Arizona Gov. Hobbs late last week signed into law a bill to provide funding for the rest of the fiscal year to a program that helps residents with developmental disabilities.
This had turned into a big political fight at the capitol, with GOP lawmakers accusing the governor’s office of financial mismanagement and the governor threatening to veto any bills until she got a compromise resolution to the issue.
The episode has led Bob Robb, a longtime observer of Arizona government and politics, to bemoan what he’s calling "the sorry state of state government politics."
Robb writes a Substack about it and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
ROBERT ROBB: It’s about the politics, not the substance. It’s as Casey Stengel said with respect to the 1962 Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
You begin with an obvious omission by the governor. It was known in advance that one element of the developmental disability program was going to be subject to a federal matching fund. It was a new program. Federal government picked up all the cost for most of it.
It was known that it was going to run out and that Arizona was going to have to come up with a cost-sharing component, but it wasn’t budgeted for.
Then, rather than focusing on solving the problem, the Republicans in the Legislature decided to make a big deal out of fiscal mismanagement by the Hobbs administration — ignoring the fact that as architects of the school voucher program, they were actually far more guilty underestimating participation in and the cost of a major state program.
MARK BRODIE: A point that the Hobbs administration has made.
ROBB: It has made. But, you know, shame on both their houses. Both reveal a lack of fiscal management, but trying to make that political point against the governor in that context just wasn’t going to do you much, politically. And then they accentuated that when it became obvious that their proposed reform wasn't going to have the votes to pass.
Rather than accept that reality — and here we’ve got time running out, money’s going to run out May 1 — they stack the Appropriations Committee with three new members in order to bang out of that particular committee this cap that wasn’t going to be able to be passed on the floor.
And so what’s the political point of that? All you’ve done is to demonstrate a degree of mean spiritedness in terms of the politics of the issue, to accomplish nothing.
BRODIE: Why do you think it is that it all went down the way it did?
ROBB: I think there’s nobody there who knows how to play this game anymore. It’s a little of an unfair criticism of Hobbs. I think it’s probable that she doesn’t have anywhere near the political skills of two Democratic predecessors who had very successful administrations even though they had Republican controlled Legislatures: Bruce Babbitt and Janet Napolitano.
But it’s also true that she’s dealing with a MAGA-fied Republican Legislature that doesn’t have the same commitment to governance that the traditional Republicans, that Babbitt and Napolitano dealt with. That’s illustrated by what they’ve done with her appointments to fulfill her Cabinet.
BRODIE: So going back to the Babbitt and the Napolitano administrations, as you point out, they both had Republican-majority Legislatures. I remember the Napolitano administration. I don’t remember the Babbitt administration; I wasn’t here for that. But I would imagine that both of those had their fair share of political gamesmanship, right?
ROBB: Oh, absolutely. Political gamesmanship was part of the game, and that’s part of playing the game. But as I said in those days, there was a greater interest in, at the end of the day, good governance that created a bridge.
The Babbitt administration was incredibly productive. We had the Groundwater Management Act. We heard we had the Urban Lands Act to create orderly development on state lands near the urban footprint. Arizona joined the Medicaid program. The authorizing legislation for a half-cent sales tax in Maricopa County to finally build a freeway system was passed. So you have a remarkable period of productive government.
Napolitano’s gains were more ephemeral but perhaps more politically instructive, either consciously or by default, sort of the operating agreement, the way to get to good government, governance, was to do what both sides thought were most important. So Napolitano got substantial increases in university, in K-12 funding, including state paid all-day kindergarten. And, the Republicans got tax cuts, and an expansion of school choice. If you look at the current Legislature-governor relationship, the largest thing that they’ve done is to squander a $2.5 billion surplus on pork barrel spending.
BRODIE: So to you, are these more ideological differences now than what we’ve seen in the past? Is it personality based? Is it relationship based? Like, what do you think is different now than what we’ve seen in the past?
ROBB: I think the largest change is the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party and scoring political points against the Democrats, well over and above interest in actually governing. Hobbs, I don’t think, has played the hand that she’s been dealt particularly well. But on the other hand, it’s kind of hard to contemplate what she could have done differently that would have produced a better result.
BRODIE: At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that at the end of the day, they did come up with an agreement that was largely a compromise, right? Like, the governor got some of what she wanted, the Republicans in the Legislature got some of what they wanted and both sides had stuff that they liked and disliked in that bill. So, in that sense, does that maybe give you hope that maybe this is more like the Napolitano-Babbitt model than what we’ve seen over the last couple of years?
ROBB: No, it strikes me as the exception that proves the rule. I think it was the publicly empathetic constituency at stake and a hard deadline of running out of money that created that dynamic. There’s not that much distance between Republicans and Democrats on the two big issues confronting the state, water and housing. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be any political path forward to doing anything about those.
We had a sufficient surplus that could have tided the state over, a couple tight revenue years, that were completely squandered because they couldn’t come up with any other approach to developing a state budget and not shutting down state government. We’re now in a very dicey situation, with respect to the state budget, because of the large question mark over what the economy is going to do. And, at least to even a fairly observant outside figure, not much substantively going on down there to try to figure out a path forward.
