KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about the GOP budget starting to move through the Legislature, the potential impact on Arizona’s congressional lines of a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling and more, The Show sat down with former state lawmaker Regina Cobb and attorney Roy Herrera.
Transcript
MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, and this is the Friday NewsCap podcast from KJZZ’s The Show. Each Friday, we review the biggest and most important political stories of the week with a panel of experts, which puts those stories into perspective to help us understand why they matter.
Here’s this week’s episode:
MATT GRESS: You now have an entire united Republican caucus in both the House and the Senate, and we are going to be very insistent on keeping 95%, if not 99% of this package intact.
OSCAR DE LOS SANTOS: This budget cuts our healthcare by $126 million, one of the biggest cuts to healthcare in state history.
MARK KELLY: Mr. Secretary, this war is stuck. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, the Iranian regime is in place, the nuclear material still in their hands. Americans are being crushed by higher costs.
KRIS MAYES: Close to schools, in the middle of a community that was never asked and never consented.
ADRIAN FONTES: They felt like they had some kind of a legal right to this very sensitive information of yours. And I said no again, and that lawsuit from the Department of Justice has been dismissed. That means we won.
KATIE HOBBS: I’m looking forward to the conclusion of this investigation, which I know will show what reporting has confirmed: that I was not involved in the decision and that DCS acted in the best interest of Arizona’s foster children.
MARK BRODIE: And joining me to talk about the GOP budget starting to move through the Legislature, the potential impact on Arizona’s congressional lines of a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling and more, are former state lawmaker Regina Cobb. Regina, good morning.
REGINA COBB: Good morning.
MARK BRODIE: And attorney Roy Herrera. Roy, good morning to you.
ROY HERRERA: Good morning.
MARK BRODIE: So Regina, you are a former chair of a legislative appropriations committee. So it’s fortuitous that you are here this week. We heard just a moment ago from State Rep. Matt Gress, who says that Republicans are going to insist on at least 90%, maybe 95-98% of what’s in their budget in the final version. Is he going to get his wish?
REGINA COBB: I don’t think so, and I think they’re going to be here till the end of June if he really feels that. Matt’s been in that room with me when he was working for Gov. (Doug) Ducey. He knows what it takes.
It takes people to sit in a room and actually negotiate, and they haven’t done that. Gov. (Katie) Hobbs put out her budget, refused to meet with them. Now they put their budget out. Neither side has come in and decided that they’re going to negotiate. And until they do, they’re not going to get a budget.
MARK BRODIE: What do you think of this process where the governor obviously is required to release their budget at the beginning of January, but since then, there have been apparently some negotiations. The governor walked away from it and said the Republicans need to show the public what their plan is instead of just saying they hate mine. Republicans took a few weeks and then put forward their plan and now said OK, we’re waiting for the governor to call us.
REGINA COBB: Yeah, I think this process is crazy. What we’ve started with usually during the summertime was with agencies, and then you start at the beginning of the year when the legislative process starts. And you start negotiating then.
Usually you walk into a room and there’s about 70-80% that both sides agree on. Then you get that out of the way, and then you find out what your go-home issue is.
Hers is Prop 123. They know that. So when they’re saying 99% of the budget, Prop. 123 isn’t in this. This is her go-home thing.
Theirs is (tax) conformity, and they have that complete conformity in there. She’s willing to negotiate a little bit on that direction, I think not complete conformity but most of it. I think they just have to sit in a room and figure out what else can they agree on before they get to those two points.
MARK BRODIE: Roy, does it seem like they’re capable of doing that at this point, the two sides?
ROY HERRERA: I’m going to try to be optimistic today. I mean, I think there’s obviously a lot of posturing going on by both sides, and that’s led to the situation that we’re in.
Both sides have priorities. I think both sides have some red lines. I mean so for example, I think the Republicans have said that ESA reform is something that they’re just willing not willing to do, which is obviously something that the governor’s asking for. Similarly on the other side, this Republican budget has deep cuts to Medicaid and to SNAP and other things that the governor’s already vetoed. So I don’t think that’s going to get in.
But I totally agree with Regina there’s going to have to be compromise here. I think one Republican said earlier this week that, well, we don't need any Democratic votes. Well, you need the biggest and most important Democratic vote of all, which is the governor’s signature, right?
