House Approps hearing finally set

After weeks of stalling, (and LOTS of thumb twiddling) followed by several days of press coverage claiming that Speaker Andy Tobin had scheduled the Senate passed budget bills to be voted on in the House -- without any committee agendas to verify the claim -- John Kavanagh's House Appropriations committee finally has posted an agenda for Monday, June 10 (10am in House Hearing Room 1).

Good news? Well, given that only one of the 10 bills in question are included on it, I'd say -- not necessarily.

Which one of the bills, you ask? Well, of course it's the one that includes Medicaid restoration.

Hmmm, what was that old saying about idle hands?

And what about the other NINE Senate budget bills? Your guess is as good as mine at this point. However, Mary Jo Pitzl, reporting for the Arizona Republic last night wrote about Tobin having competing budget bills.

Tobin’s budget is likely to get a hearing in the House Appropriations Committee next week, setting the stage for a full-House showdown over the key sticking point in the budget: Medicaid expansion.

Of course, following the pattern Tobin set last week of announcing he had set the Senate budget for a vote in the House (without any hearing being posted until today), there is no evidence yet of Tobin's budget bills being introduced or assigned to committees for hearing. And they are certainly not (yet) on the House Approps agenda for Monday.

Oh, and there's a Senate CPS bill (SB1069) that's going to be sacrificed on the altar of homage to Cathi Herrod.

Kavanagh will apparently be offering a strike all amendment for SB 1069 to make abortion clinic licensing and regulation even more onerous than it already is.

Herrod apparently is good at drawing crowds for protests/rallies, even when it's close to 110 outside. God (and Arizona lawmakers) save the pre-born, but to hell with them a day after they take their first breath.

AZ House gets the ball rolling UPDATED 8:00pm MST 6-4-13

After sitting on the state budget bills passed by the Senate three weeks ago, Speaker Andy Tobin finally scheduled those bills for consideration in the House. The bills all have been assigned to John Kavanagh's Appropriations committee.

In this linked video clip from Sunday Square Off a few weeks ago, Kavanagh sounds a lot like Senate President Biggshot did last month.

Kavanagh says he believes the Medicaid Restoration will be stripped out of the Senate bill when it is heard in his committee. He goes on to say that he thinks it will be put back in the bill during floor debate as an amendment offered by either a friendly Republican or a Democrat.

I've heard nothing thus far to contradict that assessment.

No agenda has yet been posted for House Appropriations. I will keep an eye on the legislature's website to let you know when the bills will be heard.

UPDATE

From Sen. Steve Farley and his "Friends O'Farley" report:

Progress looked pretty slow today until Speaker Tobin casually announced a first reading of all the Senate budget bills, and assigned them all to the Appropriations Committee.

Where they go from there is less certain.

We do know that the Speaker met with the Governor on the topic yesterday, clearing the way for action, so his moving the bills is a hopeful sign that he will support them or at least not stand in their way, a classy move on his part.

The Approps Chair, John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) is no fan of the Medicaid restoration, so he may well try to gut the bills in committee, but I am hearing that there will be enough bipartisan votes on the floor to strip off the Approps amendments, returning them to their original state, which would mean that passage would send them straight to the Governor's desk, not back to the uncertain fate of a Senate conference committee.

The Medicaid restoration is part of the budget's Health bill, meaning that any reasonable amendments agreed upon with the Governor to make Medicaid more palatable to the Speaker would still go back to the Senate, but would avoid a conference committee because that bill's sponsor is John McComish (R-Ahwautukee). As a supporter of the Medicaid restoration, he would be able to simply concur with the amendments and send it to the Governor after a vote that would pass with the same coalition from two weeks ago.

The final House vote on the budget could happen by Thursday or Friday of this week, with a final Senate concurrence on any amended budget bills potentially next Wednesday, with the session ending by the following Thursday. Of course, very few things go as planned in the Legislature, so there are no guarantees, except that I will keep you informed.

In any case, the renewed movement is good news, and portends a possible end to the session as early as next week. Hopefully, there will be much to share in the next Farley Report.

For those of you who are worried about former Senators Frank Antenori and Ron Gould organizing an effort to refer the Medicaid restoration to the November 2014 ballot (suspending the enactment and forcing the State to unnecessarily spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the meantime while our hospitals and tens of thousands of citizens remain at risk), I believe you can relax a bit.

Court cases have already declared clearly that budget-related bills are not subject to the referendum provisions of the Arizona Constitution. I hope that Mr Antenori and Mr Gould will soon understand the fruitlessness of their efforts to destroy our state's economy and healthcare system in order to get a few more minutes in the sun. The people of Arizona are sick of those kinds of partisan games. It's time to move into the bipartisan, moderate future charted out by the Senate budget.  

