The Show for June 12, 2026: Making Arizona government 'boring' again, late night decisions

State lawmakers and the governor have a budget deal, and are working to wrap up their session. Our Friday NewsCap panelists analyze that and the rest of the week’s top stories. And, new research aims to figure out how being awake in the middle of the night impacts our decision-making skills.

Transcript

MARK BRODIE Hi, I'm Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here's today's episode.

Good morning. It's The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, why members of the LDS Church say they were caught off guard by a recent move by the Defense Department. And why our decision making is not that great in the middle of the night.

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.

GOV. KATIE HOBBS: This budget does invest in public education, and it leaves schools whole. They're not seeing the, the shortfall from that [Prop.] 123 expiration.

SEN. JOHN KAVANAGH: The biggest win, I think, from a Republican standpoint, is the $1.4 billion in tax cuts. We took the Trump great bill tax cuts, and we brought them down to the state level. The only state to do that.

SEN. SALLY ANN GONZALES: We always talk here at the Legislature about the devil is in the details. Well, I just read you what the devil is saying in this budget about this money being used for immigration enforcement.

FORMER MARICOPA COUNTY RECORDER HELEN PURCELL: I worry about those people who maybe are just on the sidelines, and they see, "Gee, I'm not sure that my vote is going to count, so if they're saying that this is wrong, maybe I'll just not go."

DEER VALLEY SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER KIMBERLY FISHER: My action was nothing more than calling out the dictatorship that we have been dealing with, not for just the one meeting, but for the three and a half years.

ANDREW GOULD: At the end of the day, it was forcing ultimately home buyers to subsidize groundwater for other uses, and it was impacting housing and affordability.

MARK BRODIE: And with me to talk about the just-approved budget, the latest in the dispute between the Maricopa County supervisors and the recorder, and more, are Barrett Marson of Marson Media. Good morning, Barrett.

BARRETT MARSON: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: And Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies. Stacy, good morning to you.

STACY PEARSON: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So, hot off the presses, state Legislature has approved the budget, sent it off to the governor. Stacy, we heard from a number of Democrats talking about in the Legislature what some of their wins were. What to you, if you're a Democrat, what are you happy about in this budget?

STACY PEARSON: Oh, what am I happy about on this budget?

BARRETT MARSON: Well, this will be a short conversation.

STACY PEARSON: Well, thanks. The weather's great. I like the rain. It's been great. No, the fact that we wound up with a budget that does cut taxes, particularly taxes for the middle class, and I think most Democrats would agree that taxes on tips and that cut's been lovely.

MARK BRODIE: Overtime, things like that, yeah.

STACY PEARSON: Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a win. Long term, I think we are still going to have to figure out how to fund education, and we're going to have to figure out how to get corrections officers' raises, and we're going to have to figure out where new revenue comes from.

The other win I think is a moratorium on data center tax breaks. You know, a three-year hiatus is probably what we need to do to figure out what these things really are.

MARK BRODIE: Barrett, we heard from a number of Republicans saying their biggest win was basically tax conformity, which is a phrase that for a lot of people makes their eyes glaze over, but it's basically conforming Arizona's tax code with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

From your perspective, is that the biggest win for Republicans?

BARRETT MARSON: Look, this has been something the Legislature does every single year because the feds always make some minor or major tax changes, changes to their IRS tax code. So normally, this isn't really contentious. It's not a big deal.

This year, because the number was so big, it became a bigger deal. And that was, you know, again, it's about $400 million a year, $450 [million] a year over the next three years. So this is a huge, huge win for Republicans. It is no tax on tips, but it's just making it easier for us, all in this room and every listener out there, to file your taxes because it is based on sort of the same numbers, if you will.

If they hadn't done this, by the way, many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially, of people would have had to refile taxes.

MARK BRODIE: With those, that reduction, though, Barrett, are we going to be in a situation at some point down the road, be it next year or three or four years down the road, where the state is is, as Stacy referenced, looking for more money or just making further cuts, because it's not getting that $400-plus million in a year?

BARRETT MARSON: Sure, and that's about 2.5%, 3% of the state budget. The state budget is about $18.3 billion. So yeah, you know, losing 2.5%, you take it away from other priorities. But it is our money, and it is conforming to the federal numbers, which is important.

MARK BRODIE: So, Stacy, what do you think led the governor and Democrats to say, "OK we'll go along with this," because the governor had vetoed a few different versions of this earlier on in the session, and Democrats were pretty pretty united in saying, "We don't like this"?

