The Daily Agenda: Good riddance, Liz

Liz Harris is Republicans' 100-day anniversary gift to Hobbs ... Sanity is enough, right? ... And that getup is missing something.

Forty-six lawmakers in the House, including a majority of the Republican caucus, voted to expel Republican Rep. Liz Harris yesterday, saying that by inviting a conspiracy theorist to accuse her colleagues of taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, Harris had damaged “the institutional integrity of the House.”

We wish that were the real reason Harris got booted from the building. 

If that were the true motivating factor behind the decisive expulsion Wednesday, lawmakers would be kicking out a lot more people. 

Harris crossed a line, but not by airing absurd conspiracies and making criminal allegations against her fellow elected officials. If that were the line, Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers and a whole bunch of others would have to go as well. 

No Republicans on the Joint Elections Committee batted an eye in February when Harris’ guest, Jacqueline Breger, accused, by name, Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes or those RINOs on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors of taking bribes from the cartel. Even her accusations against police, prosecutors, judges and the Mormon church barely seemed to raise red flags with the Republicans on the committee. 

Instead, the Republicans mostly praised her as “brave” as she concluded her presentation.

But when reporters read Breger’s documents and found she also accused House Speaker Ben Toma, one-time Cyber Ninjas audit liaison Rep. Ken Bennett and Rogers of being in on the imagined bribery scheme, that’s when the Republican outrage started. That’s when Harris finally crossed the line. 

Ultimately, Harris was bounced because it was easier for Republicans to get rid of her than to deal with her. Harris came into the chamber promising not to vote for anything until the 2022 election was redone, then she actually followed through. She killed the “skinny budget” that Republicans wanted to send to Hobbs, a move that immediately set her apart as one of the worst things a lawmaker can be in the eyes of their caucus: not a team player. 

Instead of dealing with the problem then, Republican leaders adopted a policy of appeasement and ceded more power to Harris. To win her vote, they handed her the reins of the Joint Elections Committee, which led to her downfall. In the end, Harris did what she promised — she denied Republicans a functioning majority in the House, if only temporarily. 

The timing was also crucial to lawmakers taking the rare step of ousting one of their own. With a one-vote majority, Republicans wouldn’t have been able to pass bills if her seat had been vacant for several weeks during the middle of the legislative session. But Republicans can now afford to take a vacation from floor votes for a week or two as local party leaders find a replacement and as legislative leaders double-down on budget negotiations with the governor. At the end of the day, the rare expulsion was possible because Harris was an easy target and the timing and politics worked out for both sides.

We have no sympathy for Harris. She used her position of power to poison public discourse with lies and conspiracies and rev up the worst instincts of the dangerous faction of her supporters. In fact, we’re not above admitting we got a lot of joy out of this video of her loading her box of belongings into her Tesla in the House parking lot while a crowd of TV reporters surrounded her.¹ 

But let’s be honest about why she got kicked out. If it were about protecting the integrity of the Legislature, the punishment would be doled out equally to all who use their office to spread lies and conspiracies about elections, elected officials and democratic institutions. Instead, conspiracies only seem to bother some Legislative Republicans when the lies are about them personally.

Still not Kari Lake: In her first 100 days in office, Gov. Katie Hobbs was not Kari Lake, she bragged in a guest opinion in the Republic titled ”I promised sanity as Arizona governor. Here's how I'm delivering it.” In it, the governor highlighted her accomplishments including signing some bills, visiting the border and creating an educator retention task force. Elsewhere in the Republic, reporter Stacey Barchenger writes that at the 100-day mark, Hobbs is hopeful that she and legislative leaders are making real progress on budget negotiations. And longtime Capitol scribe Howie Fischer notes that these past 100 days looked a lot like the first 100 days of former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano’s first administration 20 years ago. 

Rank their opinions: The Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller writes that Republican lawmakers are trying to preemptively ban ranked-choice voting because they’re scared it will lead to RINOs getting elected. He notes that although we do not have ranked-choice voting in Arizona, a bunch of business types are trying to gather momentum for a still-undefined ballot measure to do some kind of ranked-choice voting here. Meanwhile, Substacker Robert Robb says if Arizona does adopt a form of ranked-choice voting, it should be a nonpartisan, top-two primary system, which would reflect Arizonans’ growing discontent with the two-party system, not the confusing five-way ranked-choice runoff style system Steller likes. 

“(The proposed initiative’s backers are) a who's who of Arizona's business-oriented centrists. As a body, it's a group I view with just a little less skepticism than the Arizona Freedom Caucus,” Steller writes.

Same story, different church: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled against child sex abuse victims who alleged members of the Mormon church didn’t report a fellow church member for sexually abusing his daughters for years, saying state law protects the church from having to turn over documents to law enforcement officials if an abuser confesses to church officials, the Associated Press reports. 

Better luck next time: Former Democratic state Sen. Kirsten Engel is taking another shot at running for southeastern Arizona’s Congressional District 6, she announced in a low-budget video filmed at a local park yesterday. She said Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who beat her five months ago, is taking the country in the wrong direction and “we came damn close (to winning) last time.”

What is wrong with people?: People experiencing homelessness in New Mexico are going missing as local nonprofits say they are being tricked by a group that is sending them to Arizona in what appears to be an insurance scam, KOB4 reports from Albuquerque. 

Retirees love Substack, too: The new editor-in-chief of Mohave Valley Daily News in Bullhead City, 24-year-old Daisy Nelson, spoke with KJZZ’s Mark Brodie about leading a local paper at a young age, the struggling newspaper industry and how she fights the general distrust in the media. 

“A lot of people may say print is dying but print is actually thriving in a lot of rural communities, and that is definitely true here as well,” she said, noting retirees love physical newspapers and not everyone is online. 

The future is awesome?: Phoenix plans to spend billions of dollars to turn wastewater into drinkable water by 2030, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. The new water treatment facility it plans to build could save millions of gallons of water per year and replace half of Phoenix’s allocation from the Colorado River, although Phoenix plans to send some of that former wastewater to other municipalities. 

Let us guess, is it strong?: Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego delivered her State of the City Address yesterday, focusing mostly on water and plans for the new water treatment plant, transportation and the need to reauthorize Maricopa County’s sales tax for transportation infrastructure, and homelessness, which she said isn’t just a Phoenix problem. 

At the behest of police who don’t want to be repo men, Arizona lawmakers are considering repealing an old law that makes failing to return a car after missing payments a criminal matter, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. 

The change would put cars on par with basically everything else that someone fails to make payments on, and car dealers and auto title lenders are not happy. As Fischer notes, car dealers and title lenders can report a vehicle as stolen if the owner misses three monthly payments, and when police spot the car, they think it’s legitimately stolen — meaning a felony stop with guns drawn. 

That doesn’t sit well with some cops, Fischer writes, citing Justin Thornton, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee about how he pulled his gun on a family that didn’t even know why they were being pulled over. 

“That's not something I'm proud of in my career,” Thornton said. “I don't think that family should have gone through that for a civil issue.”

House Bill 2484 still needs a vote from the full Senate, then will have to go back to the House for a concurrence vote before heading to the governor. 

We’re sure that U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has a habit of speaking through her clothing choices, is trying to tell us something by showing up to the U.S.-Mexico border in Naco wearing a snazzy pearl-snap western shirt and jeans tucked into her two-toned leather cowboy boots.