The election that will have the most impact on the flow of legislation at the state Capitol won’t be closely watched by anyone but the most politically connected, even though the outcome will set the tone for the next two years of legislative action.
The under-the-radar status of that election can be attributed to the secrecy of the proceedings: Arizona voters don’t participate in the campaigns, nor do they cast votes. But that doesn’t make the job of choosing who will lead the House of Representatives any less important, said one lobbyist.
“I would propose that the representatives I elect, the most important vote that they make will be that first vote they make, before the session even begins, when they vote for the speaker,” said Mitch Menlove, a lobbyist for Greenberg Traurig.
Paul Senseman, who was a chief of staff to former House Speaker Jake Flake before joining Policy Development Group as a lobbyist, said the importance of the speaker is unquestionable.
“It’s absolutely the most critical position of all for House members,” he said. “The speaker not only sets the timetable for how the trains operate, he also drives the policy.”
While the policy goals of the majority caucus – since 1967, the Republicans have held a majority in the House – are determined by a vote of the caucus members, it is the speaker who ultimately puts the plans into action. The speaker is tasked to assign members to committees, to determine how many committees there will be and what issues they will oversee.
The policy desires also are forwarded by the appointment of committee chairs, who can fast-track important bills or kill legislation by not allowing it to be heard.
The speaker also assigns to a committee every bill that is filed. Legislation important to the caucus can be assigned to a friendly committee, while bills that offend the sensibilities of either the speaker or the majority caucus are often given the kiss of death by being assigned to three different committees, virtually assuring they won’t advance to the floor.
The top post in the chamber has grown more important in recent years, veteran political observers said, as the power within the House has become concentrated in the speaker’s second-floor office.
“What I’ve noticed over the years is that the power has gotten gradually more centralized,” said Menlove, who has more than a decade of experience at the Capitol.
That phenomenon of power consolidation, Senseman said, has largely occurred because the state’s budget has become more of a contentious issue in recent years, no doubt due to massive surpluses and gigantic deficits, coupled with the inherent conflict between a Republican Legislature and a Democrat governor.
“The issue du jour has become the budget. The responsibility (given to) leadership…has increased because they have been appointed to negotiate with the governor,” he said.
With all that is at stake, the selection of a speaker has an immediate and tangible effect.
“It starts to have a ripple effect (on the entire chamber) right at the top,” said Senseman. “Right from the beginning, it can make a difference.”
Aside from the political decisions facing the speaker, the selection sets the tone for the upcoming term. It may be something as simple as the speaker’s level of organization or a commitment to starting legislative proceedings on time, said Menlove.
“Each speaker or Senate president brings a certain style or culture with them that impacts the body,” he said.
The speaker is chosen by the majority caucus and represents the entire chamber.
Leadership elections for both caucuses are held within days of the November general election. The organizational caucus meetings are conducted behind closed doors; what happens and what is said in the meetings is not discussed openly.
When the two House caucuses hold their elections in about two months, both Republicans and Democrats will have to decide whether to keep the current leaders or install new administrations.
Two bruising budget years
The last two years have been disastrous for House Republicans. Both years were marked by the passage of budgets that didn’t reflect GOP priorities, as well as policy defeats on several key issues. With the exception of the landmark employer sanctions legislation signed into law in 2007, Republicans don’t have a host of accomplishments on which to hang their hats.
That ineffectiveness is a sign that the Republican majority in the House has been weakened and needs to be re-established, said Mesa Republican Kirk Adams, who is challenging current Speaker Jim Weiers for the top spot in the chamber.
“We need to reform the way we work in the House, not just for the sake of the Republican majority, but for the sake of the state,” Adams said.
To reverse the course that has seen Democratic budgets two years in a row, he is proposing placing policy above politics, decentralizing power from the speaker’s office and utilizing the resources within the caucus. Relying on the status quo, he said, won’t make the Republican-controlled House a co-equal branch of government.
Underlining how grave he believes the situation to be, Adams is presenting his ideas to the caucus not in a letter – the traditional way lawmakers announce their candidacies for leadership posts – but in a professionally designed, 14-page color booklet outlining his platform.
