexes.

“It piqued my interest, so I thought I would mention it,” Beard told the Arizona Mirror during a Jan. 31 phone interview.

Beard told his students that those with the syndrome are often raised as girls and don’t find out that their chromosomes are XY until they go to the doctor to find out why their menstrual cycle never started. Many of them balk when told that they’re actually male, Beard said.

“None of them really believe it, because they’ve been women all their lives,” he told the students last week.

Beard showed the class clothed photos of some of the women with the syndrome, which he said “looked every bit like a woman” and asked the class, “Are these guys? Mr. Trump says so.”

The lesson caused a “ruckus” in the classroom, which Beard — who speaks in a slow Texas drawl — said he expected, with some kids loudly disagreeing or shaking their heads while others seemed to agree with his point.

“I wanted the kids to understand that, if we make rules, they should encompass all situations that might appear,” Beard said. “It was all too easy to find an outlier that doesn’t seem to fit the two gender idea.”

The following week at school began uneventfully for Beard, but on Jan. 28, he learned that one of his students had recorded the discussion and shared it with her mother, who had then sent it to O’Keefe.

O’Keefe posted the video on the social media site X where he has 3 million followers.

In the post, O’Keefe accused Beard of “misleading students by contradicting the NIH and referring to people affected by AIS as ‘women.’”

“Then all sorts of craziness broke loose,” Beard said.

Commenters on social media called Beard a “groomer,” a label that generally means a person who preys on children to condition them for sexual abuse but which has become a catch-all term for conservatives to refer to adults who are accepting of trans students and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of them said that Beard’s lesson on biology was proof of their claims that public school teachers were indoctrinating students with their “woke agenda.”

Others called for him to be arrested and charged with sexual harassment or endangering the welfare of a child. O’Keefe himself repeatedly called a Marana Unified School District spokeswoman to ask if Beard would be punished for defying Trump’s executive order.

O’Keefe’s followers sent Beard nasty emails and contacted the district, calling for him to be fired for sharing “gender ideology” with students.

The video about Beard’s lesson, which O’Keefe posted on X Jan. 28, garnered 600,000 views, 10,000 likes and 332 comments over the next three days.

On Tuesday, Beard was called into a meeting with an administrator to talk about the off-topic lesson and the district’s expectation that teachers stick to their curriculum and avoid sharing personal and political opinions. The next day, he was told to work from home and ordered not to have contact with any Marana teachers or students.

Next week, he expects to find out if he still has a job.

Beard said that he had not previously received any criticism from administrators for the content of his lessons.

Allison Benjamin, a spokesperson for the district, told the Mirror via email that she couldn’t answer specific questions surrounding Beard’s suspension or school policies, but instead supplied a statement similar to one she previously provided to O’Keefe.

In the statement, Benjamin shared two “policies that address expectations for classroom instruction that include: 1. Teaching to the state standards that are focused on course content. 2. Providing a learning environment where teachers remain neutral and refrain from sharing their personal beliefs and opinions.”

“The administration will continue to follow appropriate guidelines detailed in district policy to ensure all staff fulfill these expectations,” she wrote.

O’Keefe’s video features an at-times combative phone call between him and Benjamin. In it, O’Keefe tells her that trying to get comments from the district is a “kafkaesque nightmare.” Benjamin later agrees with O’Keefe that this was “an extraordinary situation and I’m glad that you’re reporting on it.”

Who is James O’Keefe?

O’Keefe, who already had a penchant for publishing highly-edited and misleading undercover recordings, founded Project Veritas in 2010.

Project Veritas became a mainstay of the conservative media ecosystem for sending its “undercover journalists” — some of whom were trained by a former spy on how to covertly infiltrate their targets — to secretly record liberals and journalists in an effort to catch them saying something embarrassing.

One of the so-called reporters set up a date with a top Twitter employee and secretly recorded him venting about Elon Musk. Another made a secret recording of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ twin sister, Becky Hobbs. In the video, apparently recorded during dinner at a restaurant, the governor’s twin said the Democratic Party had been donating to MAGA Republicans in Arizona primary elections to give Democratic candidates a better chance of winning in the general election.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics says journalists should only opt to work undercover in rare circumstances, when there’s no other way to obtain the information.

O’Keefe was pushed out as the chairman of Project Veritas in 2023 following accusations that he mistreated staff by yelling at them and making them do his personal errands and mismanaged finances, the Associated Press reported.

O’Keefe has continued publishing sting-style videos since his ouster from Project Veritas. He even recruited volunteers to make undercover recordings of election worker training in Maricopa County ahead of the November election. He later claimed that trainers’ accurate description of the state’s election laws brought up “serious questions about the integrity of the voting process.”

The recording of Beard was submitted anonymously to O’Keefe’s recently launched Citizen Journalism Foundation, according to the article on O’Keefe’s website.

