by admin | Oct 17, 2023 | Elections, News and Updates
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Unless you are New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham, who thinks she can just declare a public health emergency and ignore what the Constitution says. Yes, in her view, she can declare an emergency and then all “rights” are on the table, and she is free to suspend them as she wishes.
Thankfully, this was too far for even anti-gun politicians like Rep. Ted Lieu from California and New Mexico’s own Attorney General who said he would not defend the declaration in court. In other words, it was so clearly unconstitutional that even the most radical gun control advocates distanced themselves from it.
Abuses of Emergency Powers During COVID
But it is an important reminder of the abuse of emergency powers we all experienced during COVID, and why it is critical to rein in these powers. While it’s clearly unconstitutional to suspend the 2nd amendment with an emergency declaration, most states over the last 100 years have granted extremely broad powers to the executive branch to declare so-called public health “emergencies.” These powers are usually enshrined in state law, and they have largely been upheld by courts as constitutional.
Arizona was not and is not immune from this. Here, the “emergency” declaration in response to COVID was not officially terminated until March 30, 2022, 749 days after it was first declared. During that time, businesses were closed, students were required to wear masks, and people were prevented from seeing loved ones in hospitals.
Many lawmakers wanted to halt the emergency declaration almost immediately, but quickly discovered that if they wanted to end the emergency outside of regular session, they needed 2/3 of the body to call a special session. And if the legislature was called into session, they were powerless at stopping local governments and Charter cities like Tucson or Phoenix from declaring their own state of emergency if the statewide emergency was terminated. It was quickly determined that without significant emergency powers reform, our freedoms and liberties will remain under threat from overreaching government.
States Need to Restrict Emergency Powers, and That Is What HCR2039 Will Do
Earlier this year, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country” and “it is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level.” Thankfully, that is exactly what our legislature did in passing HCR2039, allowing the people to amend the constitution to ensure no future “emergency” declaration is without end and without a proper check from the legislature.
If passed by the voters in 2024, HCR2039 would constitutionally limit emergency powers of the Governor and provide the legislature with the authority to roll back any emergency declared in the state. HCR2039 would:
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- Require automatic termination of an emergency declaration by a Governor 30 days after it is declared.
- Empower the legislature to call itself into a special session immediately after an emergency declaration by a Governor with just one third of the body.
- Allow the legislature to alter, limit or roll back an emergency declaration at any time after it is declared.
HCR2039 Does Not Confer Any New Emergency Powers
Some believe that all emergency statutes are unconstitutional in the first place because they are not enumerated in the state constitution. That’s not true because states have inherent police powers, including for the protection of public health and safety. That is why existing emergency powers statutes in Arizona have largely been upheld by the courts. Whether the Arizona Constitution makes mention of “emergency powers” or not, the legislature has the authority to prescribe the powers and duties of the Governor, including the ability to respond to emergencies. In other words, all powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states under the 10thAmendment, are reserved to the states.
HCR2039 Is Supported by Conservatives and Opposed by the Radical Left
This pro liberty ballot measure was supported unanimously by conservative lawmakers and has the support of freedom-minded groups including the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Goldwater Institute, Republican Liberty Caucus of Arizona, and EZAZ. Conversely, it was unanimously opposed by all Democrat lawmakers and by liberal pro-lockdown organizations including the Arizona Public Health Association, Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, National Organization for Women, the Sierra Club, and Arizona Center for Economic Progress.
Before the next “emergency,” it’s imperative that Arizonans enshrine a strong constitutional limit on the powers the legislature can delegate to the Governor to respond.
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 | Oct 12, 2023 | News and Updates, Tax
“Don’t California our Arizona.” It’s a saying we’ve had around here for quite some time, and for good reason. Not only is California known for having ridiculously high tax rates, but woke policies in the state have:
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- Banned the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.
- Banned all natural gas appliances (like the gas stove) by 2035.
- Led to an increase in smash-and-grab robberies after Prop 47 more than doubled the felony threshold for petty theft and shoplifting.
- Dramatically increased homelessness despite throwing billions of dollars at the problem.
