by admin | Jun 6, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Heading into November’s election, the Democratic Party felt good. They thought they had the presidency locked up. And here locally, they were convinced that they would gain control of Arizona’s legislature after outspending Republicans in every single race.
Then, a massacre happened. President Trump was handed a mandate by the American people, and Democrats actually lost ground in our state legislature. That had to feel like rock bottom for the Left, and yet, as we’ve seen so far in 2025, it wasn’t.
On the heels of their historic defeat, the Arizona Democratic Party (ADP) faced accusations of financial wrongdoing from one of its leaders, just days before its convention and officer elections in January. Then, in April, the ADP saw even more infighting between party leadership and the state’s top Democratic elected officials: Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, and U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego. Now, the latest news shows that, according to its own leadership, the Arizona Democratic Party will actually go broke by the end of this year.
That’s a lot of dysfunction in just a few short months, which is usually the domain for Republicans. But now it appears the Dems have become the standard bearer of political chaos.
In the midst of all this infighting and disarray has been more bad news for Democrats. Voter registration numbers in April showed that the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in Maricopa County has increased from 85,000 in April 2020 to 191,000 in April 2025. But that’s not even the worst part for the Left. According to the numbers, there are now fewer registered Democrats in Maricopa County than there were five years ago despite the fact that Maricopa County has grown by over 150,000 residents!
It’s tempting to want to grab a bowl of popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show. Heck, it’s better than just about anything Hollywood has put out in years. But the conservative movement can’t afford to take its foot off the gas. Right now, it is critical to keep the momentum going after a successful 2024 in two important ways.
First, conservatives need to unite around winning issues such as border security, school choice, and putting more money back into the bank accounts of Arizona’s families with lower taxes and utility bills. After the Biden administration’s disastrous handling of the border, illegal immigration ranked as one of the top concerns for voters this past November. And there isn’t a person in this state who wouldn’t like to have more money back in their wallets.
On top of that, teachers’ unions made it no secret that their top priority was to roll back and eliminate the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program in Arizona. They spent millions to push candidates with a long track record of being anti-school choice in this past election. And they lost big. Now, more families are recognizing the tremendous benefits of school choice in our state as enrollment in the ESA program continues to grow.
These are winning issues, and Republicans must unite around them to build on this success. But standing on the right side of key issues is only one part of keeping the momentum going.
Leading up to the 2024 election, a strong coalition of conservative groups got proactive. They excelled at registering thousands of new voters and converted countless disaffected Hispanic and young voters into pro-freedom Republicans.
But we can’t be satisfied or rest on our laurels.
Outreach and engagement with families, business owners, and voters all throughout the state of Arizona must be a priority. And if the conservative movement continues to build on these pillars—and the Dems continue to self-immolate—the winning won’t stop heading into 2026.
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by admin | Jun 3, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
In November 2022, Arizona voters narrowly approved Prop. 308, making Arizona the 24th state in the nation giving taxpayer-subsidized, in-state tuition rates to illegals. Its narrow passage on the ballot was preceded by its razor-thin passage at the state legislature, slipping out because two former Republican legislators, who since lost their seats to primary challengers, rolled their caucus and voted in lock step with Democrats to force it for a vote.
After making the ballot, the measure was bankrolled by a small but well-financed cohort within the political class, business community, and immigration activist organizations funded by George Soros. Even a handful of Republican elected officials and candidates jumped on board, including a few city council members and current candidate for the Republican nomination for Arizona Governor, Karrin Taylor Robson.
It was in part billed by proponents as only applying to “Dreamers,” or recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established under the Obama administration. In reality, it allowed for anyone here illegally to get in-state tuition rates as long as they spent at least two years in an Arizona high school—signaling to the rest of the world that if you enter here illegally in time to go to an Arizona high school, American taxpayers will subsidize your tuition at our universities.
But they hid from the public one important fact. It unequivocally violates federal law.
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton signed a bipartisan immigration bill, which included a provision explicitly prohibiting universities from providing lower tuition rates to illegals than they do to any other U.S. citizen, regardless of their residency. In other words, under this federal immigration law, a state like Arizona could give illegals in-state tuition rates, but only if they provide that same rate to every citizen of the country regardless of their residency status, ensuring illegals are not given a privilege and benefit not provided and extended to every lawful U.S. citizen.
This federal law is explicit and clear, but states have been ignoring it for years. When Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation wrote his report on it more than a decade ago, 12 states were in violation. Today, 24 states are still incentivizing illegal immigration by having every other taxpaying citizen subsidize their in-state tuition rate, some even providing scholarships, grants, and aid further subsidizing their tuition.