Numerous commenters who reacted to the video said that they thought Beard belonged in jail for his disregard of Trump’s executive order.

In reality, the White House doesn’t have any legal authority to control local school district curricula. But Beard said that his administrators are worried about losing federal funding.

He admitted that he veered from physics and into a politically charged subject, which his supervisors did not appreciate.

“I didn’t intend to bring politics too sharply into the discussion, but it got there,” Beard said.

Beard, 69, moved to the Tucson area 12 years ago with his wife and two children. His daughter has since graduated from the University of Arizona and his son, who often features his father in his own goofy YouTube videos, is a freshman at Marana High. Beard said that he enjoys teaching the students at Marana High, and he hopes to hold onto his job, even after administrators suggested that he voluntarily resign.

“I think it would make things very easy for them if I resigned,” Beard said, adding that his administrators are not “nasty people” and that he understands the difficult position that they’re in.

College professors have some First Amendment protections when it comes to academic expression in the classroom, but court decisions over the last 20 years have not given the same protections to K-12 teachers.

Beard said he believes teaching opportunities are lost when instructors are strictly limited in topics of discussion, causing students to wonder why teachers steer clear of interesting, socially relevant subjects.

“To be able to freely express yourself will lead to a richer conversation among people who may have very different opinions,” Beard said.

Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have resumed their efforts to make significant changes to the state’s election processes — largely motivated by unfounded claims of fraud — even after Donald Trump won the presidential race and the GOP strengthened its majorities in both chambers of the state Legislature.

Republican legislative and election committee leaders told the Arizona Mirror that their proposals are necessary to speed up the reporting of election results in an effort to restore voter trust in the state’s elections. That’s after many members of their party spent the last four years sharing false claims of election fraud and sowing doubt in those same processes, following Trump’s lead in ginning up furor about GOP election losses by telling their supporters the only valid elections are ones they win.

“The accuracy is not even a question,” Rep. John Gillette, R-King told the Mirror, when referring to proposals that Republicans say would speed up ballot tabulation. Instead, he said, the No. 1 issue those bills aim to resolve is whether the counting time “sours people on the process.”

Gillette, the chairman of the House Elections Committee, claims that he knows there was fraud in the 2022 election — when Democrats won several top statewide offices — but needs more data to determine whether fraud happened in November. No claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2022 election were ever proven, and all the cases seeking to overturn the results due to allegations of fraud failed in court because there was no evidence.

Gillette said that he believes efforts to clear the voter rolls of improperly registered voters between 2022 and 2024 made an impact and led to GOP victories.

But Sen. Analise Ortiz, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Elections Committee, told the Mirror that the GOP-backed proposals to speed up tabulation would disenfranchise voters. Suppressing voter turnout is the whole point, she said.

The state legislature officially begins its 2025 session on Monday, but dozens of proposed changes to state law have already been filed. Senate Bill 1011, sponsored by Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, would require voters who return their early ballots to voting locations after 7 p.m. the Friday before the election to present identification to have their vote counted.

This would give voters four fewer days to return their ballot to polling locations without the added step of waiting for ID verification, a change from the existing deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day to drop off early ballots without an ID.

Voters would still have the option to drop off those ballots up until 7 p.m. on Election Day without presenting ID, but only at their county recorder’s office, a huge change from the hundreds of drop-off locations currently available.

The proposal would also expand in-person early voting, which currently ends the Friday preceding the election, to the Saturday and Monday prior to the election. It would require early in-person voters to fill out and sign an early voting certificate that reads “I understand that if I commit or attempt to commit fraud in connection with voting, vote a fraudulent ballot or vote more than once in an election, I could be convicted of a felony and fined or imprisoned, or both.”

Following Florida

These proposals are based on early-ballot return rules in Florida, which has a reputation for producing early election-night results. Petersen’s proposal would speed up results by putting an end to the practice of signature verification for the hundreds of thousands of “late early” ballots dropped off on Election Day and the preceding weekend. Signature verification of those ballots can be time-consuming, and proponents of the proposed changes say the requirement to possibly wait in line and show ID is worth it in return for speedier election results.

It’s always been this way in Arizona elections, but no one cared until recently because Republicans easily won most contests up and down the ballot. But as the state has become a battleground, it’s become a point of contention, one Republican lawmaker acknowledged.

“Nobody cared if the results were late in the past when everybody already knew that the Republican presidential candidate was going to win,” Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, told the Mirror. “It’s only now that…it could affect the election results that anybody cares.”

Kavanagh, the vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee, added that he thinks it’s “embarrassing and obstructive for us to be delaying that information.”

Arizona has been slower than many other states to report complete election results for years but a deluge of complaints about the process only began after the 2020 election, when President-elect Donald Trump falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him.

