by Alexander Lomax
Photo Credit: Mary Altaffer, AP
The jostling, jockeying and politicking between Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and the Republican-led Arizona House and Senate has made for some truly interesting watching in the short time that Hobbs has been Governor. While she has had a tumultuous time finding her feet (get up to date here), the AZ GOP has had nearly as tough a time trying to figure out how to legislate over, around or through her veto power.
One of the ways that they learned to exert their power and pressure Hobbs into concessions has been holding up her nominations for positions within the executive branch, one of the traditional checks on power between the parties. The Republican caucus has indeed embraced this with a certain degree of passion. Hobbs has wielded her veto pen early and often, and holding up her nominations has been one of the few responses that the GOP has had, and a response that they’ve embraced.
That response may have recently gotten completely out-of-hand however. Now the GOP caucus has apparently made its own committee…to review her nominees.
I think that the entire premise bears repeating: the party that so many of us gravitated towards as the party of small government just created a new government committee…to do what was already one of their job roles. State senators review appointees and votes on them. Precisely why is a new committee needed for them to do what they’ve been elected to do?
I can appreciate some good kabuki political theater as much as the next nerd, but this is just embarrassing. You signed onto a job, but instead of simply doing your job you’re creating extra bureaucracy in order to create some sort of bush-league McCarthy trials.
Then again, the fact that Jake Hoffman is in the middle of it should be of no surprise. His troll farms and manipulation of the various social media platforms by using people from across the world to pump disinformation into our politics has egregious enough to get him banned from those platforms. He must miss not being a gross puppet master in Facebook groups so he feels the need to overcompensate with this, and we all lose as a result.
The AZ GOP is missing out on an opportunity to be the grown-ups in the room. It’s not as though local Democrats have been mistake-free, far from it. But the GOP seems to be resistant to giving mature, reasonable folks a better option to vote for, as if our demographics and attitudes haven’t shifted since people came here in droves decades ago. I’m embarrassed for them.