Bolles is back!

We’re still taunting Jake … In other other newses … And sorry for that throwback.

Don Bolles is back.

No, the investigative journalist who was assassinated by a car bomb in 1976 to silence his work uncovering crime and corruption didn’t rise from the grave.

But the bill to place a monument in his honor at the Arizona Capitol did, thanks to a couple of Republicans willing to buck a powerful member of their party who has obstructed it.

Longtime readers may recall that in 2023, we launched a campaign to get lawmakers to sponsor a bill to allow a monument honoring Bolles’ life and work to be placed at the Capitol’s Wesley Bolin Plaza, alongside the host of monuments there honoring Arizona’s heroes and history.

Bolles reported on a variety of beats during his years at the Arizona Republic. He had a desk at the Capitol where he covered politics until July 2, 1976, when he received a call from a source and scrambled down to the Clarendon Hotel, where someone strapped a bomb under his car. He died from his injuries a few days later.

The case was never really solved. And the Capitol bears no mention of his work, legacy or murder. Despite memorializing all sorts of other weird stuff.

@arizona.agendaThere is a monument to fake news at the Arizona Capitol. We want to put up a monument to a real newspaper hero. For daily Arizona politics news check the link in our bio. #AZ #azcapitol #journalism #dailynewsupdate

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So almost three years ago, we got an idea: Bolles deserves a monument.

But to put a monument on the Capitol lawn, you need the Legislature to pass a bill. So Hank talked two lawmakers into sponsoring the bill and we cheerleaded the effort. He even pretended to be a lobbyist for a little while and tried his best to be nice to lawmakers. But after being repeatedly told that our help was not exactly helping, we backed off, and the idea took on a life of its own.

In total, lawmakers have now sponsored five bills over three legislative sessions to allow the privately funded monument to be placed on the Capitol lawn. Each one has received a broader spread of support than the last — this year’s version passed the House with 49 votes in favor and only nine against.

And each one of the bills has met the same fate: They were killed by Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, the leader of the Legislature’s Freedom Caucus and the chairman of the Senate Government Committee, where the bills have been assigned.

Hoffman is a fake elector and professional troll farmer who has unilaterally killed hundreds of popular bills by stuffing them in his desk drawer and refusing to schedule them for a hearing in his committee. We tried being nice, taunting him — we (and others) even called him a chickenshit for refusing to hear the bill, all to no avail.

Fortunately, the legislative rules contain loopholes for bypassing an obstinate committee chair who refuses to hear a bill that has broad, bipartisan support.

And the bill does have broad support: Every Democrat in the House has voted for it for the last three years, and each year, the idea has grown on Republicans. Even some of its original opponents — and some of the most conservative lawmakers in Arizona — have come around on the idea as they learn more about Bolles’ legacy and contributions to our state.

MAGA lawmakers may hate journalists, but even they can’t deny that Bolles was a badass who deserves a monument at the Capitol.

Here’s how Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin — a member of the Freedom Caucus who opposed the bill in 2023 — explained his vote supporting the bill last year:

“Don Bolles, as opposed to the current hacks we have in the liberal media, was actually a newsman.”

But sidestepping a committee chair is something of a nuclear option — and Hoffman is known as one of the meanest, most vindictive, petty tyrants at the Legislature. (And that’s saying something.)

And up until now, nobody was willing to risk his retaliation and scorn to go to bat for Bolles.

Then Republican Rep. Selina Bliss took up the cause.

We predicted (somewhat hopefully) that Bliss would be “a fierce advocate” for the bill, considering she’s a history buff who remembers watching the news of the Bolles bombing when she was a child.

She has lived up to that prediction.

Earlier this month, Bliss joined up with Republican Sen. Janae Shamp and Republican Rep. Walt Blackman to offer a strike-everything amendment to revive the bill and outmaneuver Hoffman. It wasn’t her first option, she said, but Hoffman has refused to hear several of her bills or even meet with her to explain why he won’t hear them.

“And actually, it's not just me. I'm not taking it personal, but he hears, let's say, a select number of bills,” Bliss told us. “He had one committee meeting he even canceled. So, yeah, yeah. Makes it challenging, to say the least. And hence the reason for the strike-everything (amendment) to navigate around that.”

By adding Bliss’ Bolles bill onto Shamp’s SB1335 (which was originally about teledentistry), they sidestepped Hoffman’s committee and ensured that the bill at least has a fighting chance.

The amended version cleared the House Committee of the Whole on Wednesday, and after the full House votes on it, it’ll go back to the Senate, where Shamp can concur with the House amendment and send it to the full Senate for a final vote — no Hoffman needed.

It’s still far from a done deal. But by standing up to Hoffman and using the Legislature's rules to sidestep him, Bliss and crew have shown bravery and brought the bill further than anyone before.

This is what making history looks like — not fast, not easy, but inching, finally, toward something better.

“To me, it's just unfathomable that we don't embrace our history,” Bliss said.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs said yesterday that she’s going to veto any bill that hits her desk until lawmakers pass “bipartisan” legislation funding a developmental disability program that’s about to run out of money.

We wrote about all the finger-pointing that politicians are doing over the program in last Tuesday’s edition, but a quick refresher is in order:

• A program that helps parents of kids with disabilities will run out of money in about two weeks unless lawmakers do something.

• Democrats want to just fund the program.

