John --

Welcome to our sixth weekly update from the state capitol! I hope you enjoy our updates every week as we navigate the ins and outs of a very busy legislative session.

This week is what we call Crossover Week, where other than Appropriations there are zero committee hearings and we spend a lot of time on the floor debating and voting on Senate bills so they can be sent over to the House for consideration. The House is doing the same thing, and sending their bills over to the Senate.

So in essence, hundreds of bills are “crossing over” the courtyard to the other chamber, hence “Crossover Week.”

So no committee hearings must mean it’s an easy week, right? Ha! Wrong. It’s an extremely busy week, coming after an extremely busy week last week. Wednesday of last week, for example, I was at the capitol for over 14 hours. Senate Commerce, which I sit on, didn’t end until 9:30pm.

Before we dive into the craziness that is Crossover Week, some good news. I had two more bills pass the full Senate last week, each by wide margins. 

The first was SB 1376, which would require mental health and social emotional learning instruction in school health curriculums. I’m excited about this bill, and proud of its strong bipartisan support!

The second bill was SB 1004, which would create a state finance review task force to study our state budget, expenditures, and tax credits, and recommend policy changes to the state legislature. I’ve run the bill for several years in a row, and this is the first year it received a committee hearing and passed the full Senate!

As I mentioned in last week’s update, last week was the final week for regular committee hearings other than Appropriations, which meant several very long committee hearings, as it was the deadline for Senate bills to be heard in Senate committees.

Appropriations is always the exception, however, and since I serve on that committee, I have a very long day ahead of me today. There are 25 bills on the agenda, many of them strikers. What’s a striker, you ask?

Every year, members in the majority will introduce dozens of bills that are often technical corrections bills, which don’t really do anything and may do something as insignificant as adding a period or comma to existing statute. They introduce this bill just in case they need to use it as a “vehicle” for a different bill later on. That different bill is what we call a striker.

A striker, or strike everything amendment, can be on a completely different subject than the underlying bill. Since the amendment would “strike everything” from the previous bill, the author can include whatever language they want.

Why is this especially relevant for this week’s Appropriations hearing? Over the past several weeks, dozens of bills have died through the regular legislative process, either in a committee hearing, because they didn’t receive a committee hearing, or perhaps a vote on the Senate floor. The old bill is dead, but the language from the bill can be added as a striker on a completely new bill!

There’s a saying at the capitol: no bill is ever truly dead until the legislature adjourns its legislative session. That’s because of strikers.

So our Appropriations hearing today has 25 bills on the agenda, and many of the bad bills on the agenda are strikers. Below is a quick look at some of the most egregious, which we will be debating and voting on today:

SB 1119 - this bill would require the Attorney General to review executive orders issued by the President of the United States to determine whether they are unconstitutional and recommend whether Arizona should seek an exemption from them. Coincidentally, this is being introduced right as a Democratic president begins his term.

SB 1325 - if you have been following my work over the last several years, you know I introduce a bill every year to ban gay conversion therapy for children in Arizona. I’ve introduced the bill four years in a row. This bill is very similar to SB 1482 (which died in committee last week), and it would ban cities or local governments from banning gay conversion therapy at the local level.

I will be fighting this bill in committee today, as it takes our state in exactly the WRONG direction. We should be protecting children from this harmful and thoroughly discredited practice, not protecting those who push it on our kids.

SB 1485 - remember SB 1069 from a couple of weeks ago? It would have removed hundreds of thousands of Arizona voters from the Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL), and even changed the name of the program since it’s not so permanent anymore. It died on the Senate floor, but the bill language is now back because it’s a striker!

SB 1593 - this bill isn’t a striker, but it’s still a bad bill that goes after our voting rights. It would further limit the amount of time that voters would have to mail back their early ballots, and prevent any ballots postmarked after the Thursday before the election from being counted. Even if a ballot was received in time by Election Day, if it’s not postmarked by that Thursday, it wouldn’t count.

SCR 1006 - oh, I saved the best for last! This is a ballot referral, so ultimately Arizona voters would need to approve it before it would go into effect, but check this out: it stipulates that right after a presidential election, the legislature has to go into a special session. The legislature can then decide who the rightful winner of the presidential election is, and only the legislature can appoint the presidential electors to the Electoral College.

Why even have a presidential election at all? The legislature would just get to decide who won the election, and appoint the electors who would cast Arizona’s eleven electoral votes at the Electoral College in Washington, DC.

We will be debating that bill, and 24 others, in committee today. The hearing starts at 9am, and will likely continue ALL day.

That’s it for this week’s update! I hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for more updates in future weeks.

Thank you,

Sean

http://www.seanbowieforaz.com/

Paid for by Sean Bowie for State Senate. Authorized by Sean Bowie.