AZ Policy Wonk

A new poll was released today (Aug. 31), and the results don’t bode well for Gov. Jan Brewer’s chances for election to a full term. It also looks bad for the Arizona Legislature.

Apparently, voters are fed up with Brewer and state lawmakers – Brewer especially. Only 18 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Brewer, while 46 percent said they would vote for “someone else.” Thirty-six percent said they were undecided.

It appears Brewer will have to change a lot of people’s minds between now and next fall if she wants to retain the Ninth Floor. Even among Republicans, Brewer didn’t fare well; only 23 percent of GOP voters said they would vote for her, indicating she will have considerable difficulty in a primary election.

Granted, Brewer has only said she is leaning toward running for a full term. But that’s as definitive as she’s been so far. Until last week, her plans for next year were even murkier.

Her proposed sales tax increase did much better than she did, however, with 49 percent saying they approve of the plan. Forty-three percent said they disapprove, which leaves 8 percent on the fence. Democrats were largely in favor of the sales tax increase.

Perhaps more importantly, 57 percent of the respondents said the state is on the wrong track. Only 18 percent thought the state is headed in the right direction.

The Legislature also received poor marks. Sixty-one percent said lawmakers’ performance was not to their liking. Twenty percent said the Legislature was doing a good job.

The top concerns among those polled were public education funding, followed by illegal immigration and the state budget. University funding, the environment and transportation were among the least of their concerns.

The poll was commissioned by Wil Cardon of the real estate firm The Cardon Group, and was publicized by Rose and Allyn Public Relations. The Phoenix-based Summit Group surveyed 602 “high-efficacy Arizona voters” on Aug. 20-25. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Forty percent of the respondents were Republicans, 33 percent were Democrats and the rest were independent or unaffiliated.

It’s notable that the media release that accompanied the poll results noted that Mr. Cardon has been named as a potential candidate for governor, treasurer and Arizona Republican Party Chairman. Sounds like someone is trying to instigate a revolt.

To view the results of the survey, go to

http://azcapitoltimes.com/wp-files/pdfs/statewide-issues-poll.pdf

It’s extremely unlikely that Gov. Jan Brewer will sign all of the budget bills that the Legislature sent to her Aug. 20. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing this budget to stand.

After pushing for a sales tax increase for months and vetoing a budget that didn’t include a ballot referral for the increase, Brewer has already run cross-wise with many Republicans who she would be counting on if she decides to seek a full term in 2010. Backing down now would only make her look wishy-washy.

In fact, if she signs the whole package, people would wonder why she put the state through so much trauma by vetoing a budget, which is very similar to the one on her desk now, back on July 1.

What do I mean by trauma? Well, there are plenty of examples. For instance, lawmakers have been tied up in knots for almost two months in a special session to address her concerns over the first set of bills, the state is teetering on the brink of insolvency, state cash tied up in investments has been yanked to cover operating expenses, and Treasurer Dean Martin has been crowing about the very likely possibility that the state will have to borrow money from the private sector (including interest upon repayment) to make up for the lack of a spending plan.

Not only that, but she may have irreparably damaged her image and her chances of being elected next year by continuing to fight with the very Republicans who heralded her ascension to the Ninth Floor.

If she was going to back off her sales tax increase, now would not be the ideal time. She would be seen as having a lack of resolve – voters aren’t real keen on state officials who get beat into submission by their rivals. And fiscal conservatives aren’t about to forgive her for months of pushing for a sales tax increase.

Ideology aside, she has to continue to demand a tax increase. If not the sales tax referral, then something else that would allow her to save face.

She can’t do that if she signs the budget bills as they stand now. Therefore, she is likely to sign the ones that aren’t too controversial – H2014 already has been signed, and others might follow – but veto everything that lawmakers hold dear until they give her what she wants. The repeal of the equalization property tax is one of those bills that might be held hostage while she presses for a tax increase, but it’s not the only one.

She needs leverage. Period.

Let’s say Brewer really doesn’t care about her own political future, and that she is telling the truth when she says she’s trying to do what’s best for the state. Even under that scenario, she would have no incentive to back down now – after all, if she believes the state needs a sales tax increase, then allowing a budget to pass without one would, following her own logic, present even more problems for the state.

If she believes that, then she will have to keep on keeping on.

Bottom line: This mess is probably going to continue for another week or so. At least.

Incidentally, Arizona is one of three states without a fiscal 2010 budget. Connecticut and Pennsylvania are the other two. Even California, which some people see as the poster child of bad fiscal management, was able to pass something.

I’ve already postponed my vacation plans until the end of September. At this rate, perhaps I should just cancel them altogether.

The following question was raised by an astute reader who commented on a Capitol Times story earlier today: Can the Legislature vote on a budget this Saturday, June 27, considering measures must be read in chamber three times and on different days?

The short answer is “yes,” but it deserves further explanation.

The background is that the Legislature technically read the bills for the first time when they introduced “trailer bills” on Thursday. The trailer bills are simply vehicles on which to place budget language when the final agreement has been hashed out.

That means, since lawmakers gave the bills a second formal introduction on Friday afternoon, they’re all set to third-read and vote on the measures on Saturday.

The Legislature also could avoid the pesky requirement to read bills on three seperate days before a vote by suspending rules, which the commentor brought up as a possibility. But suspending rules would require a supermajority vote in the House (the commentor also brought this up, and is totally right on), which might be difficult in this political climate.

So, they could feasibly vote on the bills Saturday. But there’s a lot of room between “could” and “will.”