Over the past several years, Republican candidates and officials made unsubstantiated claims that the longer tabulation time facilitates fraud.

“There would be so much confusion for voters if this is changed,” Ortiz said, adding that she thinks it would definitely have a negative impact on voter turnout. “It’s very frustrating that some of the proposals that we’ve seen seem to be entirely rooted in this kind of excuse that we need to speed up the election results, even if that means putting voter access in jeopardy.”

Kavanagh, a co-sponsor of SB1011, argued that a notice on early ballot envelopes mailed to voters telling them of the cutoff to return their ballot without showing ID would be enough to allay any uncertainty about ballot drop-off rules and timeline changes.

“We’ll just put that on the envelope, and then there will be no confusion,” he said.

A similar proposal in the House of Representatives, sponsored by Republican Reps. Quang Nguyen and Selina Bliss, would start early voting three days prior to the current start date and allow for voters to bring their filled out early ballot to voting locations to be tabulated after 7 p.m. the Friday before the election. But those voters would also be required to provide identification.

For Ortiz and other Democrats, these proposals are nonstarters because they will stand in the way of some voters.

“That’s a hard line in the sand for me, as the ranking member of the Elections Committee, and I know it’s a hard line for many of my Democratic colleagues as well,” she said.

Kavanagh argued that, if requiring voters who cast their ballots in-person on Election Day to show ID didn’t count as voter suppression, neither would requiring the same of any other voters.

The Republican said that he’s “100% sure” that SB1011 will pass muster in both chambers — but that it will likely be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Her office said as much in a statement.

“Faster election results should not come at the expense of voters’ rights,” Christian Slater, a spokesman for Hobbs, told the Mirror via email. “As the State’s former chief elections officer, Governor Hobbs is open to proposals to speed up the counting process, but any solution must protect Arizonans’ freedom to make their voices heard at the ballot box.”

1,000-voter precincts

Republican Rep. Rachel Keshel, of Tucson, has again this year proposed a bill that would dramatically alter the state’s election systems by banning voting centers and capping precincts at 1,000 registered voters apiece. (Keshel was elected in 2022 and 2024 as Rachel Jones, but she changed her name after the 2024 election following her marriage earlier in the year to Seth Keshel, a prominent far-right election conspiracy theorist.)

Several Arizona counties, including Pima and Maricopa, use a vote center model, in which any registered voter in the county can cast their ballot at any polling location in the county. In a precinct model, each voter can only cast a ballot at their designated location, and if they don’t cast their ballot at the correct location, it won’t be counted.

The proposal would drastically increase the number of precinct locations open across the state, with Arizona counties already concerned about finding enough physical locations, as well as enough poll workers, not to mention the increase in ballots cast that inevitably wouldn’t be counted.

There were more than 4.3 million people registered to vote in Arizona as of October, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. That means the GOP proposal would require more than 4,300 polling locations across the state if it became law. And a mandate for at least three workers at every precinct location would require counties to hire a minimum of around 12,900 poll workers.

Gillette said that he backs Keshel’s proposal, claiming that small precincts would ensure more accurate vote counts. (State law already requires all ballots voted at polling sites be entered into electronic ballot tabulators immediately. Those results are then checked and verified by election workers after the polls close.) He added that he thinks that finding poll workers wouldn’t be a problem because the state could hire college students and mandate officers of the courts to oversee them.

Keshel also proposed a resolution to send to voters in 2026 that mirrors her 1,000-voter precinct bill, which would bypass a Hobbs veto if it made its way through both legislative chambers.

Both Gillette and Kavanagh agreed that the proposals would likely be killed long before they make it that far.

“That’s not going to get out of the House, so I wouldn’t worry about it,” Kavanagh said.

When Keshel sponsored the same bill last year, it was approved along party lines in the House but failed in the Senate when former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican, voted against it alongside Democrats.

It’s finally over.

After two years filled with losses and appeals, the Arizona Supreme Court has denied Kari Lake’s final petition in a court case aimed at overturning the results of the 2022 race for governor.

The high court’s decision, made behind closed doors without public comment, came one day after the Nov. 5 election. Lake ran in that election as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, even though she never conceded her loss in the 2022 race for Arizona governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Lake, who is trailing Democratic opponent Ruben Gallego in the Senate race, made a name for herself as a purveyor of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, who endorsed her in 2022 and 2024. After the former Phoenix television news anchor lost the governor’s race by more than 17,000 votes, she claimed that the governorship had been stolen from her, just like the presidency had been stolen from Trump.

“The 2022 election was irredeemably flawed,” Jennifer Wright, one of Lake’s attorneys, wrote in the final appeal. “Without this Court’s intervention, future elections remain threatened.”