STACY PEARSON: Well, she was very clear about vetoing a bill that didn't have a spending cut associated. You can't just cut taxes without cutting what those taxes were funding. So, you know, we're a bit in an abusive relationship in that Democrats are celebrating that it didn't get worse. This wasn't worse. I mean, it really is, well, that was really unpleasant, but at least I didn't break an arm. I mean, we're really in this very strange Stockholm syndrome.

BARRETT MARSON: You know, Mark, I think what's important here is that even Stacy, when you asked her about the wins in the budget, talks about tax cuts.

STACY PEARSON: Yeah.

BARRETT MARSON: That's great. That's great for Republicans. It's great for Arizonans. It's great for Democrats. But one thing it's probably one person it's probably not great for is Katie Hobbs. She didn't get a lot of budget wins. You know, the three-year moratorium on data center taxes tax cuts, what, that's $50-odd million over the three years that they save, that eventually will probably be taken out of future budgets anyway.

So there weren't a lot of wins for Democrats, and I think that's why you saw a handful of Democrats in each chamber complain bitterly about this budget.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So, Stacy, what from this budget, if anything, do you think the governor runs on in her reelection campaign?

STACY PEARSON: So she —

BARRETT MARSON: "That I'm not Andy Biggs."

STACY PEARSON: Well, I mean, that guy's got a tin foil hat. Sorry about that.

But she runs on the fact that we've preserved higher education funding and scholarship funding and, for the, for a large part, K-12 funding. She runs against the runs on the fact that she has tried, made some very serious attempts to rein in the out-of-control ESA program. She obviously hasn't gotten some of those guardrails pushed through, but there's still, there, there's still hope, at least on the initiative side, that something good happens.

And then, more importantly, the, the governor runs on the fact that she has government functioning. In a divided environment, she is a voice of reason. It is sane. It is passed on time. You know, we are not seeing fights spill over into the streets. I mean, this is this is there's an adult in the room, and she's executed as the highest elected official in the state.

BARRETT MARSON: That is one hell of a campaign ad, let me tell you. No one out there cares more about, "Hey, what's happening in state government? Hey, it's kind of quiet. All right, let's go."

STACY PEARSON: No, that's exactly what people are craving. You're so wrong. People want boring. Make boring make boring good again. ... Yeah, make boring cool again. I mean, this is exactly what people are craving. They don't —

BARRETT MARSON: Yeah, but they don't want things done, and I don't know that Katie Hobbs has gotten things done.

STACY PEARSON: How do you — look at, look at the rest of the Legislature. We've got tin foil hats, lunacy. I mean, we've got —

BARRETT MARSON: I don't disagree with that at times.

STACY PEARSON: I mean, this is, you know what she didn't do? Investigate chemtrails. I mean, we're like we are, we are getting back to a functional government, and that's a win for Democrats.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So one thing that was not in this budget, something that the governor really did want, and, Barrett, I'll start with you on this, was an extension, or at least asking the voters to extend Proposition 123, which expired, I now think, a couple of years ago. The schools are still continuing to get the money.

BARRETT MARSON: And that's very important to note.

MARK BRODIE: Right. The schools are continuing to get the money. Last year and this and this coming year in the budget, they will get that.

But Republicans within themselves couldn't agree, it seems, on what they wanted to ask voters about, and they certainly couldn't agree with the governor. Do you foresee this ever going back to the voters at this point?

BARRETT MARSON: I do. I think once we get out of the election next year, we can, if Katie Hobbs is governor especially, I think we see more of a push to renew 123 next year.

MARK BRODIE: Stacy, what do you think?

STACY PEARSON: Agreed. I mean, there we have a path, and, and it was developed by Gov. [Doug] Ducey and his team to create more funding for education without raising taxes, and whoever's in charge needs to continue to explore that.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, is there reason, though, to believe, I mean, last year was not an election year, and they couldn't get it done. Is there reason to believe that next year would be any different?

STACY PEARSON: Sure. I mean, knowing that she's termed out, I mean, folks aren't trying to block her success to try to create a one-term governor. I mean, I think she, I think Katie, term two Katie Hobbs is going to be a really fun governor to watch.

BARRETT MARSON: Look, Rod Stewart just played here earlier this week, and I have reason to believe.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, man. Did not have that on my bingo card for today.

BARRETT MARSON: And look, I know your listeners, I know your listeners. They're Rod Stewart fans.

MARK BRODIE: Oh boy. OK. So, Stacy, anything in the budget that, if you're a Democrat, like were there hold your nose and vote for this moments for Democrats?

STACY PEARSON: I think it's a lot less this year than last or other, you know, years prior. We don't have pork. We didn't have a lot of pork to go play with, and so there were very few pet projects for people to be really upset about.