So obviously there’s going to need to be some compromise. I’m optimistic in that these folks don’t want to be there until the end of June because it’s an election year in particular.
MARK BRODIE: And the primary’s just a couple weeks after that.
ROY HERRERA: And the primary’s coming. I mean so voting will have already begun at that point and all of that and so maybe that puts some downward pressure, but everybody’s going to have to give up something ultimately because we’re in an era of divided government.
MARK BRODIE: What do you make of the fact that the Republican budget had almost across the board 5% agency cuts? It excluded a few public safety ones, but is that something you think the governor is going to go along with?
ROY HERRERA: Well, we’re all obviously in a difficult fiscal situation. It’s a lot easier to do a budget when you have a surplus, and here because of the overall economic slowdown and things like that, we have a fiscal deficit. And so there’s always going to be cuts in that scenario.
Across the board cuts, whether that makes sense or not — I’m not sure that will make sense to the governor. Again, conformity issue is a big issue here. I think the governor has indicated that she likes some of the cuts, particularly the ones that are for middle class Arizonans.
So there’s compromise that’s going to be there. But again, everyone’s going to have to give up a little bit of what they want to get this done.
MARK BRODIE: Regina, you mentioned Prop. 123 being a big thing for the governor. This is something that the Legislature and governor have been trying for at least two years now to renew. It expired last year. Would you have optimism that in the next X number of weeks they can do what they’ve not been able to do in the last couple of years?
REGINA COBB: When the pressure’s on you can do anything. And what they haven’t done over the last couple of years is really try. I think what they did is do a lot of posturing, as he said, they’ve both been posturing on both sides.
It could be done, and I think it could be a continuation of what we do right now, or it could be cut down to 5.9. I think the Republicans could go for those kind of — if it was reduced a little bit, I think they could. They’re concerned about the corpus of it.
MARK BRODIE: Of the state land trust.
REGINA COBB: Of the state land trust. And, and they should be. If they keep it at it where it’s at or below, I think they’ll be fine. But they’ve got to negotiate that. So I think they can do it, and the pressure is they’ve got to get out of there so they can all go back and do run for reelection.
MARK BRODIE: Is this the kind of situation, Regina, where the past, like especially that the first the budget under Gov. Hobbs’ first year — where people referred to it as the Oprah budget, where everybody gets a certain amount of money and can do what they want.
I wonder if that in some ways hurts the negotiations now because they don’t kind of have that muscle memory of having three years’ worth of Republican legislative leaders and the governor really negotiating a budget. They’ve done different stuff over the couple of years, and they’ve not really had to do one like this.
REGINA COBB: You’re correct on that. The muscle memory is gone for the last three years, which really does put them at a disadvantage. But you have your leaders who have done this before. They know how to go back to that again. You’ve got (Sen. John) Kavanagh, (Senate President Warren) Petersen. Petersen sat right beside me most of the negotiations I think in ’23. And then you have (Rep.) Matt Gress, who’s been in there for all eight years pretty much that Ducey was in there.
MARK BRODIE: (Rep.) David Livingston’s been there a long time, too. I mean Kavanagh’s been there almost forever.
REGINA COBB: And he was my vice chairman for four years, and he was in the room with me the whole time.
MARK BRODIE: Does that experience, Roy, come into play, especially right now when as you say sort of the time pressure is on and there are clearly some pretty significant differences between the governor and the Legislature. Does having that experience in the room matter?
ROY HERRERA: I think it absolutely has to matter. But the other thing that happens here — and and I think legislators have been guilty of this for a very long time here in Arizona — is that you don’t really have the Republicans negotiating with the Democrats in the Legislature, really. I mean the Democratic caucus has not really, to my understanding, been particularly involved in negotiating directly with the Republican caucus. That also leads to delays because, again, everybody’s gotta look at.
REGINA COBB: But that’s not anything new. It’s been like that for a long time.
ROY HERRERA: No, it’s not. So in, so in a perfect world though, things like that would happen.
MARK BRODIE: So you’re saying the Legislature is an imperfect world.
ROY HERRERA: That’s what I’m saying unfortunately, and and I don’t know if it will change. But you know just thinking about sort of the practicalities of this, this is why we are at kind of stalemate points like this and why we run the risk of going until June.
