The Daily Agenda: Leave the bathrooms alone

They're doing sex, drugs and Juuls in there ... We're still awaiting that press release ... And finger off the trigger, poser.

Being a statehouse reporter is a bit like being Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.”

Year after year, the same people introduce the same bills and fight with the same opponents over the same topics while making the same arguments. And for the past 10 years, one of the most predictable fights at the Capitol has been about bathrooms — specifically, who gets to use which ones. 

Arizona was the birthplace of the Great Bathroom War after John Kavanagh introduced the very first “bathroom bill” in the nation in 2013. 

The original bill would have classified a transgender person using a restroom of their gender as “disorderly conduct” a Class 1 misdemeanor. Kavanagh later pivoted to have the bill prevent cities from creating bathroom use policies after critics claimed that the City of Phoenix’s 2013 decision to expand its anti-discrimination ordinance to include sexual orientation, gender identity or expression would lead to a rash of men dressing as women to enter women’s restrooms.

Since then, a truly absurd amount of legislative time, media attention and our national mental capacity has been spent discussing how and whether to police toilets.

While Arizona may have kicked off the latest round of bathroom battles, bathroom brawls have always been a part of American civic life for as long as public restrooms have existed, as Neil J. Young wrote in Politico back in 2016 at the height of the trans bathroom wars. Fears of others in restrooms were part of the debate around civil rights, segregation and equal rights for women.

Despite all the energy lawmakers have put into the issue, no bathroom bill has ever been signed into law in Arizona, though that didn’t stop Kavanagh and Republican lawmakers from trying again this year, apparently hoping for a more favorable outcome under a Democratic governor. It doesn’t seem likely. 

Unfortunately, the bathroom wars show no sign of slowing down. In fact, they’ve spread into schools. 

Just last week, the Catalina Foothills Unified School District near Tucson had to cancel its scheduled board meeting after a threat of violence was lobbed at the board over its bathroom policy, which itself only became controversial after conservative media wrote about a middle school principal who sent staff a “confidential” list of students who used pronouns and names different than what’s in school records.

And the Peoria Unified School District shot down a policy aimed at preventing trans kids from using the bathroom of their choice. Two of the five board members wanted to pass the resolution, in spite of their lawyers’ advice that the move would be legally shaky at best, saying they wanted to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republic’s Madeleine Parrish reports. 

So we were pleasantly surprised to read a report in the East Valley Tribune’s Scott Shumaker this weekend about school bathrooms that had (almost) nothing to do with gender issues. 

“A small part of the talk is tangled up with discussions on the district’s transgender guidelines for bathroom use, but most of the concerns aired deal with vaping, drug use and even sexual activity,” he wrote.

This guy: Pinal County Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh and the county settled a lawsuit against him for $20,000 of his own money and another $20,000 of taxpayer money (not including the previous $175,000 in legal fees) to compensate two top employees of the County Attorney’s Office after he spread lies about them having an affair, Pinal Central’s Mark Cowling reports. Cavanagh also has to author a press release apologizing. 

“(I)t’s very clear to the taxpayers and the voters that he is an absolute pathological liar. He is truly one of the most fact-challenged human beings,” Garland Shreves, one of the two employees who had filed a lawsuit, said of Cavanaugh. 

So much opportunity: A fourth Democrat has joined the growing primary to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert in Congressional District 1. Democrat Kurt Kroemer, who has led nonprofits and once served on a Maryland city council, joins Democrats Andrei Cherny, Amish Shah and Andrew Horne, while several others are also considering joining the race in the now purplish district, including Selina DiSanto and Marlene Galan Woods, the Republic’s Tara Kavaler writes. 

Candidates are already starting to hit the campaign trail and ask for your money. We humbly suggest you tell them all no and subscribe to local news organization instead.

Snowflakes in Tempe?: The Arizona Capitol Times got the audio recording of Sen. Wendy Rogers seeking a restraining order against reporter Camryn Sanchez after the reporter started investigating where the lawmaker lives. The Capitol Times is challenging the restraining order in a May 10 hearing.

Good riddance: The Washington Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez has all the dramatic behind-the-scenes shenanigans happening before the vote to expel Republican Rep. Liz Harris from the Arizona House last month, writing that the story “illuminates what it takes for GOP lawmakers to police their own when it comes to election-related misinformation.” Sanchez writes that the vote eventually happened because she lied to the Ethics Committee and because her conspiracy-peddling friends came after fellow Republicans, not necessarily because she believed that stuff. 

“There’s a lot of election deniers out there,” one key state House Republican told the Post. “If that’s what we were going to be doing, there would be, like, 10 people expelled by now.”

Can’t wait to see him at the Capitol again: The lawyer of “QAnon Shaman” Jake Angeli wants his sentence vacated after Tucker Carlson showed short misleading clips of the January 6 insurrection showing police waving “sightseers” like Angeli into the Capitol, Richard Ruelas reports in the Republic. Angeli is set to be released from his Phoenix halfway house later this month. 

Government at the speed of government: Almost four months after Gov. Katie Hobbs established a prison oversight committee via executive order, the committee met and promised to start working, despite Republican lawmakers not appointing any positions as the order required, Elena Santa Cruz writes in the Republic.

A feather in their caps: An Indigenous student who sued Dysart Unified School District in 2019 after school officials refused to allow her to wear an eagle feather in her cap, settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith reports. Lawmakers changed state law after that incident to prohibit schools from barring Indigenous kids from wearing traditional regalia. Meanwhile, in Payson schools, the district has a good problem: It needs to spend about $800,000 of federal pandemic money or lose it. The district had originally wanted to buy portable classrooms, but that didn’t work out. Now, it has to go back to the drawing board for plans before September, Peter Aleshire reports in the Payson Roundup.

A what show?: Snowmelt in Flagstaff is backing up septic systems in rural parts of the city, forcing residents to get their septic tanks pumped multiple times or see it spill over, the Arizona Daily Sun’s Adrian Scabelund reports. It’s great for septic cleaning companies, but not so great for residents. 

“I mean, you could literally say it was a [expletive] show here for a bit,” local resident Shirleen Meyers, who had to have her septic system worked on twice in the last few weeks, told the Sun. 

Evan, this one’s for you: The Center for Biological Diversity is taking on “unowned horses” messing up the Salt River and “cow-worshipping, rancher-fearing BLM employees" who are allowing cattle-grazing to damage the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona. The Center and other conservationist groups filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the agreement managing the herd of feral horses in the Salt River, according to Courthouse News Service’s Joe Duhownik. And it issued a new report showing the damage cattle-grazing is doing near the protected San Pedro river, Paul Ingram reports in the Tucson Sentinel. 

Welcome to summer: Phoenix hit its first 100+ day Sunday, meaning the national and TV news are all over it. 

We can’t resist laughing at politicians posing with guns they don’t know how to use. 

We laughed at Kari Lake when she fell flat in an interview with a gun nut, and now we’re chuckling alongside Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, a former Marine, who over the weekend sent out a “poser alert” for presidential candidate Nikki Haley in her obligatory photo holding a large gun. 

The Republic’s Tara Kavaler has a whole story on the tweet that ends on the perfect note: “Haley did not serve in the military.”