And so it really was a basic functional budget, keep the train on track, like let's go. You know, we're, we're really looking at a functional government, and that alone is a nice refreshing change.

BARRETT MARSON: You know, Mark, when there's less money to play with in a budget, it's easier to do. It's when there's more money and everyone's fighting over, you know, this $4 million project and this $7 million project, that's when it gets a little hairier. So this year, there wasn't a lot of money to play with, so it was kind of easier to do.

MARK BRODIE: Were there elements of this, Barrett, do you think that Republicans kind of had to hold their nose and vote for, or was it generally like, "The stuff that Democrats want, we don't really care that much about. It's not not a big deal?”

BARRETT MARSON: Yeah, I would say there's very little quote "wins" in here for Democrats, and it's just kind of a normal budget. And with the 1.4 or other —

STACY PEARSON: Or Republicans. I mean, aside from tax cuts, the Republicans didn't get much of their pet projects either. We don't have a border strike force. We don't have, you know, the lizard guys.

BARRETT MARSON: Well, hold on. That's not true. We do have the, the local border support fund, which is, I don't know, $17 million, something like that, I don't remember the exact number right now. But no, that's that that's been in the budget for the last few years, remains in the budget. It remains. And so I, you know, there was some law and order money, if you will, that certainly Republicans and Katie Hobbs can, can point to.

STACY PEARSON: Yeah, $55 million for corrections to comply with the federal court orders. I mean, this is, there, there was stuff in here to just comply with the law, which is nice.

MARK BRODIE: And we we've heard that the Legislature's going to try to wrap up today, hopefully. Referenda, the big issue still outstanding. Obviously, there are some third-read bills or some bills to be voted on, but are, is the decision about what voters are going to figure out in November still the big thing left, Stacy?

STACY PEARSON: Yeah, referral-palooza is really what today is. And, no doubt, yeah, and what, how that ballot takes shape could very well determine the state's future. I mean, we're talking about some really really important bills, really important referrals that are still being considered, ones that democracy have, have democracy on the line, ones that have the future of the state and unions' ability to organize. I mean, we've got some really big items still outstanding.

BARRETT MARSON: Yeah, there are a couple to watch. There is one that doesn't allow boys in girl spaces, and there's one that Stacy mentioned, sort of the, the democracy one, you know, that would limit mail-in balloting, you know, mandate precinct balloting, things like that. So there are several important ones to watch. There's also a bill that sort of deals with license plate readers.

MARK BRODIE: And there's one that would ban photo radar, too, I think.

BARRETT MARSON: Yeah, and so, well, that's an HCO, right. That is a, that's a, it's a referral, but there's a, there's just a regular bill … that would essentially ban Flock, right, and license plate readers. So those are the things to watch out today, what are, what is the Legislature going to do with that today.

And I almost can guarantee this, they will end the session at some point today, maybe even in daylight, which would be great.

MARK BRODIE: Wow. So very quickly before we go to break, we know that last election, I mean, the ballot was endless. There was a lot of referrals. Any predictions on — there were three that the Legislature put on last last session. Do you have any predictions on how many to expect this November?

STACY PEARSON: I mean, if we believe Republican leadership, they wanted to limit it to 10.

MARK BRODIE: 10 total.

STACY PEARSON: A 10 total or 10 additional, I don't know if it matters. But ultimately, what I think last ballot taught Republicans is, without a campaign and the machinery behind that, just referring an endless number of things doesn't necessarily help your candidates.

BARRETT MARSON: Well, one of the things that I think hopefully the Legislature noticed is that voters were not eager to take away their own rights.

STACY PEARSON: Right.

BARRETT MARSON: And several of the initiatives that or referrals, rather, that went down two years ago were about capping rights on the voters. They weren't going for that. So I, hopefully the Legislature at least takes note of that.

MARK BRODIE: Stacy, there is I feel like we talk about this every week on the Friday NewsCap, this drama between the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Recorder Justin Heap. There are a couple of things going on this week, but let's start with this ballot envelope scanner that was apparently removed from a ballot tabulation area or somewhere within the county tabulation center.

BARRETT MARSON: Mark, it wasn't apparently, it was.

MARK BRODIE: It was.

BARRETT MARSON: It was. There's video.

MARK BRODIE: There's video of it being —

BARRETT MARSON: There's video, and you know, I guess it didn't happen if there wasn't video, but guess what? There's video of the guy putting it into the trunk of his rando car.

STACY PEARSON: Four, four angles of video of this thing going for a field trip.

MARK BRODIE: So the recorder is saying that the machine belongs to his office, it was not in use at the time. The supervisors are saying that is not true.

I mean, not trying to adjudicate this, Stacy, but like optically, this seems not great for anybody.