- Led to rolling blackouts during historic heat.
The list could go on and on. But it’s pretty clear. California’s policies have been a disaster, so much so that the state once ran out of U-Hauls because so many people were leaving. And yet, despite all this, Arizona lawmakers still decided to send your hard-earned dollars to woke Hollywood liberals through a movie tax credit bill last year. And while we hate to say we told you so, that decision now appears to be coming back to haunt Arizonans.
Earlier this week, it was announced that DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg’s political operation will be joining forces with Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs to launch a PAC here in our state. And what is the PAC’s primary goal? Making sure Democrats win control of our state legislature! And you can be certain that Hobbs will gladly reward her woke allies in Hollywood with your tax dollars—all the while fighting to stop Arizona’s kids from receiving $7,000 to pursue an educational experience that works for them.
This is the exact reason why the Club fought so heavily against the movie tax credit bill (HB2156) in the first place. The legislation gives movie companies refundable tax credit subsidies up to 15 percent if they spend up to $10 million in productions costs, 17.5 percent if they spend between $10 million and $35 million, and 20 percent if they spend over $35 million. Plus, there’s an opportunity for an additional 2.5 percent if the movie company meets other criteria. With the average cost of making a movie over $100 million, that means the vast majority of movie companies will benefit from the highest possible percentage.
So how much of your tax dollars will be given away to liberal movie studios like DreamWorks that want to turn Arizona Blue?
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- $75 million in 2023
- $100 million in 2024
- And $125 million in 2025 and each year thereafter
But our state has to be getting jobs or something else out of this, right? Wrong. Countless studies on Hollywood subsidies conducted by both liberal and conservative economists have concluded that these tax credit schemes are a ripoff. One recent study found that despite $10 billion in taxpayer spending, there was no statistically significant impact on employment. Womp…womp…
That means the only thing Arizonans have to look forward to thanks to this ridiculous piece of legislation is Hollywood liberals like Jeffrey Katzenberg leveraging cash from Arizona taxpayers to push their woke agenda and elect Democrats. All while making movies bashing America using our state as the backdrop.
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 | Oct 5, 2023 | Misc, News and Updates
It’s time for COVID mandates to go away forever. And last month, one Arizona town took a step in this direction when it passed a resolution that needs to be a trend in every city throughout our state.
With a desire to take proactive measures to protect citizens’ constitutional rights, the Queen Creek Town Council passed Resolution No. 1540-23 with a unanimous vote during its regular meeting in September. And it’s quite clear. While the town recommends that people exercise personal responsibility to prevent illness, it committed to not implementing mandates concerning masks, vaccines, business closures, curfews, or “any similar measure.”
On top of that, the new town policy protects its employees who will be allowed to make their own decisions on vaccines and mask-wearing without facing the threat of losing their jobs for refusing to wear a mask or get the COVID vaccine. And perhaps even better, the new ordinance doesn’t just apply to COVID. It has been officially adopted by the town for the response to any future pandemic. It’s about time we see some sanity in government.
While it’s certainly sad that it ever had to come to this, COVID paranoia has been with us for several years now, and it’s clear that it’s not going away any time soon. Back in August, Morris Brown College in Atlanta implemented a two-week mask mandate for all students faculty and staff. And in the same month, Hollywood studio Lionsgate also instituted a mask mandate for employees due to COVID. Yes. This is still happening in August 2023.
But it also serves as a great reminder of all the ways government officials seized our freedoms during the pandemic.
We faced mask mandates, lockdowns, and social distancing all in the name of taking “15 days to slow the spread.” Many students were shut out of their classrooms for over a year only to find out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was following the advice of a teachers’ union. Some government officials threatened the idea of vaccine passports as the price of getting back to normal. Then, President Biden took it a step further when he went ahead and mandated vaccines for any employer with 100 or more employees with cities like Phoenix following in his footsteps. While the Supreme Court eventually blocked the move, many citizens had already given in to the mandate out of fear of losing their jobs, and the damage had been done.