In the 2011 report, Hans noted that in 2005, it was estimated that providing an in-state rate to illegals in California was costing taxpayers between $222.6 and $289.3 million and in Texas between $80.2 million and $104.4 million. It’s costly for taxpayers, fundamentally unfair, and incentivizes more people to enter our country and states illegally.
But these states, including Arizona, continue to flagrantly violate federal law because there is no private right of action. So anytime a U.S. citizen who is charged more to attend a university than an illegal sues, the courts toss the case for lack of standing. It would take the federal government to enforce its own laws to put a stop to it. Since its passage in the 1990s, no executive has done so.
Until now.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order to, for the first time, do just that, directing the Department of Justice to investigate states violating the law.
Just think about it. A U.S. citizen who is a resident of another state will be charged $34,014 to attend Arizona State University this year, and that’s up from $26,470 just 10 years ago. An international student, someone who is not a U.S. citizen but is lawfully here temporarily to pursue higher education, will be charged $37,202. But a noncitizen who entered this country illegally? They will be charged $11,822, less than a third of out-of-state U.S. citizens and international students who followed the law. Those students and every taxpayer pick up the tab to subsidize the tuition of illegal immigrants.
It was bad policy then, when the border was wide open. It’s bad policy now. It was illegal then, and it is illegal today. It’s time for the Trump Administration to shut it down.
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by admin | May 16, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Joe Biden caused a lot of damage in just four years as president. He undermined national security, cratered the economy, and weaponized the deep state against ordinary Americans and civil liberties. Considering these monstrous failures, the devastation he caused in transportation and infrastructure is largely overlooked. But shockingly, Biden’s USDOT director Pete Buttigieg made it pretty far down the road implementing a woke transportation agenda across the country.
In the past decade, environmentalists and central planners have linked arms with woke evangelists to radicalize transportation policy across the country. This was super-charged under Biden’s administration that pushed propaganda about roads being racist, rewrote rules and policies to force the Green New Deal, and made billions in grants to states and localities contingent on them adopting this woke agenda.
Now, Trump is hitting the brakes on the Left’s anti-car agenda, and in just 100 days Secretary of USDOT Sean Duffy has begun reversing course, cleansing the agency of DEI, environmental red tape, and wasteful and damaging spending.
Taxes on Driving & Subsidizing Transit Boondoggles
Only four weeks after being sworn in as Secretary of Transportation, Duffy sent a letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul informing her he was shutting down the congestion pricing pilot program, which charges most drivers a $9 toll for entering NY’s “congestion relief zone.” The “pilot program” is estimated to generate a half billion dollars a year, not for road improvements to benefit the drivers paying the toll, but to bail out the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which supposedly needs $15 billion in infrastructure improvements.
It isn’t just New York that needs a bailout for “Big Transit.” Billions every year get shelled out by the federal government to fund transit projects with embarrassingly low ridership. On February 20th, the USDOT announced they were launching a probe into California’s bullet train boondoggle, a pipedream of the Obama Era that has gobbled up over $16 billion in taxpayer subsidies and failed to lay one track in 16 years. Similarly, Duffy cut funding to another expensive train project in the state of Texas, cancelling the remaining $60M of a federal grant and telling project leaders that if they think the project is feasible, they should shoulder the cost and not expect the American taxpayer to bail them out.
Transportation Green New Grift
Sec. Duffy also immediately began eliminating the Green New Deal nonsense plaguing the USDOT under Buttigieg. Duffy rescinded the Federal Highway Administration GHG rule that forces states and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to establish targets to reduce emissions. And he reopened the CAFE standards to reverse Biden’s effective ban on gas cars and provide the choice consumers want. From top to bottom, Biden’s USDOT was forcing a radical environmental agenda, mostly through granting and withholding of federal monies. Billions of dollars were allocated to local city projects that ripped up perfectly good roads to narrow or eliminate them and replace that space with bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. No more.
It is obvious to see Duffy is over the target when radically liberal transportation publications like “Streetsblog” have a new lamenting post every day. They even commented on the USDOT’s “purge” of various links on the agency’s website supporting “Complete Streets” that were clearly put together by Left activist organizations and provided the justification for thousands of cities to redesign their roads to force people out of their cars. Lest you think complete streets sound like an innocuous, non-political design feature, Streetsblog explains it as, “a powerful tool to reduce racial and social inequities, as well as making cities more green and accessible.”