STACY PEARSON: No. The, what happened with the release of that footage yesterday is this fight that was largely on Twitter and in the court itself jumped the fire line. I mean, this, it was, we've got a Board of Supervisors that is holding its position, we have a recorder that was holding his position. Now it has spilled over to the active administration of an election. And a scanner getting loaded up on a dolly, on a roller and put in somebody's pickup truck is bonkers.

MARK BRODIE: This was during the, we should mention, this was during the Tempe City Council election.

STACY PEARSON: During the Tempe election. And Councilmember Randy Keating sent a demand yesterday to preserve records in anticipation of litigation.

BARRETT MARSON: Because, you know, one of the things is they took the machine, which isn't so good to begin with, but they also took ballot envelopes.

STACY PEARSON: You're right. Yep.

BARRETT MARSON: We don't know whether those ballot envelopes still had ballots in them. And I think that's really important, that he may have taken this person who took the machine may have taken actual ballots.

And, you know, did that disenfranchise anyone in Tempe? Well, we don't know that yet, we have to wait for the end of the investigation. But I think that's really really important. It's, it's a small fact, it's a significant fact that is sort of lost in a lot of the stories because the machine and the video, but there are potentially ballots.

STACY PEARSON: There were, there were papers, too, yeah. What I find so fascinating about this is if you would have asked me when we first started talking about this, whether or not I thought Debbie Lesko was going to be in a position of opposition to the county supervisor, like I would have thought that they would have gotten their tin foil hats at the same store, she and Justin Heap. Not at all.

I mean, she is, she is standing strong for democracy in a way that I didn't expect, and she's demanding answers. I mean, this is a Republican majority board that has dug in to the, to the strongest degree against what County Recorder Heap is trying to do.

BARRETT MARSON: We do things right on the west side, just FYI. West side west side for life, baby. No, you know, I think, I think Stacy talked about something very important. Four-fifths of this board is absolutely united and they are standing strong. You have the three of the Republicans and the Democrat who are a united front, and I don't know that people expected that going in.

STACY PEARSON: I agree.

BARRETT MARSON: But I will tell you, the board has been virtually unanimously united in this effort against Heap. And, you know, again, it's for the good of the administration for voters. Thankfully, so far, voters haven't noticed. I mean, it's, it's been a little bit insider baseball, but I will say ...

STACY PEARSON: Ballots get mailed in what, 14 days

BARRETT MARSON: But taking machines during the middle of an election that may include ballots, that all of a sudden now starts to bring it to the voter. Hey, what happens if he just takes a machine, you know, in July or November that does have ballots? And how are we going to, you know, how are we going to get, ensure that the election is run properly? And the, that is the board's main focus, and Heap's main focus seems to be attacking the board.

MARK BRODIE: Well, Stacy, it's an interesting point you made about Supervisor Lesko because there were some questions, right, when Bill Gates and Clint Hickman left the board about what the board would look like because they, of course, had been involved in the 2020 election and, you know, harassed and threatened and stalked and, yeah., dealt with all sorts of stuff.

And really, nobody knew what was, you know, how the new supervisors were going to react. It seems as though the new board, in many ways, is kind of similar to the old one.

STACY PEARSON: Agreed. And once presented with the facts, the Board of Supervisors has been, to Barrett's point, relatively unanimous in its defense of how the elections are administered. We don't have room for this for these games.

I mean, this, this people's trust in elections are at the lowest point in recorded history. This walking a ballot scanner out of a building and loading it into a pickup truck is bonkers.

BARRETT MARSON: I think it's, it's for the board, the personalities are pretty different. Like, I don't think anyone who has ever known Kate Gallego or Debbie Lesko would put them sort of in the same camp of Republicans, right? But yet, one of the thing, the thing that does bring them together is they both have incredible backbones. These are two incredibly strong women. You know, one's a bit more of a moderate Republican, one's more of a bit of a conservative Republican, but what they have are incredibly strong backbones.

And they, the two of them, the chair now and vice chair, are standing united and strong. And along with [Steve] Gallardo, along with Thomas Galvin on the east side, those four have really stood up and are going to bat.

And they're, you know, Justin Heap wants someone arrested, you know, for maybe, you know, picking up some ballots, and, you know, Jack Sellers and Debbie Lesko, they are, you know, "Arrest us first. We, you arrest us, not, you know, some, you know, election worker who's just doing their job."

MARK BRODIE: So, Barrett, let me ask you about a former Maricopa County recorder, Helen Purcell, for whom the Purcell Principle is named.

BARRETT MARSON: I just want a Marson Principle. I don't even know what my principle would be but I want a Marson Principle.