MARK BRODIE: But couldn’t one make the argument that sort of the governor is negotiating on behalf of the Democratic caucuses and in theory anyway, the Democrats in the Legislature are communicating with the governor or her staff and saying, “OK, we need A, B and C. We’re not doing X, Y and Z.” And that is sort of taken into consideration when the governor and the Legislature eventually start talking about this?
ROY HERRERA: In theory that’s true, although every legislator — I’m sure and Regina’s a true expert at this — but every legislator’s going to have priorities that are specific to their district that they have to care about which may be a little bit different.
But again there also the question becomes: do you really want to have a bipartisan budget? I think we all should strive for that, obviously doesn’t always happen, but that all involves negotiations with everybody.
REGINA COBB: And when you’re talking about experience, I mean Gov. Hobbs doesn’t have the experience that that some of the other legislators have in there. And I think that you ask somebody without experience to be your negotiator, that’s not a good thing.
This year they’ve decided they’re going to do what they call the super cage, which means that they have the full appropriations committee on both sides in the room. You have that many people in the room, you are not going to come up with some good balance, I don’t think. I think that’s a difficult thing. You just need the experience in the room to be in the room and doing the job.
MARK BRODIE: Is that a matter of like too many too many cooks in the kitchen?
REGINA COBB: Yes, absolutely, absolutely too many cooks in the kitchen.
MARK BRODIE: All right, so guys let’s just a couple minutes until the break. I want to ask you about a federal judge this week decided that a lawsuit that the district the Federal Department of Justice filed against Arizona was to be thrown out.
This is the one that asked for voter information from Arizona voters. They purportedly wanted to use it to make sure that Arizona’s following law in terms of keeping the voter rolls maintained and all that sort of thing.
Roy, this is an area that you work in quite a bit. Are you surprised that a Trump-appointed federal judge tossed this lawsuit out?
ROY HERRERA: I’m not surprised, and for full disclosure I filed on behalf of a client an amicus brief on the side of the secretary of state in in the litigation. I’m not surprised at all, and if you look across the country. I think I count six different states that have you know been sued by the Department of Justice or sued the Department of Justice related to this request.
In all six of those states, the Department of Justice has lost. So they’re obviously not making the case, legally speaking, on why they should be entitled to this kind of information. This is very sensitive personal data that they would be turning over to the Department of Justice.
And so I think the secretary of state needs to be given credit for fighting back and and winning this lawsuit. So it doesn’t surprise me. It was Judge (Susan) Brnovich on the federal court. She’s a very considerate judge, knows you know this law very well and so I’m not surprised that she came out this way.
MARK BRODIE: Do you have a sense of whether DOJ may or may not appeal this?
ROY HERRERA: It’s hard to say. I mean my theory on why they want this data — because it hasn’t really been explained very well by the Department of Justice — is that we have a president that still is an election denier. In other words, he still doesn’t believe that he lost the 2020 presidential election.
And I think you have a Department of Justice that’s doing his bidding to basically show to him that they’re doing something about it, and that something is trying to gather data to build up a case on why there was fraud. Because again, we have not seen any evidence of fraud thus far and the countless lawsuits we’ve had since 2020.
But I think that’s the reason why they’re doing it and if that’s the reason, then yeah they will likely appeal.
MARK BRODIE: Regina, what do you make of this ruling and sort of what it means for Arizona voters and and Arizona elections?
REGINA COBB: Well, I think that it’s a lot of chatter that we shouldn’t be dealing with right now. It’s something that’s been, just what Roy said, is it’s been something that we want to say we’re doing something, and so we are doing it.
I think there’s other things with the elections that you can do and ways to make it safer. Going back and doing voter rolls, I have a mixed feeling about this. I want to make sure they’re correct, but do I want to give my personal information all the way to the federal government and they have know everything about me? I know they know a lot already, but this is one more step of of giving my personal information out.
MARK BRODIE: Sure. All right, we’ll take a quick break. That’s Regina Cobb, I’m also joined by Roy Herrera. I’m Mark Brodie in Phoenix. The Friday NewsCap continues in just a moment.
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s the Friday NewsCap on KJZZ 91.5 I’m Mark Brodie. My guests this week are former congressional staffer and attorney Roy Herrera and former state lawmaker Regina Cobb.