But Wright rehashed many of the same arguments that had already failed during Lake’s previous trials and appeals, instead of contesting the lower court judges’ mistakes in interpreting and applying the law, the function of appellate courts.

Tom Liddy, an attorney for Maricopa County, filed a scathing response to Lake’s last appeal on Aug. 12.

“Rather than offering reasons why review should be granted, the Petition instead only argues that Lake is right and the lower courts are wrong,” Liddy wrote.“The Petition makes this argument by simply parroting Lake’s position below while ignoring much of the legal reasoning and all of the evidence that led the lower courts to decide against her.”

In the appeal, Wright argued that Maricopa County didn’t conduct the logic and accuracy tests on its ballot tabulators that are required by law, and that the people comparing voter signatures on early and mail-in ballot envelopes approved them too quickly to have actually completed any true signature verification.

But the case law on which Lake based her argument meant that her attorneys would have to prove that the county failed to perform any signatures verification at all.

Liddy pointed out that, during her second trial, when the court concluded that two of Lake’s own witnesses testified that they had personally verified signatures for the county. He added that Lake’s signature verification claims didn’t fail at trial because the lower court misinterpreted the law, but because of her attorneys’ incompetence.

“Lake’s signature verification claim failed because her allegations wrote a cheque (sic) that her proof could not cash,” Liddy wrote. “Lake’s failure in providing competent evidence to support her claim is no reason to grant review.”

Liddy countered Lake’s allegations that the county didn’t perform logic and accuracy testing on its tabulators ahead of the 2022 election, pointing out that the court record in the case contains certificates signed by the secretary of state, as well as Republican and Democrat observers who witnessed the tests being completed.

Liddy also addressed Lake’s allegations that the county performed additional “unannounced testing” of the tabulators. He said that supposed testing, caught on publicly-viewable cameras, was actually just the installation of memory cards that contained the elections program that had already undergone logic and accuracy testing.

“Lake also complains of the error codes returned in the subsequent testing of the tabulators with the installed memory cards, but Lake willfully ignores the evidence showing that Maricopa County intentionally ran test ballots that would return these errors to ensure that the tabulators were reading such ballots appropriately,” Liddy wrote.

According to Phoenix attorney and Lake critic Tom Ryan, the Arizona Supreme Court’s denial of this appeal is the end of the road for Lake’s long-enduring challenge to the results of the 2022 election.

“To paraphrase a quote from Charles Dickens in his 1843 short story ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Kari Lake’s case is as dead as a doornail,” Ryan told the Arizona Mirror, via email. “Or to paraphrase Monty Python in their Dead Parrot skit, Kari Lake’s case is bereft of life, joined the Choir Eternal, kicked the bucket, bought the farm, is without any observable metabolic processes, and is not pining for the fjords of Norway. It is dead.”

Lake filed her initial election challenge in Maricopa County Superior Court Dec. 9, 2022. She lost that trial, appealed the decision, and was granted a new trial on only one of the several claims considered during the first trial.

She lost her second trial in May 2023 and has been laboring to convince the appeals courts, or the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse that decision ever since.

Lake and the attorneys that represented her in both trials have all faced repercussions for their false allegations of election fraud.

Scottsdale divorce attorney Bryan Blehm and Washington, D.C., employment attorney Kurt Olsen were both sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court in May 2023 for making false claims in one of Lake’s appeals. The attorneys wrote that it was an “undisputed fact” that more than 35,000 ballots were illegally inserted into batches of legal ballots in Maricopa County when the November 2022 ballots were being sorted shortly after Election Day, but the high court determined that was not true.

In June, a Supreme Court Panel ruled to suspend Blehm’s law license for 60 days as discipline for his false statements, and in October the panel formally admonished Olsen for the same reason.

The judges on the panel explained in Olsen’s disciplinary ruling that he was granted leniency because he willingly participated in the disciplinary hearing and because he promised to be more careful with his wording in the future.

Blehm skipped his disciplinary hearing, without first informing the court, and did not cooperate in the proceedings.

Lake herself is the subject of a defamation lawsuit for the election fraud lies she spread about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer after she lost the 2022 election.

The case is currently in the discovery phase, after in April Lake legally conceded that her statements were false. She later claimed publicly that she never lied and that she only gave up defending herself in the defamation case because it was just a distraction tactic to interfere with her campaign for the Senate.

The amount of damages that Lake and her campaign owe Richer for security costs, loss to his reputation and mental health issues caused by her statements, as well as punitive damages, will be determined in a jury trial, with a pretrial hearing set for February.

Neither Olsen nor Wright responded to a request for comment early Thursday evening.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake has claimed that all of the emails that might contain evidence pertinent to a defamation suit filed against her have been wiped, so she can’t share them to be used as evidence.