Myriad Republican lawmakers attended this morning’s Arizona Supreme Court hearing in the legal challenge that pits Gov. Jan Brewer against top Republicans in the Legislature. The hearing lasted about an hour, with both sides given 30 minutes to present their arguments to the five state Supreme Court justices.

Republicans in the gallery included: Sen. Chuck Gray, Sen. Russell Pearce, Rep. John Kavanagh, Sen. Jack Harper, Senate President Bob Burns, Rep. Doug Quelland and House Speaker Kirk Adams. There were too many Republican lawmakers to name, actually, but few, if any, Democrats.

Capitol Times reporters Christian Palmer and Jeremy Duda were there to scrounge some news for the paper, and came back with a few quick highlights.

Here’s the skinny: 

The justices cut short attorneys arguments about the political battle behind the legal challenge that has pitted Brewer against top Republican lawmakers. They instead sought answers about why they should accept Brewer’s petition for special action, asking for an explanation for how Brewer would be harmed if the court refused to accept the case.

Justice Andrew Hurwitz surmised that a veto of the budget was in the future, anyway, otherwise the case wouldn’t have been brought up.

Brewer’s attorney Joe Kanefield said Brewer’s intentions regarding the budget measures shouldn’t figure into the legal analysis. Most importantly, he said, the Legislature should submit the bills to Brewer in order to allow her the proper time to review and act on the bills. Holding off could lead to a shutdown of government services.

Justices sought Kanefield’s input on whether the governor wants an immediate order to leadership to submit the bills or some sort of an established test to determine what constitutes a “reasonable time” for bills to be turned over.

Kanefield said the goal is an immediate order stating that the nature of the bills, considering they are appropriations bills, demanded action. “It is different and deserving of special treatment,” he said.

The attorney representing the Legislature, David Cantelme, claimed the governor wanted the bills transfered simply to gain a political advantage – but he was interrupted by Justice Scott Bales, who asked “Isn’t that why the Legislature is holding them?”

Cantelme said there’s still time for the Legislature to vote to suspend its rules to rescind or reconsider the budget bills. “Any member of the Senate could upset the apple cart if they could command 16 votes.”

The timing of transferring bills to the governor is strictly the prerogative of the Legislature, Cantelme argued.

The justices gave no indication of whether they will accept jurisdiction of the case. It’s unclear when the court will announce its intentions.

Nobody likes working ’round the clock. And nobody will say publicly that it’s a good idea to pass a budget at 4 a.m.

But it happens. And I get why it happens – sort of, at least.

Lawmakers have put in a lot of hours trying to get their minds around a huge, complex budget problem. They spent months working toward a consensus. They held hearings, grilled department heads, conferred with tax experts, etc. Then they pressed on toward an agreement that attempts to fill a $3.2 billion deficit and, in the meantime, everyone was trying to understand how to best position the state regarding the receipt and use of federal stimulus money.

There were substantial reasons that led to the delay so far in terms of coming to a budget agreement. Big deficit. Serious disagreements over taxes. And Election Day 2010.

For the first five months of session, the Senate wasn’t making any progress on non-budget bills, but at least I sort of understood the order of things, the logic in it all. The budget was a huge, hairy beast that needed to be a priority – and for some, it made sense to make it their sole priority.

But during the last week in May, something changed; there was an urgency among lawmakers to pass a budget quickly. A few days later, on June 1, Gov. Jan Brewer finally offered her competing budget plan, and it became clear why the hurry. But the reasons for the rush, however obvious, became less logical and started to seem more like the politics Arizonans have seen in the past several years of state budget negotiations. Only this time, it wasn’t a Democratic governor keeping legislative Republicans at bay – it was the GOP’s own governor.

The result of that confrontation was the passage of a legislative budget only three days after Brewer’s was released. It went quickly, after months of slow-pacing the process. So quickly, in fact, that lawmakers worked from Wednesday morning on June 3 until Thursday morning on June 4 to pass a budget that almost nobody really thought was the best plan for the state.

What was once a deliberate process sped up considerably, perhaps too quickly. Many lawmakers don’t like the budget they voted for, but legislative leaders were trying to send a message to Brewer that they weren’t going to do it her way. And they needed to show that they had enough like-minded colleagues in tow.

Through all of this, though, one negative side-effect has emerged: It’s not good for the state, its residents or democracy in general when lawmakers hold the first floor debate and vote on the fiscal 2010 budget in the middle of the night.

What gets lost is openness in government, public participation and the idea that scrutiny and criticism from all sides makes for better policy. Those virtues go out the window when 10 budget bills are voted upon at 4 a.m. while residents sleep, after most Democrat lawmakers have gone home and in front of a diminished Capitol press corps.

I get that there was only a month left to finish budget work before the fiscal deadline. Lawmakers had to pull the trigger at some point. But now, here we are, a week later, and we’re stalemated with all three branches of government involved.

Here’s a novel concept: Maybe the negotiations should have been handled ahead of time, rather than the governor’s release of a budget that she knew lawmakers wouldn’t like, the Legislature’s decision to pass a budget in the dead of night that they could have guessed the governor wouldn’t sign and the ensuing legal battle that has now involved the state Supreme Court. 

There is a risk to the process of democratic government when issues that will affect millions of Arizonans are debated and decided in the dead of night and in front of a half-full chamber of lawmakers. And now the whole process is going to get murkier to most voters, now that the court has a chance to weigh in.

This isn’t exactly the kind of government transparency that I, for one, had in mind when the session started.