As of this update, there is still no committee agenda posted for House Appropriations. I think Farley's insight on budget bills not being subject to referenda is important.

From the Arizona Republic story on the Antenori/Gould/Bauserman effort,

The Governor’s Office said neither challenge is legally sound. But the administration is prepared to fight them by arguing the new Medicaid law would be intertwined with the fiscal 2014 budget, which under the state Constitution cannot be referred to voters. It also argues that a two-thirds vote is not required because the hospital assessment would be imposed by the state’s Medicaid program, not the Legislature.

Arizona -- Archetype of Influence Peddling?

In October 2011, Zocalo Public Square -- a joint project of the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University -- held a forum/panel discussion in Scottsdale on the topic, Is Arizona the Front Line of American Politics? 

The panel included New York Times bureau chief Marc Lacey (moderator), ASU Prof. Jennifer Steen, author Tom Zoellner and retired long-time state House Minority Leader Art Hamilton. They addressed a variety of issues related to the perception that Arizona is the "meth lab of democracy."



In this clip, Hamilton, who served 26 years in the Arizona House of Representatives explains that he thinks term limits has been a failure. He also said that even though he supported the Citizens Clean Elections Act, public financing of election campaigns has brought unforeseen negative impacts.

Hamilton's 26 years experience, Steen's academic research background and Zoellner's work with former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords certainly require us to consider the insight each shared. But despite their best intentions, I don't think this panel came anywhere near touching on the root cause of Arizona's political problems.

What you will not find on the recording is the portion of the Q and A session at the end where I posed a question about the influence of ALEC on public policy and lawmaking in our state. Yes, I was there that evening. The specifics of Hamilton's answer escape me now, but I still recall that he acknowledged the bias of the monstrosity of a lobbying cabal but not much more.

We have seen, over the last two decades, great interest of, by and for the people of Arizona regaining some semblance of control over what takes place in the legislature. Steen and Hamilton are most certainly correct in boiling it all down to the fact that a number reforms have been tried and thus far success has been extremely limited.

Yet, one "reform" measure that has been discussed many, many times concerns lobbyists spending money on lawmakers. They do so by making campaign contributions, buying gifts (food, tickets to sporting events, etc.) and, like in the case of ALEC, providing "scholarships" to conferences at luxury resorts (with plenty of personal amenities like golf and sight-seeing junkets).

Leading journalists in the largest newsrooms in Arizona have openly, to no avail, called for lawmakers to enact reforms -- at minimum to tighten reporting requirements -- to allow for closer scrutiny of the invisible hand that controls Arizona lawmaking.

In economics, the invisible hand of the market is a metaphor conceived by Adam Smith to describe the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace. The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his important claim that individuals' efforts to maximize their own gains in a free market benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions. (emphasis in original)

Some elected officials have even said they would push for such legislation (Bill Montgomery). None has been forthcoming. And none ever will, at least not any introduced by lawmakers themselves.

Evan Wyloge and Hank Stephenson at the Arizona Capitol Times reported on the limitations of our state's lobbyist reporting system. Among their findings,

Lawmakers perennially introduce bills with ideas to improve transparency in lobbying and accuracy in reporting, but they have managed to avoid voting on the proposals.

Arizona State Professor emeritus Robert Cialdini's research on the subject of Influence is beyond question. 

Adam Smith's concept of the "free market" on the other hand, is taken for granted when it comes to Republicans (and some ambitious Democrats) making laws in our state. Maybe considering Smith's contention that the invisible hand of the market (regarding lawmakers' votes on legislation) will ultimately benefit society provides a subconscious mechanism (rationalization) which allows lawmakers to believe they aren't really selling out their constituents when they -- without resistence -- do the bidding of the most influential lobbyists at the Capitol.

Activists on the left and the right do exert some level of influence on state lawmaking -- the degree of which, to my knowledge, has not been measured. I now call on political scientists and investigative journalists to devise methods to measure influence of activists and of lobbyists in legislatures throughout the country. When they do, voters will better be able to make informed decisions on candidates and on ballot measures for additional reforms.

In the meantime, I submit that even if Arizona is not a "meth lab of democracy," it appears to be an archetype of clandestine influence peddling.

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*NOTE -- at the beginning of the Zocalo clip, a graphic says the entire program is available to view on the Zocalo website. I looked diligently on that site and could not find it. However, C-Span.org DOES have the full length audio and video from this event.