Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday he intends to approve legislation cutting millions more in taxes even as he signed a budget that cuts millions of dollars from education and social programs.

The Arizona House has given initial approval to two bills blocking state funding for federal policies.

After campaigning on an education platform of increasing school choice and doing away with Common Core, many conservative Republicans in the Legislature are frustrated to find that they can’t make good on their promises to constituents.

Republicans and Democrats joined forces in the Arizona House of Representatives today to kill a bill that would have expanded School Tuition Organization tax credits. That led Republican leadership to unexpectedly cancel another vote on two other “school choice” bills.

With hardly time to pause, policymakers lunged from one budget solution to another at the height of the recent fiscal crisis, spawning a chaotic period of accounting gimmicks, borrowing and budget slashing.

The powerful Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House is getting a new chairman. Term limits barred long-serving committee Chairman John Kavanagh from running for re-election to the House, and he was elected earlier this month to the Senate.

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Optometrists want the ability to prescribe steroids, hydrocodone pain killers and other potentially dangerous drugs, but lawmakers say a bill allowing them to do so is circumventing the legislative process and would put the public at risk.

Citing a need to protect government against the costs of excessive public records requests by citizens, lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a bill that would increase the cost of obtaining public records that take government employees more than eight hours to compile and redact.

The award for best legislative batting average for the session — the calculation of bills introduced versus bills signed into law — goes to Rep. David Livingston, a freshman Republican lawmaker from Peoria who has been vocally critical of the governor.