During an Oct. 21 hearing, Tyler Swensen, one of Lake’s attorneys, told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner that the campaign associated with the email accounts that might contain evidence was dissolved almost a year before Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed his defamation lawsuit.

If that were true, Lake would have had no obligation to preserve emails in the accounts as evidence.

However, Kari Lake for Arizona filed its last campaign finance report in January 2024, and the campaign was spending money through Dec. 31, 2023, more than six months after Richer filed the lawsuit.

Swensen did not respond to the Arizona Mirror’s request to answer questions about the claims he made in court.

Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor who pivoted to politics as a Donald Trump acolyte, spent months falsely accusing Richer of intentionally sabotaging the 2022 election, and blamed her loss in the gubernatorial race to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on unproven election fraud.

Lake has repeatedly claimed — without a shred of evidence — that Richer was responsible for 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots being counted in Maricopa County. She’s lost every trial and appeal in her lawsuit challenging the election results over the past two years.

In June 2023, Richer filed a defamation suit against Lake, her husband, her gubernatorial campaign and the Save Arizona Fund.

The Save Arizona Fund is a dark money nonprofit that Lake controls and that has raised an unknown amount of money to fund her legal efforts to overturn the 2022 election.

Richer is seeking damages to reimburse him and his wife for the thousands of dollars he said they spent to install new security features in their home after he said Lake’s false statements spurred threats of violence and harassment.

Additionally, Richer is asking to be awarded punitive damages as well as compensation for damage to his reputation and mental health.

Even though Lake has since publicly professed that her statements about Richer were true, in March she accepted a default judgment, meaning that she legally conceded to the court that the statements were false. She later said she only defaulted because she didn’t want to participate in a “witch hunt” and accused Richer of using the lawsuit to distract her from her run for the Senate.

Lake officially announced her run for Senate in October 2023, more than three months after the defamation suit was filed.

Following the default judgment, the only thing left for the court to decide is damages. But Richer and his attorneys have struggled for months to compel Lake to turn over documents and communications to be used as evidence in a jury trial to determine how much he is owed.

In August, Warner ordered Lake and her husband, Jeff Halperin, to provide several categories of documents after Lake refused to hand them over and made what the judge called “unwarranted objections” to his orders.

The kinds of documents that he ordered Lake to produce included any analysis that her or her team made of media reports about the defamatory social media posts she made about Richer, and communications with or between Lake’s campaign — named Kari Lake for Arizona — or workers for the Save Arizona Fund about the social media posts.

She was also ordered to surrender any analyses made of media coverage of events or podcasts where she made defamatory statements about Richer, as well as any communications or solicitations for donations that Lake sent which included a link to any of Lake’s defamatory comments — and how much money she raised from those communications.

Multiple times during the Oct. 21 hearing, Swensen told the court that all emails from Lake’s gubernatorial campaign were gone, but was fuzzy on the details of exactly when that happened, who “purged” them and why.

“My understanding was there was a restart, and that account is now used strictly and solely for her Senate campaign, and anything associated with the gubernatorial campaign is gone from that account,” Swensen said.

In a previous court filing, Lake’s attorneys wrote that it was her “understanding and belief” that those emails were purged. Warner told Swensen he was more interested in the facts than anyone’s “understanding and belief.”

“‘Understanding and belief’ is something that lawyers often use when they want to hedge,” the judge said. “They don’t want to say it, but they don’t want to not say it.”

Swensen answered that he didn’t know if Lake could explain how and when the “purge” or restart happened.

The email addresses in question all used the domain name @karilake.com, the same domain name Lake uses for her Senate campaign. Lake and members of her staff, including at least two holdovers who handle media and communications, are using the same email addresses for her Senate campaign as they did during her race for governor.

Lake’s gubernatorial campaign, Kari Lake for Arizona, regularly made payments in 2022 and 2023 to Squarespace, a site for building and hosting websites; to GoDaddy, a site that hosts websites and email servers; and to Google.

It’s possible that Lake changed email servers at some point, while keeping the same addresses, and lost access to old emails from her time campaigning for governor, but Kari Lake for Arizona continued to make payments to GoDaddy and Google through the end of 2023, six months after the suit had been filed, according to campaign finance reports.

Her Senate campaign began paying GoDaddy in early October 2023, three months after the suit was filed. That committee, Kari Lake for Senate, has continued to make payments to GoDaddy and Google in 2024.

“(Kari Lake for Arizona) was dissolved as an entity almost a year before this lawsuit was filed, and at that point, that may have been when the emails were purged and everything was taken down,” Swensen said on Oct. 21. “That’s what occurred.”

But Swensen’s claim is demonstrably false. A year before Richer filed the defamation suit was some four months prior to the 2022 election. And far from being officially dissolved directly after the election, Kari Lake for Arizona raised more than $2.5 million between Election Day 2022 and the end of that year.