MARK BRODIE: We'll work on that. You might not like what it actually says but we'll can get one for you. She came out this week and said that in the lawsuit, the original lawsuit between the recorder and the supervisors, that the, the judge should stay this and put it off because we're close enough to an election that, you know, it could cause some problems, could cause some confusion.

Barrett, does this like legally, and I guess in the court of public perception, like does this matter what Helen Purcell has to say?

BARRETT MARSON: It very much matters. Now, little caveat, I am not an attorney. I used to get my law degree from Law & Order University every week, but it would seem that her argument is pretty valid and, you know, kind of hits it on the head.

We are in elections, essentially. I mean, as Stacy noted a couple of minutes ago, early ballots, couple weeks, get mailed out in just a couple of weeks. We are having a big primary for a lot of important positions here, and I don't think it's time to make drastic changes in the administration of elections. Let's deal with it when we're not counting ballots.

MARK BRODIE: Do you agree with that, Stacy?

STACY PEARSON: Oh, absolutely.

MARK BRODIE: With the caveat that I think none of us in this room are lawyers.

STACY PEARSON: Right, but we, we all know the court of public opinion is, is on the side of boring, traditional election administration, not experiments. I mean, Helen Purcell got unelected because precinct locations changed and people got mad. They went to where they used to be, that facility wasn't open anymore.

I mean, folks just want to go mail their ballot in or drop it off where they always drop it off and call it a day.

BARRETT MARSON: By the way, Brodie, Pearson and Marson PLC would be a pretty good law firm.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, we'd get I don't know, can we be disbarred if we're not members of the bar?

BARRETT MARSON: We can't be disbarred.

STACY PEARSON: That's a good. Yeah, no, that's a good question.

MARK BRODIE: It does it does have a certain ring to it. Get the business cards made up. All right. Barrett Marson, Stacy Pearson, thank you both so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

BARRETT MARSON: Thank you.

STACY PEARSON: Take care.

MARK BRODIE: That's all for this week's Friday News Cap. You can find the full show podcast at podcast.kjzz.org. I'm Mark Brodie. Thanks for listening.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not

Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, get ready for a road trip. We'll kick off our summer soapbox series.

But first, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were up in arms last week after the Department of Defense under the leadership of Pete Hegseth left them off its newly slimmed-down list of Christian religions. The omission spawned a massive backlash that the DOD quickly responded to by revising its list, but the revision fell short of designating Latter-day Saints as Christian. It all points to a long divide between some Christians and members of the LDS Church and some very distinct beliefs about Jesus Christ. And our next guest says it also says a lot about the political power of both evangelical Christians and Latter-day Saints today. Tamarra Kemlsey covers religion for the Salt Lake Tribune. My co-host, Lauren Gilger, spoke with her more about it.

LAUREN GILGER Let's begin, Tamarra, with a little bit about the reaction to this. Like, this seemed to really touch a nerve in Utah, in the broader kind of LDS world. Talk a little bit about what motivated this reaction. Like, this is a long point of disagreement, let's say, between some evangelical Christians and the LDS Church, right?

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Since Day 1. Since Day 1, Joseph Smith came out and said, "Hey look, I've got another book of scripture about Jesus Christ." This has been very upsetting to other Christian faiths, especially the evangelical world as it's developed. And it is really kind of frustrating for a lot of Latter-day Saints who see themselves as otherwise bedfellows with evangelicals. "Hey look," you know, especially since the rise of the religious right, "We have all these shared political goals, we have all these shared ideas about patriotism, what it means to be an American. Like, can't we all get along? Won't you let me into your club?" And this sense of like, "Well, we like it when you vote our way, but no."

LAUREN GILGER Right. And this is sort of a theological debate, right? Like, talk a little bit about the the kind of differences in the belief system that especially some conservative evangelical Christians really take issue with.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Yes, absolutely. So, as I mentioned, the existence of the Book of Mormon is very concerning to many. The other is, of course, this belief that God was once a man, and that men and women will one day be gods and goddesses. That is very offensive to people who are conservative Christians. That has been very difficult.

Everything that goes on in the temples is really uncomfortable for a lot of these — a lot of people, but a lot of Christian evangelicals who see it as sort of like, "culty" is the word that you will often hear, "it's strange, it's weird." I mean, of course, a lot of things that — you could argue that a lot of things that religions do are "strange and weird," according to modern Protestant sort of norms that have become the water that a lot of Americans just swim in without noticing today, but yeah, it's kind of like, ooh, what's that? Cringe.

