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Legisplaining the session
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Legisplaining the session

We’re getting weird today … Tase them, bro … And finally winning.

Hank Stephenson
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Nicole Ludden
Apr 10, 2025
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Legisplaining the session
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Well, folks, we’re (hopefully) heading toward the final act of the Arizona legislative session — a time when things get weird, fast.

Budget bills start dropping. Striker amendments come out of nowhere. Debate rules get tossed.

If you’re not living on Skywolf, it’s easy to miss how fast — and how quietly — big decisions get made.

We were going to write you a glossary list of terms you need to know toward the end of the session.

What’s a BRB? How do Strikers work? That kind of thing…

But then our art intern, ChatGPT, got involved and things got weird, fast.

Each of the three posters below is a multi-part illustrated field guide to how an aspect of an end-of-session process works — and doesn’t.

To view the entire educational visual essay, just click on the links in the titles.

But to see the full zines, you’ve got to be a paid subscriber. We’ll even throw in a discount.

I like stupid art projects!

“Inside the Arizona Budget Beast” is our guide to how the state’s biggest, messiest, most powerful set of bills actually comes together — who’s in the room, what the documents look like and why it all happens at midnight.

If you want to understand where the money goes, you have to understand the process. And the process is a beast.

“How a Bill Becomes Frankensteined” explains what happens when Arizona lawmakers start resurrecting the dead.

Most bills die. That’s normal. But near the end of session, lawmakers pull parts from failed proposals, abandoned drafts and pet projects — and stitch them together into something new.

It’s not clean. It’s not transparent. But it’s how major policies get passed when the clock is ticking and the normal rules don’t apply.



“The Long, Strange Road to Law” is our trippy little travelogue through the Arizona bill process — from its humble beginnings as an idea, to the procedural gauntlet it must survive, to its final showdown at the governor’s desk.

It’s like Schoolhouse Rock took a Jack Kerouac-inspired trip to Arizona and licked a Sonoran toad.

Lawmakers love Tasers: Republican infighting ensued on the House floor yesterday after Scottsdale lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to stave off a bill that would let law enforcement technology company Axon build its headquarters project, which includes 1,900 apartments and a luxury hotel, without getting approval from Scottsdale voters, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Scottsdale-based Republican Rep. Joseph Chaplik told lawmakers that Axon CEO Patrick Smith “assaulted, accosted and threatened” him over the legislation.

Beautiful clean coal: Trump signed an executive order to boost U.S. coal production and wants to force the Cholla Power Plant in northeast Arizona to stay open as part of the initiative, the Republic’s Russ Wiles reports. Arizona Public Service planned to shut the plant down after it became “uneconomical to operate,” but Trump said during a speech Tuesday he instructed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to keep it open.

“We’re going to keep these coal miners on the job and tell them ‘just remain calm,’ because we’ll have that plant open and burning the clean coal, the beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time,” Trump said.

Fight or flight: A Tucson family that has fought for immigrant and transgender rights for years has fled the country, LOOKOUT’s Joseph Darius Jaafari reports. The Trujillo family said the Trump administration’s hostility to immigrants, Latinos and trans youth, including increased ICE activity in their neighborhood, drove them to make the difficult choice to flee. Lizette Trujillo was featured in a collaboration we wrote with LOOKOUT on shifting transgender advocacy amid hostile governance. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. Katie Hobbs that defines biological sexes, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Jamar Younger reports.

The Q stands for Quitters: Even though many police agencies across Arizona have dedicated LGBTQ+ liaisons, police are doing a crappy job investigating crimes against LGBTQ+ people, LOOKOUT’S1 Celina Jimenez reports in a partnership with the New Times. Ron Blake’s story is instructive: In 2011, he was raped and robbed and the LGBTQ+ liaison at Phoenix Police Department who interviewed him didn’t even take written notes and seemingly put zero work into solving his case before ghosting him entirely. While police have made the hires to appease critics, it’s not clear that LGBTQ+ liaisons are doing much, if anything, to help people like Blake get justice.

“(A) deeper look at the record shows that too many of these commitments have been all talk — if even that,” Jimenez writes.

Humans aren’t cargo: The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages. The lede really says it all in this story from the Mirror’s MacDonald-Evoy about Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons’ speech to the Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center on Tuesday.

If at first you don’t succeed: Phoenix is starting over its search for a new police chief after interim Chief Michael Sullivan withdrew as a candidate, KJZZ’s Chad Snow reports. Former Chief Jeri Williams resigned three years ago, but the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association opposed Sullivan, her likely replacement. The city will start taking new applications on Friday.

We clearly did not succeed on our first attempt to get you to upgrade to a paid subscription and support local journalism.
But we’ll try again.

Investigating the investigators: Gilbert residents say they face retaliation, harassment and bullying by police after submitting public records requests about local officials, the Daily Independent’s Tom Blodgett writes. Local Veterans Advisory Board member Dave Rosenfeld said he found records about a city council member attempting to kick him off the board, while local activist Mindy Brocker said police were after her for her activism.

“We cannot label residents as stalkers, a nuisance or harassers for using their right to review public records or speak up at public meetings,” Brocker said. “The right to access public records, while I’m sure is annoying, is essential to a healthy democracy.”

We put a lot of work into putting this newsletter together, and we want as many people as possible to get the chance to see it.

So we’ve started regularly posting to our social media accounts to get the word out. (Yes, even on Elon Musk’s Twitter hellscape, because that’s where a lot of political shenanigans happen).

Your likes, shares, reposts, comments and follows really help us out.

And in a political world where the richest man in the world pushes his thoughts to the forefront of your social feeds while holding an inordinate amount of governmental power, your paid subscriptions help us keep this operation going and hold people like Musk accountable.

Check us out on: Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

Though her back-to-back election losses somehow didn’t result in her becoming governor or a U.S. senator, Kari Lake is finally failing upwards.

After she was supposed to take on the esteemed post of heading up the government-run media agency Voice of America, Elon Musk DOGEd Lake’s post out of existence.

Now, Arizona’s failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate is being shipped off to an unnamed role in the State Department to dismantle the agency she was appointed to, per the Washington Post.

“I am thrilled to be working on behalf of President Trump and this administration. He put me in this role because I’m a fighter,” Lake told the Post.

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Speaking of LOOKOUT, they’re up for an Equality Chamber Hero Award, and they need your vote! Here’s the link. They’re in the “Spirit of Service Award” category at the bottom of the page.


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Legisplaining the session
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She spread election conspiracies. It ruined her life.
How one of Arizona's top Stop the Steal activists came to believe the real conspiracy is to promote the hoax of election fraud.
Aug 18, 2021 • 
Hank Stephenson
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She spread election conspiracies. It ruined her life.
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Kari Lake does us a solid
The former newscaster returns to support local journalism.
Mar 22, 2024 • 
Hank Stephenson
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Kari Lake does us a solid
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We got the Senate audit report
And it says — no joke — that Biden won
Sep 24, 2021 • 
Hank Stephenson
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We got the Senate audit report
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