But let’s take a step back to June 2020. If you’ll recall at that time, just about every local government in the state of Arizona enforced mask mandates. That included Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, Scottsdale, Tempe, and more. But one town refused to implement mask mandates any longer. And that was Queen Creek.
Now, the town is leading the charge toward freedom again, and it’s time for the rest of Arizona’s cities to get on board. COVID hysteria has gone on long enough. And the Club is committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure that a great ordinance like the one Queen Creek just passed is spread around the entire state.
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 | Sep 28, 2023 | Elections, News and Updates
For months we have been hearing that a small group of disgruntled political consultants and power-hungry politicians would be releasing their plan to scrap our century-old primary and general election system in favor of a confusing jungle primary/ranked choice voting scheme that will disenfranchise voters and empower special interests.
Well last week a group called “Save Democracy Arizona” rolled out their proposed election reform ballot initiative, and it is about as dysfunctional a plan as what we expected.
Reading through their proposed constitutional amendment, a sprawling 4 pages of poorly written language drafted in secret, it is abundantly clear that this won’t make elections any more transparent or fair except for the special interests who support it. And it does far more to disenfranchise voters and destroy democracy than actually save it.
The first major change included in the proposed initiative is the creation of a jungle primary. If this sounds familiar, that may be because California uses a jungle primary system. That’s right, we are now importing California solutions to “fix” our electoral process. Plus, voters in Arizona overwhelmingly rejected a jungle primary ballot measure a decade ago.
Under a jungle primary, every candidate—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, No Label Party, and Independents—would now appear on the same “primary election” ballot. The winners of the primary then would advance to the general election.
Who gets to decide who the primary winner is? The legislature, who can allow as little as two and as many as eight candidates to advance to the general. If they decide to allow three or more, the legislature must then allow for the ranking of those candidates—thus implementing Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
So, the measure includes both California-stye jungle primaries and Alaska-style ranked choice voting, all built on the same baseless and flawed complaints about our election system that they have been making for years.
They argue that primary elections result in divisiveness, leading to a small fraction of the most partisan voters determining the outcome of elections. But California Democrats quickly learned the same was true for Jungle Primaries after their voters enacted it, where candidates from only one party advance to the general election ballot in some races, stripping voters of any choice at all.
On top of this, Jungle Primary proponents argue that independent voters (now a third in Arizona) don’t have a voice in the process. But independents do get to vote in our primary elections now, they just have to decide whether they want to vote in the Republican or the Democrat primary – not both. Plus, Independent candidates get to bypass a primary election altogether, collecting more signatures but then advancing straight to the general election ballot—a pathway that partisan candidates can’t pursue.
Finally, one third of voters being “independent” means that two thirds, a supermajority, do associate with a political party. So, this whole multimillion dollar effort to completely change our elections is purportedly built on a block of voters, in the extreme minority, that campaigns spend significant amounts of time and money courting in every election.
In other words, these voters are not ignored, and they do have a voice—arguably an outsized one. The truth is that Jungle Primaries and RCV aren’t for independents. They’re for special interests who can’t win elections without changing the system.
The good news is that despite months and months of planning, the proponents are divided and have split. Just days after Save Democracy filed “Make Elections Fair,” Voter Choice AZ announced they will not be supporting it and will instead move forward with filing their own initiative.
For either to be successful, they’ll need to compete to raise millions to collect the necessary 383,923 signatures, plus a couple hundred thousand safety net. And then they will have to convince voters to support it—voters who have been hearing about the problems of RCV for months.
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 | Sep 21, 2023 | News and Updates, Tax
If someone in the private sector illegally took money that didn’t belong to them and then refused to return it, what do you think would happen? They could be heavily punished with fines. They could face sanctions. They could even end up in jail, depending on the offense.
But for about a year and a half, Pinal County has been allowed to drag its feet in refunding $80 million that it illegally collected from taxpayers. It’s just another example of government officials who think they are above the law.
This all started back in 2016 when Pinal County officials proposed a $640 million transit tax hike to voters in order to fund a wide array of transportation projects throughout the region. But after unveiling the plan, the county faced strong opposition from retailers, home builders, auto dealers, and multiple taxpayer watchdog groups.