LAUREN GILGER It's different, yeah. I mean, lots of folks will point out there are no crosses in Mormon temples, right? They focus on the resurrection and not the the death of Christ. But you mention in your reporting that the LDS Church has been engaged in this kind of nearly decade-long campaign to rebrand. You know, it's tied up in this idea that Latter-day Saints are Christians, and they want folks to think of them that way. What has that campaign looked like?

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: So, this was definitely the work of the late President Russell M. Nelson who just died last year at the age of, oh, I think it was 100 or 101. ... And he was to the end very insistent and very active on this front that, "No, no, no, we're not Mormons." And that's was a huge pivot from his some of his predecessors who had dumped a ton of money into this.

I don't know if any of your listeners ever remember the "I'm a Mormon" campaign. There were lots of YouTube ads. If you went to Times Square, you saw these where it was people who were fun and quirky and interesting, being like, "I'm a Mormon." All of that was gone. All of that was gone. The logo became this image of Jesus, there was all of like, the Temple Square in Salt Lake City, which is the sort of Vatican for the LDS Church, just got revamped, and like, gone are references to Joseph Smith and the restoration for the most part, instead it's just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all day long, all the time.

And so, yes, this has been, I mean, they bought the URL churchofjesuschrist.org, they changed all of their social media handles. So in every way that the institution kind of has its fingers in defining officially what it stands for, it found a way to insert Jesus.

LAUREN GILGER: That's very interesting. So, we also saw this move from the DOD, like it reverberated throughout the LDS, you know, communities near and far. But we also saw it hit the political realm, right, like with Utah Senator Mike Lee in particular, but many other LDS politicians you know, getting getting really upset here, speaking out. For him in particular, I think it was it was notable because it was kind of a rare instance of him being willing to push back against the Trump administration.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Lee even had a video where he was — this impassioned plea where he was talking to his camera and he's like, "Pete Hegseth, tear down this wall!" Right? Trying to mimic Ronald Reagan, and I guess, in this case, Hegseth is Gorbachev.

But it was this very, very ... he took it very personally. I think exactly for that reason that he saw himself as part of this Christian evangelical right that has found so many avenues of power in this administration. And to suddenly find himself on the out, I think that felt like a deep betrayal.

But I will note that he did not say, "Trump, tear down this wall." His criticism was overwhelmingly focused on Hegseth, who is himself very, has a very clear Christian ideology. In contrast to Trump, who has been like, somewhat Presbyterian, sort of like, is definitely, you know, doesn't go to church as much as Hegseth, let's put it that way. ... And then, when this list changed — and to be clear, the list did not add Christian to, it instead of caving to LDS demands and adding the word Christian, they pulled the tag altogether.

So no faiths were given this Christian delineation, right? Nonetheless, Lee calls this a victory. And in doing so, once again, cements himself as a supporter of Trump, saying, "This was Trump. Trump did this. Trump did this." He says, "I called up Trump, Trump loves Latter-day Saints, and he listened, and I'm so grateful, don't we love Trump?" And so he found this way to sort of even like, cut Hegseth out, and declare himself the winner of this.

LAUREN GILGER: It's an interesting political moment too, Tamarra, because, I mean, the relationship that LDS voters have had with Trump in particular over the last decade or so he's been in politics has been a little fraught. Like, I think most LDS voters are probably Trump voters today, so it's an interesting move from the DOD to sort of alienate them in this way. But they're certainly not all for Trump.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: It's been about a 60% split among Latter-day Saints for Trump, which is down from about 80% or 86% or 87% for previous GOP presidential nominees. So, definitely a majority, but not the outsized numbers that we saw previously.

And so, of course, it makes political sense for Trump to try and stem those losses, especially at a time where he is down overall in the polls. Now, I think for him, this just wasn't a big deal. Trump has not — has certainly seen opportunities to make inroads into the Christian community, the conservative Christian community, and to build up and sort of triumph, you know, play off of their cultural grievances.

However, it really seems like Hegseth is got more of a clear ideology. He attends this religious organization, this church that is run by this pastor, Doug Wilson, and they are, you know, arch-conservatives. And it's very different from even your mainstream evangelical church, which they would see as too liberal. So I think what you have here are different priorities about whether to make sort of theological stands or political savvy moves.

LAUREN GILGER Hmm, very interesting stuff. All right, we'll leave it there. Tamarra Kemsley, religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, joining us to talk about this controversy. Tamarra, thank you very much for coming back on The Show, I appreciate it.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Yeah, always fun.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It's The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, get ready for a road trip. We'll kick off our summer soapbox series.