The campaign went on to spend more than $750,000 over the course of 2023 and filed its last campaign finance report on Jan. 12, 2024, the day it was dissolved, according to a filing with the Arizona Corporation Commission.

In the Oct. 21 hearing, Swensen complained that Richer’s requests for documents to be used as evidence were overly broad, with searches resulting in tens of thousands of pages of documents to parse, even though the judge had already ordered Richer to narrow the scope of his requests.

“It’s just, it’s got to end at some point,” Swensen said.

Lake had already produced some of the requested documents, Richer’s attorney Ralph Mayrell told the court on Oct. 21, but most of them were “not particularly complete or useful.”

A Lake staffer provided a short list of news reports about the defamatory statements, Mayrell said, adding that it appeared that the list was created by pulling from a larger data source and that Lake should just provide that instead.

Lake’s allegations that the 2022 election was stolen from her and that Richer had something to do with it were covered extensively both by local and national news organizations. The Arizona Mirror alone has written more than 50 stories about Lake’s false claims of voter fraud and Maricopa County’s supposed connection to it.

Swensen told the court on Oct. 21 that Richer’s requests for documents in the case were “outrageous.”

“It’s really, in our view, them trying to interfere with Ms. Lake’s senatorial campaign,” Swensen said.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.

Judicial retention elections usually aren’t the sexiest items on the ballot, but this year two campaigns are fighting to persuade voters to either retain or throw out two Arizona Supreme Court justices.

At the same time, voters will be considering a constitutional amendment that would essentially give judges lifetime appointments.

Justices Clink Bolick and Kathryn King are up this year for a routine retention vote that the judges on the high court face every six years. And if voters in November favor Proposition 137, dubbed “The Judicial Accountability Act of 2024,” it could be their last retention election ever.

Voters have never kicked an Arizona Supreme Court justice off the bench in the 50 years since the state implemented judicial retention elections, but historically those elections didn’t get much attention and were questions that some voters just skipped.

But this year, after Bolick and King — both appointed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey — voted in April to uphold a near-total abortion ban dating back to 1864, Progress Arizona mounted a campaign to convince voters not to retain them.

The progressive advocacy and lobbying organization has since joined focus with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona to create a political action committee called “Protect Abortion Rights, No Retention Bolick and King.”

“This horrific decision (to reinstate the 1864 ban) followed decades of planning by abortion activists who advocated for the appointment of far-right judges, not just at the federal level, but also at the state level,” Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the PAC, said during a Sept. 10 press conference.

The Arizona Supreme Court was only able to reinstate the Civil War-era abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 struck down the constitutional right to abortion previously provided through the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The nation’s highest court nixed those protections in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservative justices who voted to strike down Roe.

The Arizona Supreme Court’s subsequent decision to reinstate the 1864 ban — which lawmakers later repealed — was out of touch with what most voters want, Finkelstein said.

The PAC is also pushing voters to vote no on Proposition 137, a ballot measure sent to voters by the Republican-controlled state legislature that would end most judicial retention elections. The constitutional amendment would be retroactive, meaning that if voters decide not to retain Bolick and King, but the proposition passes, the justices will be retained anyway.

The proposition was sent to the ballot by anti-abortion politicians, in an effort to protect Bolick and King from being voted out, Finkelstein said. The proposal was introduced in the Senate months before the court’s abortion ban decision, but was fast-tracked for the ballot after it.

“The ability of voters to reject judges on our ballot is part of our Democratic process, to ensure the courts are balanced, current and in touch with the people,” Erika Mach, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona, said during the Sept. 10 press conference. “Partisan, out-of-touch judges have no place in our private, medical decisions and must have no place in our courts.”

Another political action committee, created in June, called the “Judicial Independence Defense PAC” is working to counter the efforts of the campaign to oust Bolick and King.

Daniel Scarpinato, a spokesman for the effort to support Bolick and King, told the Arizona Mirror that the Judicial Independence PAC was created to educate the voters about the merit selection process for judges and to ensure they have the facts.

“Bolick and King have been very impartial justices that have served with integrity,” Scarpinato said. “This is something that’s kind of new and uncharted territory, at least in Arizona, to have this level of money and campaigning to remove justices.”

Scarpinato was a top aide for Ducey, who appointed both Bolick and King to the bench.

In a May 20 op-ed published in the Arizona Republic, Bolick bashed the campaign against him and King, writing that those behind it were “cynically harnessing anger over our recent abortion decision to replace us with justices who will rubber-stamp their ideological agenda.”

Bolick wrote that he was simply following the law when he cast his vote in the 4-2 decision to uphold the ban, and that it had nothing to do with his personal beliefs. He pointed out that his wife, state Sen. Shawnna Bolick, of Phoenix, was one of a few Republicans who voted alongside Democrats to repeal the ban. He also noted that he’s the only registered independent who has ever sat on the state Supreme Court.

