Friday is the last day for lawmakers to hear bills in committees in their chambers of origin: House bills in House committees and Senate bills in Senate committees.
And that means some of those panels this week will be working through pretty long agendas.
Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services joined The Show to talk about what to expect this week at the state Capitol.
Full conversation
HOWARD FISCHER: I'd be willing to bet that even though, theoretically, according to the legislative calendar, this is the last week for each chamber to hear bills and its own committees, that there will be more next week. The sheer number of bills that they have kind of says that's not going to happen.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah. OK, so let's talk about a few that will be heard this week. And one of them is dealing with the initiative process. Lawmakers over the years have changed the rules for groups of voters to put issues on the ballot. What are some of the changes that they're considering this time around?
FISCHER: Well, we start off with the premise that lawmakers, particularly those in the Republican Party, and particularly the people who put them in office, usually the business community, don't like people making their own laws. I mean, you know, if you're not going through the Legislature and not providing campaign contributions, how dare these people.
So that's how we got, for example, minimum wage. That's how we got medical marijuana. That's how we got recreational marijuana and a whole bunch of other things. That's how we got the Heritage Fund. So over the years, as you point out, there have been efforts to kind of curtail that. Some of it they would have to take back to voters.
For example, a couple of years ago, they said, normally you require 10% of signatures ... last governor's race statewide, and they want to say it's got to be 10% from each of the 15 counties. And voters said, I don't think so. And they rejected it by a wide margin. This year, they're back with something a little different that doesn't require to go to the voters.
This year it says that if you are a paid circulator, and you already have to disclose that, now you have to wear a badge with your name on it and saying what state you're from, under the presumption that people say you're from New York, oh, my God, we would never sign anything. You know, failing to recognize that paid circulars have become part of the issue, since it takes perhaps 500,000 signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Now, the future of that, I'd say there may be the votes in the Republican-controlled Legislature for that. Again, it doesn't go to the voters, and it'll be up to folks to decide: Are you willing to reelect folks who have made it harder for you to make your own laws?
BRODIE: Right. Howie, let me ask you about a bill that would set aside a pretty decent chunk of change to reimburse counties and cities that put up border fences in areas that have high crossings for illegal immigrants.
FISCHER: Yeah. This is interesting because of the fact that as we all know from watching the news, border crossings are way down, both in terms of human smuggling and drug smuggling. In fact, the new drug smuggling thing has been the drones, as we saw over the weekend, with the question of whether they're trying to shoot them down with lasers over El Paso.
And yet this seems to be a very political purpose behind this. I don't doubt that there are areas somewhere along the border, perhaps down in rural sections of Cochise County, that you might have crossings, but again, they've been down to virtually zero. So I can't help but believe that this is more of a political thing to somehow get money to counties and to county sheriff's departments to go ahead and say, look, we want to do more enforcement.
And it's a very popular issue. You know, secure the border.
BRODIE: Of course.
FISCHER: I mean, even Katie Hobbs is saying, look, I'm voting to secure the border. I'm working to secure the border. So I think this is more eyewash than anything else, given, again, look at how much fence has gone up even with the federal government. And in fact, as Trump just signed some legislation to go ahead and repurpose some steel that wasn't used the last time.
BRODIE: Howie, safe to say, though, that since this is a money bill, that even if the bill passes, it would have to be worked into the budget later this session.
FISCHER: Oh, definitely. I mean, anything with money on it doesn't go anywhere until the budget is approved. Then you have to decide, well, what are the priorities? Well, first of all, we haven't even decided what tax breaks we're giving. Is it going to be $250 million a year? Is it going to be $440 million a year?
And what money is coming in, as we've talked about, you know, the budget, but the governor has, is built on $760 million coming from the federal government to reimburse us for the last stuff we did, including that Ersat's border wall that Doug Ducey put up using storage containers. There's also some other things in there about, you know, we're going to curb vouchers, which, again, hasn't gone anywhere but the governor's budgeted $80 million for that.
So you're right. We have to figure out how much we're willing to spend and how much we're willing to save for tax cuts. And that's going to be a real hard one for some of the Republicans to say, OK, we're going to not do $20 million in certain kinds of tax cuts because we want to give some money for border walls.
BRODIE: Yeah. Howie, speaking of the proposal to ask voters whether or not they should approve a plan to basically say if the Legislature and the governor do not come up with a budget by the end of April, those folks don't get paid.
FISCHER: Well, as somebody who's been covering the legislature into June and sometimes July, I'd say it's got my vote. There are a lot of reasons it has and doesn't get done by April 30. Part of it has been the volatility of the economy. And it makes a lot of sense to say, you know, you really need to have something done by a certain date and get the heck out of Dodge.
That just hasn't happened, you know, since, since the 1980s. And, and a lot of it is, a lot of freshman lawmakers say, but I have another bill I need to heard, which is part of, you know, we probably say, I don't think we're done with, with bill hearings quite yet. There's some interesting problems with this.
For example, it says not only do legislators not get paid, but the governor doesn't get paid. OK, well, the governor's part of it, but also says the secretary of state doesn't get paid or the school superintendent doesn't get paid. Why? How is it their fault that there is no state budget? And yet there's a curious flaw in the law.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that as of this election, we're going to have a lieutenant governor. There's nowhere in the bill that says the lieutenant governor doesn't get paid. So that might be the best job in the state if in fact, this thing passes, because lieutenant governor is going to be the only one saying, hey, I'm being paid. I don't care.
BRODIE: And somebody somewhere is now furiously drafting an amendment to this proposal, I would assume, right?
FISCHER: Oh, definitely. I think that if it gets out in the form that it's in, somebody's gonna say, excuse me.
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