“I guess you could say this is a business plan for reforming the House. I wanted to put (together) a vision of what the House could be,” he said. “This is designed to get the caucus discussing the type of institution they want to work at and the kind of success they want to have.”
The cornerstone of his platform, Adams said, was creating a bottom-up approach to leadership that diffuses the power the speaker has assumed in recent years and returns it to other members of leadership and the chairmen.
“It’s kind of odd to be running for the speaker position and be calling for less power, but I think that’s better for the institution in the long term,” he said.
Adams also wants to see Republicans focus their energies on the creation of good policy, not politics. Doing so would allow Republicans to be less reactionary and would result in political victories, he said, pointing to the CPS legislation he helped spearhead last year that was signed into law, despite continuous opposition from the Governor’s Office.
“Once we got the policy right, the politics followed naturally,” he said.
Goal: Diffuse speaker’s power
Ultimately, House Republicans seeking a change in the way the chamber operates might be split between Adams and Steve Yarbrough, who is running on a platform that parallels Adams’ in many places.
“The similarities between what we have in mind are clearly very substantial,” Yarbrough said.
Both men want to diffuse the power held by Weiers and increase the responsibilities of the other members of leadership and the chairmen. Both also want rank-and-file members to have more influence in caucus strategy and will urge the Appropriations Committee to regain control over the budget process.
The similarities aren’t unexpected, though, as both Yarbrough and Adams spoke at length about the changes they’d like to see in the chamber prior to each man entering the race. And while each has encouraged the other to halt their bid for speaker and run for majority leader &nd
ash; a move both have, to this point, refused to make – Yarbrough is confident he will prevail in what figures to be a two-vote election when the caucus convenes in November.
“I keep saying that if I get past the first ballot, I’ll win on the second,” he said. “Of course, Kirk is probably saying the same thing.”
If more than two people are running for a leadership post, caucus rules dictate that the lowest vote-getter will be eliminated and additional rounds of voting will be held until one person garners votes from the majority of the caucus. In this situation – assuming the 33-member Republican caucus doesn’t add or lose any seats – if no one receives 17 votes on the first ballot, the caucus would vote again and choose between the two top candidates.
Yarbrough said he is confident because his ideas to change how the House operates resonate with legislators who are unhappy about the way the last two years have gone.
“I’m running to offer a different approach to the work of the House,” he said. “I want to change the culture of the House.”
Change vs. experience
Like the presidential campaigns, everyone is talking about change and experience. In the state House, Jim Weiers has the experience. He was first elected to the House in 1994, served a term as majority whip, followed by a term as speaker.
After reaching his term limit and spending two years in the Senate, he returned to the House in 2005 and has been speaker ever since. If he is chosen again, it will mark his fourth term overall and third consecutive in the position.
If that happens, he would join the late Frank Kelley as the only person to serve four terms as House speaker. Kelley, a former newspaperman from Phoenix, spent more than 20 years in the House and served four consecutive terms as speaker, from 1977 to 1984.
The experience and knowledge Weiers has gained in his time as a lawmaker and as speaker sets him apart from the two challengers, neither of whom has held a leadership position, Weiers said.
“Leadership is exactly that. You don’t do leadership on a trial basis,” he said. “It’s hard to convince somebody that they’re wrong when they haven’t had the experience and seen what wrong looks like.”
That experience will be even more paramount, Weiers said, given that legislators are staring into the face of a third consecutive budget deficit, and possibly another one in the following year. He touted his experience in addressing shortfalls, dating back to his first stint as speaker when lawmakers faced budget crunch after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
And while both challengers are calling for increased openness – especially when it comes to developing the budget – and more collaboration within the caucus, Weiers said the reality is that every caucus member has had the opportunity to become more engaged.
“I’ve seen nobody come forward and say ‘This is the authority I want, and I want to take this on,’” he said, speculating that the time commitment required to take on a larger role has essentially scared off many in the caucus.
He has always had an open-door policy, Weiers said, and caucus members are welcome to sit in on any meeting he is a part of.
“The more the merrier. There’s nothing to hide. I want people to hear what I hear,” he said. ?