In November, Arizona voters approved a surtax on the rich to fund an underfunded education system. Now, Republicans there are on the verge of overturning the will of the people with a tax cut that will instead cost the state $250 million. The new law will give $4 to the poor, $96 to the middle class, and $350k to people making over $5 million.
That is not a typo. Nor is it a fluke.
Having seen the state turn blue in the presidential and senate elections and their state legislative majority dwindle down to a single seat in November, Arizona Republicans have spent the first half of 2021 launching conspiracy theories and passing laws meant to nullify past election results and rig future contests.
The bonkers Maricopa County election “audit” stands as the most prominent example of the Arizona GOP’s full-on right-wing blitzkrieg on the state’s voters, but it’s hardly the only one. Among other moves, the party dismantled its uber-popular permanent vote-by-mail list in order to enable vast registration purges, stripped Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of key powers such as the ability to represent the state in election lawsuits, planned a special session to act on the “audit” findings, and moved to hijack the state’s independent redistricting commission, with a potential gerrymander as the endgame.
They’ve also enacted that grossly inequitable flat tax and joined in the culture wars by authorizing fines for schools that merely teach about racism.
To get a sense of just how unhinged it’s gotten in the capital and how Democrats plan to respond, I spoke with State Sen. Juan Mendez, a Tempe-based lawmaker who has been one of the most outspoken Democrats amid the GOP bombardment. During our conversation, he also provided some key and heretofore unheeded insight into what it might take to get one of Arizona’s Democratic US senators, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, to come around on the filibuster and save her home state from local autocracy. Of course, we’ll lead off with that.
Passing the For The People Act would ban gerrymandering and unfair elections, but Arizona’s own Kyrsten Sinema refuses to move on the filibuster. Given how big the progressive activist community is in Arizona and how much it has changed the state, what has the response been to that?
Activists and organizers are definitely paying attention. We tell everyone every election that “this is the most important election” and “we just need to take over the Senate, take over the House, and get a president elected.” And we finally got everything and it’s still not working. So we can’t just tell our voters and our base to just wait and let this play out in some kind of political way.
I've been hearing it's hard for us as a party to raise money, national organizations don't want to get associated with giving money to the Democratic Party because it might look like they're supporting Sinema. It's awful that she's holding back voting rights and so many policies, but what she's really got to be aware of is how her decisions are making repercussions for the Democratic Party and the activist machine in general. We probably aren't going to be able to raise the outside funds that we depend on for elections.
Do you have any insight into what might move her on this?
I mean, I want everybody to keep trying to put pressure on Sinema and all those buses and caravans driving across the south, I want that to be successful and I want that to be the thing that convinces her. But I knew her before I was in office and she was just in the state legislature. She is not going to care about any of whatever activists do or whatever happens in the media. That’s not going to move her.
I personally think we have to move past her and put pressure on the rest of the Democratic Party, President Biden and leadership in the Senate. We can’t just keep being like, it’s one person [to convince]. People are responsible for her. She's her own senator, but she's also in a party that is supposed to have leadership. If this were happening in the legislature, everybody would be getting mad at the senate president or the governor. It’s wrong that she's having these indefensible views, but it doesn't just stop with her. Way too many people are benefitting from her taking all the heat.
She’s enabling a lot of bad behavior on the other side too — it certainly looks from afar like Republicans have reached new extremes in Arizona. You just finished up the spring legislative session — was it as wild as it seems? How was it to work with them?
I feel like they sometimes recognize they're in over their heads, but they still keep doubling down. I feel like they wouldn't be doing a lot of this stuff as quickly if they felt that they were going to stay in power longer. The whole fight over why they needed this flat tax now came because they don't think they're going to be in power long enough to get this in the future. The governor was elected saying he was going to cut taxes every year. And technically he has, but he's gone out of his way to find the lowest-hanging fruit, so it hasn’t been in a meaningful flat tax kind of way. And there's a lot of them that have been caught on a hot mic saying it needs to be done now.