Transportation Gone Woke
Lastly, this administration has been quick and bold in their attack on the unamerican cult of DEI, embedded at every level of government. Sec. Duffy immediately began rescinding Biden DEI policies at the USDOT, including cutting the strings to federal monies contingent on DEI, “social cost of carbon,” or “disparate impact” findings. In fact, he has made it clear that states can expect not to receive funds if they break the law, including sanctuary jurisdictions that do not comply with immigration enforcement. And Duffy announced they would strip funding for pointless woke research projects such as the $6M spent on “intermodal inequities, particularly how improvements to auto travel can benefit higher income, often white drivers, while depressing transit ridership potential and depriving it of revenues necessary to provide comprehensive services to lower income, often BIPOC people and research… to address safety concerns of women and gender non-conforming people using public transportation.”
The Root Problem – Vision Zero
But what lies at the bottom of all of this – congestion pricing schemes and other taxes on driving, emission standards to ban gas cars altogether, rip out roads and replace them with bike lanes, and siphon transportation dollars to bailout transit – is the ideological rot that is the Vision Zero initiative.
In Arizona we identified the Vision Zero initiative as the most effective injection of woke ideology into transportation planning in the country. After all, who doesn’t want to end traffic fatalities? The initiative itself started in the states as a non-profit funded by a liberal Bay Area clearinghouse for leftist causes adopting an ideology founded in Sweden. It has since penetrated the educational institutions of transportation professions and gained saturation in 2016 when it was officially adopted by the USDOT and became central to planning and funding requirements. In the name of making streets safer, Vision Zero has been the vehicle accelerating the wokeification of transportation planning.
Arizona and Sec. Duffy Can Permanently Save our Roads
In Arizona, we have been the tip of the spear fighting all these issues. At the top of the list is our “Freedom to Move” referral which would enshrine in the Constitution a ban on the government tracking, taxing, or limiting our miles of travel. This measure is currently one vote in the Arizona House away from being on the 2026 ballot. But we have also introduced a host of bills, fought the extension of the half cent sales tax in Maricopa County that subsidizes transit to the tune of billions of dollars, and worked in local communities to stop road diet projects.
But all this will continue if Sec. Duffy doesn’t completely eradicate Vision Zero from the USDOT, which is why we sent a memorial to the Trump Administration and Congress to educate the agency about it.
It has only been a little more than 100 days since Trump has taken office. The breadth and speed of the actions taken by the USDOT in that short time is breath-taking. Secretary Duffy arrived just in time to start the reversal of the corrosive woke transportation trends in our country. Yet there is still a lot more work to be done, and we are hopeful, given the performance thus far, and with groups like ours, the administration will get around to it.
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.
by admin | May 13, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
Since becoming Governor of Arizona in 2023, Katie Hobbs’ name has been synonymous with corruption. Now, one of her latest vetoes shows the lengths she is willing to go to protect her own schemes.
Buried on the afternoon of Friday, May 2, Hobbs vetoed SB 1612, along with 21 other bills. Sponsored by Arizona State Senator TJ Shope, SB 1612 would have required anyone applying for grants to various state agencies to disclose gifts, donations, or other support provided to the sitting governor. That sort of transparency should be something that every Arizonan can get behind—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, you name it—unless, of course, your agenda doesn’t involve the best interests of Arizona citizens, right Katie Hobbs?
This whole story starts at the very beginning of Hobbs’ tenure as governor. If you’ll recall, at the time, Hobbs set up a shady slush fund to provide donors with a conduit to buy political favor from her administration. While setting up and managing the fund, Hobbs illegally used public resources—like the state’s website—to solicit money for her inauguration. And she also tried to stop the disclosure of the names of those who donated to her inaugural fund.
But after immense political pressure and public records requests filed by groups like the Arizona Freedom Foundation (who operates AZ Free News), Hobbs finally released the names of the donors. One of the names of the groups on the list was Sunshine Residential Homes Inc., a for-profit company that contracts with the State of Arizona to provide some child welfare services. At the time, Sunshine Residential Homes made a donation of $100,000. But in June 2024, an eye-opening report revealed a deeper level of corruption—an alleged pay-to-play scheme between Hobbs and the group home.
According to the report, Sunshine Residential Homes donated approximately $400,000 toward the Arizona Democratic Party, Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaign, and her aforementioned inaugural fund. How generous! Surely there couldn’t be anything else behind this. Oh…wait a minute. The report revealed that Sunshine Residential Homes was granted a 60 percent increase at a time when the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) cut loose 16 providers! On top of that, no other standard group home provider received a rate increase. This arrangement set up Sunshine Residential Homes to potentially receive millions of dollars more at the taxpayers’ expense. Are donations supposed to yield that kind of return?
