Monday marks the beginning of crossover week at the Arizona Capitol, when the House starts in earnest sending its bills across the mall to the Senate and vice versa.
That means lawmakers will have long agendas and lots of bills to vote on in the coming days.
Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services joined the The Show with a look-ahead to the next several days.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So let's talk about briefly the sort of the importance of crossover week. I guess a lot of bills that, you know, folks, lawmakers had hoped to keep moving at the end of last week are no longer moving.
HOWARD FISCHER: Well, some of them are not. You know, remember that there were like over 1,100 bills introduced in the House. I think there were 800 in the Senate, even though there were half as many members there. And there's a certain process where things get kind of, you know, filtered and things that don't get heard, things that die in committee.
What's happening now is now the full House and the full Senate are getting a look at these things and deciding Do we really want to move these things forward? At this point, most things sponsored by Republicans will move forward, even if there are flaws in it. The usual attitude is, well, we'll fix it when it goes to the Senate, or something like that.
... But it is a filtering process of sorts. It does give people a chance to find out a little bit more about the bills. They get to ask questions of the sponsors. That doesn't always mean the sponsors will answer the questions — because that isn't the requirement. But again, it is a chance to go ahead and figure what are the priorities going to be? How many bills they're going to try to get through the process? How many they're going to send to the governor?
And perhaps more of the point, how many of these are the governor going to veto? I mean, you know, so far this year she has vetoed 11 and signed only three. So at the rate we're going, I'd say we're headed for yet another record.
BRODIE: Yeah. OK. So, one of the bills that the Senate will be debating this week would expand the list of impeachable offenses for the governor and other folks. What else do they want to be able to impeach governors and judges and other statewide elected officers for?
FISCHER: Well, the current constitutional requirements talk about things like high crimes and misdemeanors, things like that. This would say: We can impeach somebody if they fail to follow or enforce a state law or a court ruling. Now, that's sort of a nebulous kind of thing because, you know, does somebody, somebody violated the law? Well, give me three attorneys. I'll give you seven opinions as to whether that law has been violated. Same thing with court rulings.
But this the brainchild of Sen. Wendy Rogers, who one of the more conservative lawmakers down there. And she contends that the governor is ignoring the law, the attorney general is ignoring the law, the judges are ignoring the law. And this would provide an avenue for lawmakers to go ahead and do an impeachment.
Now, remember, it simply takes a majority of the House to file bills of impeachment and do the impeachment. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to actually convict someone and remove them from office. I'd say that that's a virtual impossibility. So I'm not sure what you accomplish here other than perhaps having something that you can hold over the head of the governor saying, "If you don't do this, we will impeach you."
I mean, this isn't sort of like what happened in Washington with Clinton and then with Trump, where they were trying to score, I think, political points. And again, as we saw in Washington, ultimately, all of that went nowhere.
BRODIE: Yeah. So, Howie, there is a bill going through the House Appropriations Committee this week — today, actually — that requires schools to spend 60% of their money on teacher salaries. And there's punishment for those that don't.
FISCHER: Exactly. There's been a report prepared now by the Auditor General's Office now for over two decades, and they separated out into instructional stuff, which is teacher salaries and things like that, and fringe benefits, administrative, certain support services like librarians, transportation, utilities. And the argument has been we really need 60% spent on teacher salaries, which is a nice goal.
The problem has been also that the auditor general says we've actually been going in the wrong direction. Some of that is that we actually have fewer kids in schools. Yet you still have certain fixed costs. And so this is designed to say: If you do not hit 60%, tell you what, we're going to give you a few years to take a half a percent a year to try to get there. If you don't get there, we're going to withhold state aid.
Now, I'm not sure how withholding state aid from a district that's having problems, problems getting teacher salaries up solves the problem. But again, it's designed to shed light on the problem. One of the problems, of course ... and I know I keep using the word problem, but that's so much of what happens here is that way — is that there are things that you cannot change.
I mean, you've got a rural district, you have large transportation costs. ... If you have a district that's in Flagstaff, you have heating costs. A district down here has cooling costs.
And so you come into some questions of while the teacher salaries have been increasing, nobody doubts salaries have been going up. But as a percentage of the whole, which is the way they choose to measure it, they haven't kept pace with everything else.
One other important thing to point out is that when you compare administrative costs, pure administrative costs in Arizona overall with other states, we're actually below the average of other states. But that doesn't seem to be impressing anybody.
BRODIE: Howie, one more bill I want to ask you about is coming up for a vote in the House this week, and it would require that parents who use their kids in videos, presumably on social media or YouTube or something like that, who make money off of those videos, would have to set aside some percentage of the money for the kids when they turn 18.
FISCHER: Yep. No more freelancing off your kids. No more, you know, getting that new washer dryer paid for by the kids. This is actually modeled after a national thing called Coogan's Law, which is named after a child actor named Jackie Coogan, whose parents spent all of his money and basically left him destitute.
This says that if your kid is appearing in 30% of your videos, you know, because they're doing something cute — "Aw, that's nice. Let's get clicks on that." Or they'll show him opening up boxes, let's say, of Hasbro toys, and Hasbro will then pay money to have that out there, that you can't just spend it on yourself. You know, the true star of this is the child. And so they need to set aside at least 50% of the money for the child when he or she turns 18 and ensure that they're actually benefiting from their own efforts, their own talents.
I mean, I recognize a 3-year-old may not recognize, "Oh, this is work." But it is. And so there's nothing wrong. The lawmakers are saying, and I think it's been proved unanimously at this point, that, yes, it's only fair that the kids share in this. Now, you theoretically could go to a judge and say, "Well, your honor, we have some special expenses here." And judge might be able to excuse it, but in general, those dollars would be inviolate.
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