I just finished my ninth year and I've only ever seen like two or three Democratic bills move through the process every year, and they're never anything worthwhile. So we've never really practiced democracy in any kind of deliberative manner. But recently, they've just thrown out all adherence to rules, like they just don't care anymore. They've given us amendments seconds before asking us to vote on them. Some of them in the House were literally cutting off the Democrats’ microphones and wouldn't allow them to raise comments or debate during certain parts of the process. They won't even let me say the words “white privilege” in the Senate. They're really triggered right now.
I used to think it was the primaries that were the problem. And they definitely do have their crazies. There are people who've definitely jumped off the deep end and haven't come back up for air in a long time. Senator Sonny Borrelli is one of the more intense ones, he honestly believes that deep state people are trying to kill him for trying to do the audit. He thinks he's a soldier fighting in some kind of big conspiracy theory.
Some of them are just the regular kind of evil in that they support corporations. But even some of the quieter ones that I wouldn't ever have worried about, the ones that I could have a conversation with, are definitely toeing the line. There aren’t any moderates anymore. We have some Republicans that think they try to hold out for their values, but it's never in a meaningful way. And they end up just getting beat up publicly for it.
One Republican senator was getting death threats over him not thinking that we needed to do all this audit stuff. He didn't want to arrest the county board of supervisors. He was talking on the floor about the death threats and another senator said “well, maybe you should vote the right way.” I was sitting maybe 15-20 feet away from him and he said it loud enough for me to hear.
Sen. Kelly Townsend is always calling on people to do “what's needed,” in that very coded way where she knows she’s asking for violence but doesn't want to take responsibility for it. I think it's just gonna keep getting worse and worse and worse until they lose power.
The flat tax basically overturns the ballot initiative from November, while the audit and move to strip Sec. Hobbs of her powers also shows a basic disregard for democracy. Is there outrage over the dismissal of elections?
The public put an initiative on the ballot to raise taxes on the wealthy. And so in response to that, they've literally brought the taxes down to where we can appease that initiative, but the wealthy don't have to pay any more than that.
The public is organized and ready to respond to this. The Republicans keep trying to shove down this expansion of school vouchers, to just take more money out of public education, and they keep trying it every year. One year, the public put a bunch of signatures together to repeal that specific law and put it on the ballot and everybody voted to repeal. But they tried to do it again, knowing that the people were going to do the same thing. It just died yesterday in the House.
There are a bunch of groups now threatening to repeal the flat tax and, from what I've heard, something around some of the voter suppression stuff. We’re trying to make it where it's not going to be a bunch of different groups firing off and trying to respond. We want to try to organize everybody into one or two responses. It’s still very much in the early stages. But they know that people are gonna respond that way and they're just daring us to do this.
They play chicken with themselves. Their own members will tell them “I'm not voting on this today” and then they'll put it on the agenda, on the board for us to vote on it. And they'll just stare their people down and watch them not vote on it. So they definitely don't mind playing chicken with us and don't care about crashing at all.
The state has really changed over the last decade. The legislature is super-close and Democrats won both Arizona’s electoral votes and its Senate seat last year. How are people responding to all these far-right policies and conspiracies?
Anybody who's involved in politics is already in their own camps. It doesn't look like it's the kind of thing that’s being used to attract independents. They're just entertaining their base. And it's only driving up my base, as well. My base is just getting more worried and more concerned and they're gonna probably work even harder than before. But they give us updates on voter registrations and everybody's losing registered party members while the independent population gets bigger.
Is Arizona moving left enough that even gerrymandering won’t ultimately really make a difference?
So the demographics are going to be in our favor, but it takes a long time. There are parts of Arizona that are way more diverse than the average person would expect. We've got wealthy parts like Sedona, the vacation capital, it's all Latinos in the schools. In many wealthy areas, it's not the same demographics anymore. But with gerrymandering, even just with these last maps that we’ve been working with over these last 10 years, we're running out of competitive districts. We’re down to our last two or three options to take the state.
The more calculating Republicans who aren't the Kool-Aid-drinking crazy ones — there's one guy, JD Mesnard, he’s a community college political science teacher and he's not a crazy guy but he's scared that he’s going to lose power. They already barely won his senate district and he's proposing all kinds of ideas; specifically, he wants to expand the number of members in the House because he's afraid they're gonna lose power there. He's trying to make it sound like he's trying to make it more equal for everybody when really, he's just preparing for them not to be in total control.
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