While the scheme is still under investigation from both Attorney General Kris Mayes and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, Hobbs could’ve given the people of Arizona greater confidence in the government by signing SB 1612. Instead, she dropped a two-sentence veto letter saying that AHCCCS’ procurement and award processes are “consistent with Medicaid best practices.”
That’s right. Hobbs dodged the issue and attempted to bury it because she knows she has no good reason to oppose this bill. And that just about sums up Katie Hobbs. Her entire tenure has been filled with corruption. We’ve seen it when she diverted millions for an unauthorized program that has blown a hole in our state’s budget. We’ve seen it when she broke the law to take credit for the Republican tax rebate. We’ve seen it when she approved a $700,000 contract for Urias Communications, owned by the brother of the now-former Office of Tourism Director Lisa Urias, to create a new state logo. And now we’ve seen it once again as she tries to hide from her pay-to-play scandal through her veto pen.
SB 1612 would’ve brought some much-needed transparency and accountability, no matter who is in the governor’s office. That’s something all Arizonans deserve. But as long as Katie Hobbs is governor, we’ll get neither.
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
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by admin | May 9, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
PHOENIX, ARIZONA – This week the Arizona Supreme Court granted review of a critical 1st Amendment lawsuit, Center for AZ v. AZ Secretary of State. The case deals with Proposition 211, which established onerous and unconstitutional disclosure requirements on private organizations and donors that could lead to harassment, censorship, and chill free speech. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
The Arizona Supreme Court granted review on the following issues:
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- “Is the Voters’ Right to Know Act facially unconstitutional under the Arizona Constitution?”
- “If not, did the court of appeals properly dismiss Plaintiffs-Appellants’ as-applied challenge?
“We are thankful that the Arizona Supreme Court accepted review of this vital case for our First Amendment liberties,” said Scot Mussi, President of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. “Both the U.S. Constitution and the Arizona Constitution guarantee citizens the right to speak freely, which includes the right to not be forced to speak. Prop 211 not only violates this right for donors by silencing them from supporting causes they believe in but impairs the speech of nonprofits like ours as well. We are hopeful that the Arizona Supreme Court will rule in favor of the Constitution after considering the merits of the case.”
Joining the Arizona Free Enterprise Club on this challenge are the Center for Arizona Policy, with the Goldwater Institute serving as counsel.
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.
by admin | Apr 29, 2025 | Misc, News and Updates
PHOENIX, ARIZONA – This week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed SCM 1002, which “urges the President, and the Congress of the United States to eliminate Vision Zero and instead promote transportation solutions that prioritize sound engineering methods, reliable safety outcomes, flexibility and engineering innovation.”
Vision Zero is an ideology, not transportation engineering. The ideology has one set of prescriptions for every perceived problem – narrow lanes, remove lanes, lower speed limits, add bike lanes and sidewalks, and other mandates that increase congestion to get people out of their personal vehicles. It first appeared in Sweden at the end of the 20th Century and has spread all throughout Europe and, unfortunately, most American communities.
Thankfully, the Trump administration has already taken steps to eliminate Vision Zero, DEI, and the Green New Deal from the federal government, including blocking New York City congestion pricing, uprooting emission reduction requirements, and removing the Complete Streets page from the Federal Highway Administration’s website. More of these actions are forthcoming under President Trump and Secretary Sean Duffy’s leadership.
“In recent years, radical leftists have hijacked our government to impose their woke transportation-related dreams across our country and world,” said Scot Mussi, President of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. “We witnessed those dreams rapidly become reality over the past four years under the Biden administration and Pete Buttigieg. Thankfully, President Trump and Arizona Republicans realize the importance of stopping the un-American war on cars, replacing these with rational, tested, and true actions in our communities that prioritize freedom of choice and prosperity for all. We are grateful for the members of the Arizona Legislature who supported SCM 1002 and who stand as a check against Governor Hobbs’ radical schemes to fundamentally transform our state’s transportation policies.”
The Arizona House passed SCM 1002 with a vote of 32-23 (with five members not voting). Earlier this session, it was approved by the Senate 17-12 (with one member not voting).
Help Protect Freedom in Arizona by Joining Our Grassroots Network
Arizona needs to have a unified voice promoting economic freedom and prosperity, and the Free Enterprise Club is committed to making that happen. But we can’t do it alone. We need YOU!
Join our FREE Grassroots Action List to stay up to date on the latest battles against big government and how YOU can help influence crucial bills at the Arizona State Legislature.
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