Roy, let me start with you on a big ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that could have implications for Arizona dealing with a congressional map in Louisiana, basically saying that there was a district that was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. The president of the Arizona Senate, Warren Petersen, has said Republicans here will file a lawsuit to try to undo some districts here that he considers to be unconstitutional as well.
Obviously Arizona has an independent redistricting commission, so it’s a slightly different procedure than in a lot of other states, but could Arizona’s congressional maps end up changing before the next census when they would be changed anyway?
ROY HERRERA: So without running the risk of being the worst guest that you could have on here, I’m a bit limited on what I can say on this topic given the fact that I was the co-lead counsel for the redistricting commission this time around.
And theoretically if Petersen proceeds with anything, I would imagine you know that’s going to involve the commission. So I don’t want to talk about necessarily what the Supreme Court decision means for redistricting going forward.
I will say and I think we all know this that the state constitution has a number of factors that the commission has to consider when it draws its maps. It has a process that the commission must follow. I think that the this commission followed that process and considered all those factors appropriately.
And I think the evidence for that quite frankly is the fact that no one really sued the commission’s maps after they were promulgated — unlike 2000, unlike 2010. So to me that’s a sign that the commission did its job well. Obviously if President Petersen intends to move forward in challenging the maps, I’ll respond to anything that he asserts on behalf of the commission at the direction of the commission, and we’ll go from there.
MARK BRODIE: Were you surprised at the reasoning that the U.S. Supreme Court gave in its decision out of Louisiana?
ROY HERRERA: Not really. I mean just very generally speaking, this seems along the lines of what this Chief Justice Roberts-led court has been doing in this area. I mean there’s been a number of decisions now involving the Voting Rights Act that they have done, and I think most observers of the court were not particularly surprised at this is the way that it came out, where you had this six, you know, conservative justices on one side and the three liberal justices on the other side.
So in that sense I’m not surprised, and it’s sort of a the trend that we have been seeing from this court.
MARK BRODIE: Regina, Arizona has been immune from the redistricting battles that we’ve seen play out over the country after President Trump urged Texas to start redrawing, that of course set off this domino effect.
Could this be what changes that — not necessarily for 2026 because as we’ve talked about, the primaries are very close and you know this would have to go through court. But in terms of maybe 2028 or sometime before the next redistricting would have ordinarily happened?
REGINA COBB: Well, the normal redistricting would happen in 2030. So we’re going to be two years earlier. So there’s a lot of things to consider here. Are we going to start doing midterm redistricting or middle of the 10-year decade uh redistricting that we do? It takes us over a year to do redistricting. And as Roy said, this one was pretty good. I think they did a pretty decent job.
This could boomerang on the Republicans, and I hope that they look at this as something to a warning. Because we could actually have redistricting to that causes a whole state to go blue.
MARK BRODIE: Really, you think that?
REGINA COBB: There could be, yeah. Or you you could do it to where you put all of the Republicans into one district and then Democrats have got a competitive district and other districts. So it could boomerang on us. So I feel like that we should leave it as is every 10 years, do the job. There’s a lot of processes that we need to go through with redistricting that couldn’t be done in a very short amount of time.
MARK BRODIE: If you are Senate President Petersen, how concerned would you be that, as you say, this could come back and maybe create more competitive districts or maybe even more lean-Democratic districts?
REGINA COBB: Yeah, I would be concerned about that. I think you gotta look at both sides. You gotta have your eyes open when you look at this. It can’t just be that we want to just change everything to Republicans. It would be nice to do that, but you can’t do that.
But here we are saying that this state, we want to change it for this state — well it can happen in another state going the other direction.
MARK BRODIE: Interesting.
So guys, late last week the attorney general filed a lawsuit to try to stop the ICE detention warehouse facility that’s being built in Surprise, and she had gone through sort of a litany of reasons. There was a a stop-work order on that anyway, but Roy I’m curious what you make of the fact that the governor, the the attorney general is going to court now to try to stop this facility, which at least some in the community don’t necessarily want.
And the City Council has basically said “Look, even if we don’t want it, there’s nothing we can do to stop it.” It seems like Mayes is saying, “Well, this is something we can do to stop it if that’s what the goal is.”
ROY HERRERA: I think that’s right. I mean she’s challenging this on the grounds that they didn’t do the appropriate environmental impact study at that location. And this has been the type of challenge that we have also seen in other states and we’ve seen at least one judge in another state agree with the plaintiff in that case that the federal government has not done the appropriate environmental impact study. So that is the legal claim I think.