• Republican Rep. David Livingston wants to cut the help parents receive in half.

• Republican Rep. Julie Willoughby drafted a bipartisan compromise solution to lessen the blow to families.

  • So Livingston added three more Republicans to his appropriations committee to make sure his version got passed.

Throughout the session, parents of children with disabilities have made the trip to the Capitol to tell lawmakers why the program is essential to meet their children’s very specific and demanding needs.

It’s become one of the biggest fights of the year.

So Hobbs yesterday put her foot down and told lawmakers to send her a bipartisan compromise solution, or risk a return of the record-setting “Veto Queen” governor.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the state House voted against every single bill that came up (even the ones they didn’t hate) in protest.

Livingston responded by mocking and chastising Hobbs, calling her childish and saying she “will not get her way.”

He then proceeded with a very mature series of comments.

“She can work with us … or she can sit up in her ivory tower and drink her wine and not worry about it,” he said, before getting shut down for being “personally offensive.”

That didn’t stop him.

“I agree wine is whiny, and I was referring to the whiny-ness, so maybe it would be more manly to offer a glass of whiskey,” Livingston added.

Support the Agenda so we can enjoy a glass of whiskey this weekend. Or a glass of wine. Whatever you’re drinking. We’re not picky.

Every day, we scour more than 100 news sources looking for the dozen or so articles you need to see in our In Other News section.

It’s a lot of work! And a lot of interesting stories get saved for our new weekly policy newsletters, the Water Agenda, Education Agenda and A.I. Agenda.

So today, we thought we’d show you a little of what you’re missing if you haven’t subscribed.

Here’s a sample of the Other News in education, water, and artificial intelligence.

Want the weekly scoop delivered straight to your inbox? There’s a button for that.

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In Water Agenda Other News

Not having it: Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed seven water-related bills that she said provided “political cover” for the Legislature, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. All of the bills were sponsored by Rep. Gail Griffin, a Republican from Cochise County who has long held the keys to Arizona’s water legislation. Hobbs said the bills made “pointless trivial statutory changes,” when Arizonans want actual groundwater management.

Long time coming: After 25 years, a contaminated aquifer in central Phoenix was finally cleaned up last week, KTAR’s Balin Overstolz McNair reports. The aquifer, which is located in an industrial area, was contaminated by tetrachloroethene (PCE), a chemical often used in the dry-cleaning business. Back in 2016, state officials started putting microbes and sucrose into the ground, which began the process of breaking down the harmful chemicals. Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality has another 37 sites scheduled for decontamination efforts.

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In Education Agenda Other News

Trying to pay the bills: Local school districts are struggling to make ends meet. The Deer Valley Unified School District is asking the Legislature to help cover the ever-higher electricity costs for air conditioning at schools. The Scottsdale Unified School District is facing a shortage of bus drivers. And the Chandler Unified School District is reeling from a failed bond election last year that officials hoped would pay for renovations at two elementary schools.

Trans policy backlash: Governing board members at Mesa Public Schools got an earful when they proposed a “gender dysphoria policy,” the Mesa Tribune’s Cecilia Chan reports. The policy would require school staff to notify parents if their kids ask to go by a pronoun or name that’s different from the one on their birth certificate, as well as force them to use bathrooms and play on teams that align with their sex at birth. Most of the 80 people who spoke at the board meeting last week criticized the proposal, saying it would make students feel “unsafe, unwelcome and unsupported.”

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In A.I. Agenda Other News

AI’s doing police sketches now: Goodyear police just used AI to generate a forensic sketch of a suspect in an attempted kidnapping case, 12News’ Gabriella Bachara reports. Police took a hand-drawn sketch and fed it into ChatGPT, which spit out an image that was so realistic “it made my jaw drop,” sketch artist and Goodyear Police Officer Michael Bonasera said. He isn’t worried about AI taking his job; it’s actually going to help police dig into more cold cases and generate new leads, he said.

Image: Goodyear Police Department

For those about to rock: The French streaming platform Deezer said 18% of uploaded songs are fully generated by AI, Reuters reported. An executive at Deezer, which has nearly 10 million subscribers, said “we see no sign of it slowing down.” They launched a detection tool in January to filter out AI-generated songs, as artists increasingly are filing lawsuits accusing AI firms of stealing their copyrighted material.

Today’s top story about the strike-everything amendment reviving the Don Bolles memorial bill got us talking about those sneaky “striker” bills. And how sometimes they can be used for good.

Joe, an intrepid reporter who came on board the Tucson Agenda this year, once covered a striker bill with perhaps one of the craziest backstories we’ve ever heard.

In 2006, a deputy fire chief in Mesa was caught in his neighbor’s barn trying to have sex with a lamb.

At the time, Arizona didn’t have a law on the books about bestiality. And it was too late in the legislative session to introduce a new bill. So the 2006 Legislature threw together a last-minute strike-everything amendment that made bestiality a class 6 felony.

It passed unanimously and then-Gov. Janet Napolitano signed it into law.

But per Joe’s reporting, some lawmakers had qualms with a provision that wouldn’t let people who committed bestiality have pets. The final law didn’t include that provision after former Republican Rep. Eddie Farnsworth suggested it would be too onerous to prevent offenders from living with birds and fish.

Nearly two decades later, our lawmakers are still choosing interesting battles.