Many of us have had the experience of lying in bed in the middle of the night trying desperately to fall asleep and not being able to. Now, researchers at the University of Arizona will be studying how being awake at that hour can impact our decision-making abilities. And spoiler alert, it's generally not in a good way. The five-year project will examine what's known as the Mind After Midnight hypothesis with a nearly $4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Michael Grandner is director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at U of A and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at Banner University Medical Center Tucson. He joins me to talk more about the research he and his colleagues will be doing. And Michael, let's start off with this Mind After Midnight hypothesis. What exactly is it?

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: : Yeah, the whole point is that when you're awake in the middle of the night, when your brain wants to be asleep and your body wants to be asleep, but you're not, even though you're awake, you're not really your best self. You're not in the place where you can make the best decisions, you're not processing information, ideas, ideally, you're not emotionally regulated in the right way. And it's not a sleep deprivation issue. And it's not just a circadian rhythm issue. It's a combination of a bunch of things where you could be fine during the day. It's just there's this vulnerable period in the middle of the night where we just, you know, we're idiots. We don't make good choices. We blow things out of proportion, we freak out about things we really shouldn't. And there's a science behind this.

MARK BRODIE Well, so I think it would maybe not be a surprise to any of us who have been lying awake at like 3:00 in the morning that maybe that's not when we're at our best selves. What are you hoping to learn about maybe why that is and why we're not maybe making the best decisions if it's not because we're just overtired?

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: Right, that's the thing. It's that our hypothesis is that there's a combination, there's like a perfect storm of bad decisions that are happening in the middle of the night because the the parts of your brain that are involved in emotional decision-making, for various reasons, might not be functioning properly during the night because of both the combination of wakefulness where the brain wanted sleep, but at the same time, you're in the the 24-hour circadian rhythm, the part of the day where the brain is not supposed to be processing that information, and so it's not efficient at doing so. And so our hypothesis is the types of decision-making, especially emotional decision-making, impulsivity, those sorts of functions are going to be worse in the middle of the night than they are during the day, even if you're not sleep-deprived. And that's what we're trying to look at. And in particular, we're looking at the emotional piece because the motivation for this study, the reason we were able to make a case that this was critical to fund, was because we discovered a bunch of years ago, um, you know, little almost 10 years ago now, that suicide spikes in the middle of the night, about four times higher than you would expect by chance alone. That it's much more likely to occur in the middle of the night than during the day. And we were trying to figure out the reasons why. And wherever we look in the population, not only do we see this, we also see that it's tied to all kinds of things that are unhealthy choices. I mean, similarly, nobody craves a salad at 2:00 in the morning either. I think that And our hypothesis is that this is all connected. It's all connected to this same system, but the fact that suicide is a major public health problem, and the solutions we have are just not good enough, we came up with an idea that says, look, this is happening in the middle of the night, let's understand what is special about the middle of the night that's leading to this vulnerability that we can then help address it later.

MARK BRODIE Well, I wonder then, when you talk about addressing it later on, like would that do you envision that as being helping people to actually fall asleep? Or is it maybe more a matter of if somebody is going to be lying awake or, you know, sitting on the couch awake at at 3:00 in the morning, to help them sort of regulate their emotional thinking so that they don't make a poor choice?

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: All of the above. Yeah, that's the idea. So the way this works is before we can target something, we have to know where to aim. And that's the point. The study we're doing now is all about where should we aim our potential solutions?

MARK BRODIE Right. Is it possible that there's sort of a a vicious cycle going on where people who are not able to sleep and sort of, you know, you often hear, you know, "my brain is too active, you know, I have I'm making lists in my head," or, "I just can't relax, I can't rest my brain." Is there possibly a correlation between, you know, some of these emotional decision-making regulations that that you think are causing problems here, and the fact that some of these folks can't actually fall asleep?

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: That's actually where all this started. It started in thinking about insomnia. I mean, it widened to it might be more than then insomnia, but it started about insomnia. So why is it that, I mean, if you go back decades, what you will find is, this is where it started with suicide risk where what you find is people with insomnia have a tripled risk of not only thinking about suicide, but actually taking action on it. And we were alarmed as researchers. We were the there's a group of us who were alarmed by this, and we wanted to get creative and think about what are we missing? How do we better answer this question? And which led to this hypothesis, and I got to give credit to Dr. Michael Perlis at the University of Pennsylvania, where this was originally his idea, and he's a collaborator on this project, too. But he had this idea of, what if it's just bad to be awake when your reason sleeps, your ability to reason through things is still asleep? What if that's part of the problem? That, like you said, some people have insomnia and that insomnia leads them to be awake in this it puts them in a bad place at a bad time. Once they're there, that's where some of the risk is. Now, in people who have insomnia, we have good solutions already, but it's not enough because some people still wake up in the middle of the night and there's nothing you can do about it. Some people still are working shifts, some people, you know, will experience this even occasionally, and then what do we need to do to fix that?