But obviously the the larger point here is — and I think Attorney General Mayes said this in the lead-up clip that you played — which is that you know this is a this would be in a in a community of Surprise where folks in the community don’t want this facility there, and they obviously didn’t have a say in putting it there.
And so I view this as her fighting back on behalf of that community to make sure that this facility isn’t placed there. And if that means you know going to court and and you know claiming that they didn’t file a you know an environmental impact study, then that’s what you gotta do in order to do that.
MARK BRODIE: Regina, we should mention that it’s not uniform. Not everybody in Surprise is opposed to this. Not everybody in any place will be for or against anything. Obviously there’s a you know a spectrum of opinions here.
But from a I guess from a political standpoint, Attorney General Mayes is obviously running for reelection this year. She has not been shy about going after the Trump administration. Do you see this as, in addition to the legal issues that she clearly sees with this, a savvy political move on her part or not?
REGINA COBB: I think it’s futile. She is doing politicking and I think that calling it a nuisance law and saying it didn’t go through the environmental impact study, I think it’s going to be — it’s not going to go anywhere. There are many communities that don’t want like prisons in their communities, but they end up with a prison in their community. So … I think she’s just doing politics.
MARK BRODIE: Could the administration have done even like a cursory I don’t know like an online survey or something in Surprise just so folks there felt like they at least had some kind of say in this, or do you think they made the right choice just by saying “We’re doing it here, and we don’t like we’re not looking for opinions on this”?
REGINA COBB: I think that if they wanted to get it done, they did it the way they did it, and they should have done it the way they did it. Because if you start going out for public comment you’re going to get exactly what you said. You’re going to get both sides out there fighting, and it’s going to be a delayed response. So if they wanted to get it done as quickly as they did, they did it the way they should have done it.
MARK BRODIE: OK. So guys a couple minutes left. Regina, I want to ask you about the newest state lawmaker, member of the House, someone that you would have served with, Sylvia Allen was appointed by the Navajo County Board of Supervisors to replace David Marshall who was appointed — maybe legally? — to be the the Navajo County recorder.
She has obviously experience, she served in the Legislature for a while and is coming in at a time when I would have imagined having been there before is pretty valuable.
REGINA COBB: Absolutely. I think this was the perfect choice for them. It was kind of like when (former state Rep.) Steve Pierce came in in the Prescott area when they needed somebody to come in and fill in a spot, especially towards the end of session right before an election.
She’s not running for reelection. So this is a perfect person to be in there. Sylvia is a great legislator, did a great job when she was in there. I could see her coming in with her experience and being able to jump right into all the budget negotiations, all of the final bills that are being presented at this point.
MARK BRODIE: Roy, I would not expect that you and now-Rep. Allen would share a lot of political beliefs, but in terms of having the experience of having been a legislator at a time when you’re coming in and voting on a budget, is there value there?
ROY HERRERA: I mean we don’t share a lot of beliefs.
MARK BRODIE: Maybe not any.
ROY HERRERA: Maybe some, but certainly not on how old the Earth is, for example, or something like that. But yeah … to Regina’s point, she’s going to be there for just the remainder of this session. You have somebody in there that’s done this before.
I don’t really see any long-term impact that that’s going to have because she’s not going to be running for reelection or anything like that. And so having somebody that’s done it is not a bad idea.
MARK BRODIE: And presumably she will vote in the same way that her predecessor would have, right? So there’s no real change there other than the human sitting in the chair.
ROY HERRERA: No, that’s exactly right. And we’re at sort of the — I hope — towards the endgame of this budget negotiation. … And so I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference.
MARK BRODIE: Would you agree with that, Regina? Like she and Rep. Marshall would have voted the same way.
REGINA COBB: Yes, they would have voted the same way, and I think that Sylvia’s a strong woman and she’ll finish out this season good with it.
MARK BRODIE: All right, terrific. Thank you guys for the conversation. Regina Cobb, Roy Herrera, good to see you both thanks.
REGINA COBB: Good to see you, too. Thank you.
ROY HERRERA: Thank you.
MARK BRODIE: That’s all for this week’s Friday NewsCap. You can find the full The Show podcast at podcasts.kjzz.org. I’m Mark Brodie, thanks for listening.