Scarpinato dismissed the claims of the anti-retention retention campaign that Bolick and King are extreme and out of touch with what average Arizonans want as nothing but partisan political talking points.

The Arizona Commission on Judicial Performance Review, which conducts surveys of jurors, litigants and witnesses, gave both Bolick and King a favorable rating in their evaluations ahead of the election.

Both of the justices made their decisions based on the laws previously enacted by the state legislature, and the judges are there to interpret the law, not to make policy decisions, Scarpinato said.

“This is clearly an organized and very well-funded effort to remove the justices through the merit selection process, largely, I think, driven by out-of-state interests,” he said.

The largest donation to the Judicial Independence PAC, according to campaign finance reports, was $100,000 from its chairman, Randy Kendrick, a conservative political activist whose husband Ken Kendrick owns the Arizona Diamondbacks. Kendrick lives in Paradise Valley and is a board member for the Goldwater Institute, the Phoenix-based libertarian think tank where Bolick served as the top attorney before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

But its next-largest publicly disclosed contribution came from Robson Walton, the billionaire son of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Walton, who has reportedly given $25,000, lives in Bentonville, Arkansas.

So far, only donations to the PAC in June and July are publicly available, because of campaign finance report deadlines, but the rest of the donations were comparatively small, with most from Arizona, along with two donations from Illinois and California.

Because the “No Retention” PAC was just formed in August, its donor information won’t be publicly available until October.

“Our contributions thus far have only come from in-state donors seeking to educate voters about two extreme anti-abortion judges who imposed the heinous 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or victims of human trafficking,” Finkelstein told the Mirror in an email.

With Bolick’s history as a lawyer for special interests, and King’s as a corporate attorney, Finkelstein said she was not surprised that the opposing political action committee “is funded almost entirely by billionaires.”

According to Forbes, Ken Kendrick’s net worth is $1.1 billion.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.

Democrats have made huge inroads with suburban voters in Arizona since 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, leveraging their support to not just take back the presidency in 2020, but to outperform expectations in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

And the Harris-Walz campaign has boots on the ground in Arizona in an effort to capitalize on the advantage Democrats have gained with those suburban voters in its bid to keep Trump out of the White House and win the Grand Canyon State.

The campaign attributes Arizona’s recent metamorphosis into a swing state, after decades of being reliably red, to white suburban voters being alienated by the Republican Party. Vice President Kamala Harris needs to hang on to those voters — primarily in Maricopa and Pima counties — if she wants to win Arizona.

The campaign is working to reach these voters through phone calls, door-to-door canvassing, advertising and events around the state.

At one such event, a presidential debate watch party at the home of a Democratic precinct committeeman in Phoenix’s Ahwatukee Foothills neighborhood on Sept. 10, “Grey’s Anatomy” actor and former Tucsonan Kate Walsh helped to drum up excitement for Democratic candidates.

“This literally is a life or death election,” Walsh told the crowd of around 30 people gathered for the watch party. “We’ve seen it playing out, not only with the lack of reproductive rights, but also gun violence in schools.”

Abortion rights in Arizona, as well as other states, have been clawed back since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Trump has waffled in his stance on abortion in an apparent effort to find a politically expedient position that won’t anger anti-abortion activists while also not turning off women voters. He has flirted with a nationwide abortion ban, before later saying that he would not sign such a bill into law — though he refused to say he would veto a national ban when asked directly at the debate with Harris — while also praising the three justices that he appointed to the high court for their part in striking down Roe.

Harris has called for the restoration of all the rights previously afforded to women via Roe and has made reproductive rights a centerpiece of her campaign, with members of the local campaign calling it a “winning issue.”

Trump argued during the debate that the fate of abortion regulations are currently where they should be: in the hands of individual states. But strict bans in states like Texas, with exceptions only for medical emergencies where the woman faces immediate death, have put women’s lives and long-term health in danger and forced them to flee the state for necessary medical care for nonviable pregnancies.

Walsh, who previously stumped for Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, said it was her own background and upbringing that inspired her to publicly support Democrats.

“I grew up as a child of the American dream, the daughter of an immigrant,” she said.

Her father moved to the U.S. from Ireland when he was four years old, and went on to serve two tours in the Korean War. Walsh, who moved to Tucson with her family when she was 11, considers Arizona her home state.

“We grew up working class,” Walsh told the Arizona Mirror. “I’ve had a job since I was 14. Literally, anything over room and board, I was responsible for in my house.”

Walsh only lasted one day at her first job — emptying ashtrays in a Tucson office building. She went on to work at Burger King, and then took a pay cut from $3.30 an hour to $2.75 for a job at Dairy Queen, where she got to work alongside her best friend and eat lots of ice cream.

