What Happened During the Final Days of Session
I've spent four years at the Capitol, and while politics has never been a particularly gentle sport, what happened during the final days of this session was unlike anything I've experienced. And this isn't just my opinion. Multiple longtime staff, lobbyists, and people who have spent decades around the Capitol told me the same thing: they had never seen anything quite like it.
This Rundown is going to be a little different than usual because I hope this gives you a glimpse behind the curtain of both what happened and why.
Three weeks ago, I sat in a Joint Legislative Audit Committee (JLAC) meeting, which is responsible for overseeing our state agencies and boards. The topic that day was an audit request for the Department of Economic Security.
When I asked what prompted the audit, the answer traced back to a single story a legislator had heard about billing codes being changed 5-6 years ago.
Ok.
"How much would this audit cost?" I asked.
Between $500,000 and $600,000.
Ok.
DES is already undergoing a major technology transition, a federal audit, and a state audit. Requesting another half-million-dollar audit based on one uncorroborated story, while state resources are already stretched thin, struck me as a bit...wasteful.
During the discussion, my Democratic colleagues raised what seemed like an obvious point: if we're concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, why aren't we auditing the ESA voucher program?
After all, that's a program approaching $1,000,000,000 a year in taxpayer spending and one that has generated repeated examples of fraudulent purchases, weak oversight, and accountability concerns.
The answer was clear. There was plenty of appetite to spend taxpayer dollars investigating a state agency based on a story someone heard. There was very little appetite to scrutinize the voucher program.
Fast forward a couple of weeks.
As the final hours of session approached, things began to unravel into chaos, political retribution, and arm-twisting that I have never seen before. And at the center of it all was a growing concern that Arizona voters might decide to place guardrails on the ESA program.
So what do you do when you have all the power and you don't like where public opinion is headed? You change the rules. And that is exactly what happened - the Republican leadership suspended all rules. Entire referrals were rewritten. Measures were pushed through an impromptu committee and onto the floor in the middle of the night.
The legislative Hail Mary came in the form of four constitutional referrals, thrown together in the closing hours of session. Some were drafted so hastily that significant questions remained about how they would actually function. For example, HCR2040 is aimed at punishing public educators, but because the measure defines and restricts activities of "labor organizations" rather than a specific union, critics warn it could create uncertainty for police, firefighters, and other public employee associations that rely on similar representation structures.
Not only did this effort catch Democrats by surprise, but it also required extraordinary pressure campaigns within the majority party itself to secure the votes needed to move them forward.
This should concern every voter, regardless of party.
Constitutional referrals are not ordinary legislation. They can shape Arizona for decades. They deserve thoughtful debate, public transparency, and careful drafting.
Instead, we watched a flurry of referrals rushed through in the final hours of session targeting public education, vote-by-mail, workers' ability to organize, and future voters' ability to reform government programs.
What struck me most was the willingness to wrap these proposals in emotionally appealing stories that often had very little to do with what the measures were actually trying to accomplish.
Military families.
Children.
Election integrity.
Fairness.
Accountability.
But when I read the actual language, and spent hours debating these proposals on the House floor, the story being told often did not match the policy being advanced.
That crosses a line.
One referral in particular crystallized the entire situation for me.
In HCR2048, the public-facing argument was about protecting military families from future voucher reforms. Sounds nice, right? Few people would oppose helping military families.
But buried in the proposal was language stating that if voters approve another ballot measure that conflicts with its voucher protections, "the entire bill or measure is void."
Think about that for a moment.
Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans are currently signing petitions to place voucher reforms before voters. Yet the Legislature advanced a proposal that could invalidate a voter-approved reform measure in its entirety if it conflicts with the voucher protections being added to the Constitution.
Not part of it.
The entire thing.
That's not a debate about education policy. That's an attempt to predetermine the outcome and insulate the ESA program from the will of Arizona voters. And when military families are used as the vehicle to accomplish that goal, the military family isn't the policy. They're the shield.
And the main driver of these deceptive referrals were driven by conversations happening behind the scenes about whether a deal could be reached to stop the Protect Education initiative from moving forward altogether. These referrals were being used as leverage in a broader effort to keep ESA reform off the ballot.
Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans have signed the Protect Education petitions because they want a say in the future of the voucher program. Volunteers have spent months collecting signatures in every part of the state. Community groups invested time, money, and energy to put the issue before voters.
I wasn't part of those negotiations, and reasonable people can disagree about whether a deal should have been taken. But the fact that those conversations were happening at all tells you something important about the moment we were in.
To me, this was the clearest sign of just how concerned the majority party had become about voters weighing in on the ESA program.
This wasn't simply about winning a political argument. It was about preventing voters from having the final word.
This is about protecting a program that is approaching $1 billion a year in taxpayer spending. A program with documented examples of waste, fraud, and abuse concerns. A program where the majority of participants were already attending private school before taxpayers were asked to subsidize their tuition.
And rather than address those concerns, we watched efforts to constitutionally shield the program from future reform.
Sitting through all of this, I kept coming back to the same thought: if a program is working, if the public supports it, and if the facts are on your side, you shouldn't be afraid of voters.
But that wasn't what I witnessed during the final day of session. A day that lasted 19 hours long and ended at 4:30 a.m.
Here are each of these referrals, what they actually do, and why I believe Arizona voters should be paying attention.