MARK BRODIE So in the study, are you mostly looking to have participants who have insomnia? Are you looking for folks who are occasionally can't fall asleep or wake up in the middle of the night and can't can't get back to sleep, like what what do you imagine the participant sort of ratio to be there?

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: Yeah, that's an excellent question because the answer is a little counterintuitive. We're not specifically looking for people with sleep problems. We want people when they come into the lab, we want them, you know, the first night in the lab, they're actually we they actually get a full night of sleep. We want them to be relatively well-rested the next day when they do some of these tasks. We don't want them to be super tired. And we want them to be able to sleep at night. And so we're we're looking for people who could sleep fine, but they when, you know, when you wake up, maybe you're not your best self. We think this is actually a normal process. You don't have to have insomnia to be awake during the night and have it affect you. You know, you could be someone who sleeps great every night, but then, I don't know, the dog starts barking and it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and then maybe you have trouble getting back to sleep, and then you start thinking there are worrying. Like, this could happen to anybody. We're actually looking for mostly just people who are interested in this. It turns out that the people who are the most interested are some of the ones who are struggling with some of this, um, and so some of those people would qualify, but some of those people actually they actually need to get their sleep problem treated before they can come in because we want to study what happens in sort of a normal situation.

MARK BRODIE All right, we'll have to leave it there. That is DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: , director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona. Michael, thanks so much, I really appreciate it.

DR. MICHAEL GRANDNER: Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you.

MARK BRODIE Few things say summer more than the ubiquitous road trip. Whether you're headed across the country or across town, a hopefully air-conditioned getaway can be the best, or the worst. For Phoenix writer Nina Newell, a long-ago childhood family road trip offered a lesson she'll never forget: you can never truly leave home. Here's the first in our latest collection of soapbox essays.

NINA NEWELL: Summer, 1979. This kid in my class, Trevor, said our family's never going to be real Americans. My 12-year-old brother spoke for the first time since we left Portland hours ago. "What? Where are we?" I moved my sleeping 5-year-old sister off my lap and looked out the car window. Not a glimmer of blue in the sky. We're still stuck in Oregon then, not yet in sunny California. A glance at the speedometer told me we're only doing 15 over the speed limit. A former taxi driver in Saigon, my father always drove as if he were an epileptic rabbit with a lead foot. Next to him, hugging a gigantic plaid blanket, my mother was snoring, loud enough that I knew my father couldn't hear us kids in the back seat. "Fuck Trevor." At 15, I recently discovered the delicious thrill of cursing in English. I faced my brother. "Cuz we're Asians?" "No, cuz we don't eat like them," he said. I shrugged. "We chew, they chew, we swallow, they swallow, we crap, they—" "I meant," he interrupted, "we don't eat hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries." "Trevor's an idiot. Can't use chopsticks with those." I joked and reminded myself to forge my mother's signature on the lunch form at his new school in California. Poor kid would be beaten up the rest of his life if he brings sticky rice and stinky stew to the first day of middle school. His voice turned anxious. "You think they're after us?" I peered at the back window. No flashing lights or sirens. "Relax, kid. No cops." "Not the cops," he whispered, "the Viet Cong." I stared at him with a little pity and a lot of exasperation. He was eight when we escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat. You'd think by now he'd have gotten over that childish fear of the bogeyman Viet Cong is coming to get you. I was tempted to soothe him with our family's usual mantra, "Jesus Christ will always protect us." But my atheist throat couldn't get the words out. Instead, I said, "Don't worry, Vietnam can't claim us no more. We have our green cards. We're almost full Americans." He didn't seem reassured, but my father was pulling into a parking lot. A McDonald's parking lot. Mouths opened, my brother and I looked at each other. We had never, ever set foot in the temple of the Golden Arches. "I need coffee," my father said and nudged my mother awake. "Lunch break." "Can I have French fries?" my sister certainly woke up. My mother nodded and said, "Wash your hands." Long minutes later, hands scrubbed clean, my sister and I left the restroom and eagerly approached the table where our family sat. A glimpse of my brother's tight, red face and my feet slowed. My gaze lowered to the table. Two cups of coffee, one small bag of fries, and one gigantic plaid blanket nestling a pot of sticky rice and stewed boiled eggs next to a bundle of chopsticks. My heart dropped. "Fuck Trevor, we're never going to be real Americans."

MARK BRODIE: That was Phoenix writer Nina Newell. All summer, we'll be bringing you true stories from the road. To hear more soapbox essays and learn how you might be able to get on the air with your own story, visit kjzz.org.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show's podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.