She told the Mirror that, as the daughter of an immigrant who successfully pursued her dream of becoming an actor, she now believes that her tax dollars should go toward helping others achieve their own dreams by providing them with quality health care, education and a safe place to live and go to school.

“I was always taught to give back and do what I can,” Walsh said.

Grey’s Anatomy and Umbrella Academy actor Kate Walsh urges a crowd of local Democrats to advocate for Vice President Kamala Harris at a presidential debate watch party on Sept. 10, 2024 in Phoenix. Photo by Caitlin Sievers | Arizona Mirror

A staunch advocate for reproductive rights, Walsh was dropped from her parents’ health insurance when she was 20 years old while attending the University of Arizona. From that time until she was about 33, Planned Parenthood was her sole medical provider.

That experience helped her realize the vitality of the care that Planned Parenthood provides when it comes to women’s health in general.

“To see what’s been happening with women’s health has been devastating to me,” Walsh said.

She also said she relates to those currently struggling with student loan debt. Walsh didn’t pay off her $40,000 in student loans until she landed her role as Dr. Addison Montgomery on “Grey’s Anatomy” when she was in her mid-30s.

MAGA fails in Arizona for the third straight election

Walsh — who after her stop in Arizona was headed to campaign for Harris swing states Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — said she loves to have conversations with undecided voters.

“People are so overwhelmed by all the information and all the vitriol and, honestly, in the age of the internet, it’s too much information and people get afraid and they either don’t want to vote or they want a simple answer,” she said.

As someone who had friends and family when she was growing up who hunted, she speaks to those voters about things she called common-sense gun legislation, such as a requirement for background checks.

During the debate watch party in Ahwatukee Foothills, Walsh reacted alongside the crowd of primarily die-hard Democrats cheering as Harris corrected Trump’s false claim that Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born.

After the debate, Walsh urged the watch party crowd to continue to advocate for Democratic candidates and to push their friends and neighbors to do the same.

“I really encourage you to tell all your friends to get out and volunteer and do every single thing we can to lean in before this election,” she said.

Walsh also highlighted the importance of voting not just for president, but for candidates all the way down the ballot.

“That’s who’s making the decisions for your local community and for this state,” she said.

The Harris campaign knows how critical it is to stay engaged with the kinds of voters who attended the watch party, seeing that they helped Democrats gain ground in Arizona in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

While Trump won Arizona when he was elected president in 2016, he lost the state by 10,457 votes to President Joe Biden in 2020. Republicans still control both chambers of the state legislature, but they do so by just one seat, and Democrats believe this could be the year to flip one or both of them.

And in 2022, all of the Trump-endorsed candidates for statewide offices in Arizona lost their races to Democrats.

Grey’s Anatomy and Umbrella Academy actor Kate Walsh, at left, watches the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, alongside a group of local Democrats, in the home of a Democratic precinct committeeman in Phoenix. Photo by Caitlin Sievers | Arizona Mirror

Democrats have built their largest coordinated campaign to date in Arizona, with 16 field offices — and plans to open three more — with 150 staffers. They plan to continue to remind Arizona voters why they’ve rejected MAGA candidates in the past three elections, including their launch of a botched so-called “audit” of the 2020 election results in Arizona and Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Kari Lake’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2022 gubernatorial race that she lost to Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs.

“The Arizona Harris-Walz campaign will continue to make sure voters understand the risk Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda pose to our fundamental freedoms and our economy, with their plans to ban abortion nationwide and raise taxes on families by nearly $4,000,” Sean McEnerney, Arizona Democratic Coordinated Campaign manager, told the Mirror in a written statement. “Vice President Harris is offering a new way forward for all Americans and to turn the page on Donald Trump and Kari Lake’s era of politics, and that’s why Democrats, Republicans and Independents are coming together to support her in Arizona.”

In a sign of the group’s political power, Arizona Team Trump is also courting undecided suburban voters by training local volunteers in how to talk to their neighbors and friends about the issues that matter to them most, such as inflation and crime.

This is a shift from the campaign’s tactics in 2020, according to Team Trump, when it was more focused on reaching voters through official members of the campaign instead of through local members of the community.

Team Trump uses the office in Scottsdale that it shares with the Arizona Republican Party to reach suburban voters there, with around 10 offices total, across the state, according to the campaign.

The campaign is looking directly to Trump for messaging about abortion rights, a top issue for suburban women, no matter their political affiliation. The former president continues to say that the U.S. Supreme Court rightly placed the responsibility for abortion regulation in the hands of the states. Team Trump says that it’s up to the voters to decide in November whether to enshrine the right to abortion into the state constitution via the Arizona Abortion Access Act.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.