This should’ve been enough for county officials to recognize that the community didn’t support their proposal. But they were too committed to their scheme. So, what did they do? They developed a new plan to buy off their political opponents by adding a special carve-out for purchases that exceeded $10,000 from paying the new tax. That’s a bold strategy, isn’t it? It’s also illegal.
Because the new tax would only apply to retail sales below $10,000, it meant that the day-to-day purchases of lower-income citizens would be more heavily taxed than more expensive items. But capping the tax in such a way isn’t authorized by Arizona statute. That’s why the Goldwater Institute—supported by the Club every step of the way—challenged the Pinal County transportation tax in court. And in March 2022, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled against the tax in a big win for taxpayers.
That should’ve been the end of it. Pinal County officials should’ve immediately begun working on a plan to refund the money to taxpayers. And yet, nothing but crickets for the past 18 months. The reality is that the Arizona Department of Revenue and Pinal County haven’t taken any steps to even allow people to apply for refunds. And at the end of last month, ADOR announced that it was pausing any plans to send the money out because it did not receive clarity from Pinal County on how to do so.
This is outrageous! And more than likely, it’s completely by design. Pinal County officials think that if they delay long enough, they will be able to keep the $80 million. After all, they had a bill introduced during the last legislative session that would have allowed them to do just that. That bill went nowhere, just like the illegally collected taxpayer money the county has been holding in an interest-bearing escrow account.
Now, the Goldwater Institute has gone back to court to force the refunds to occur. And once again, the Club will support this effort by whatever means are necessary. Pinal County officials had no right to take this money. And they certainly have no right to keep it. Taxpayers are legally entitled to these refunds. And if Pinal County refuses to do the right thing, it’s time for the courts to step in and force them to.
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 | Sep 14, 2023 | Elections, News and Updates
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes appears to be in a tug-of-war with Governor Katie Hobbs to determine who is worse at their job. It’s been well-documented that since she took office, Hobbs has been off to a rough start with high-profile staff exits, breaking the veto record after killing the bipartisan “Tamale Bill,” and alienating many Democrats by signing the Republican budget. But over the past eight months, Fontes has been working just as hard in the battle to see who’s more incompetent. Not only has he failed to perform the necessary voter list maintenance—leaving 14 Arizona counties in violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act—but he rushed through a version of the Elections Procedures Manual (EPM) that is filled with unlawful provisions.
Now, Secretary of State Fontes has been dealt another major blow after a superior court judge ruled that he and his predecessor (now-Governor Katie Hobbs) enforced an EPM requirement that contained an unlawful voter signature verification process.
Currently in Arizona, early ballot voters are only required to prove their identity by signing the exterior of the envelope that contains their ballot. That process is already problematic enough, which is why the Free Enterprise Club has been a strong advocate for universal voter ID in elections. But Hobbs’ EPM, which has been upheld by Fontes, essentially rewrote state law to make invalid voting easier.
Under Arizona statute, an envelope signature is supposed to match the signature on the voter’s registration record. If it doesn’t, the country recorder must contact the voter, advise the voter of the inconsistent signature, and allow the voter to correct or the county to confirm the inconsistent signature. But Hobbs’ EPM instructs county recorders to validate early ballot affidavits if they determine the signature matches any election-related document available to them. This not only rewrites state law regarding signature verification for mail-in ballots, but it creates a process that invites dubious methods and opportunities for abuse during the signature review process.
That’s why the Free Enterprise Club filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes after he failed to reject Hobbs’ EPM earlier this year. Fontes and a left-wing group called Mi Familia Vota (represented by Hillary Clinton Lawyer Marc Elias) responded by filing a motion to dismiss, claiming to the court that the term “registration record” was ambiguous and up for interpretation. Essentially, they were arguing that he could decide what constituted a valid signature record for the purpose of verifying a ballot signature. On top of that, Fontes petitioned the court to interpret the law to mean that other documents could be included in the definition of “registration record.”
But Judge John Napper saw through those arguments and rejected Fontes’ motion to dismiss earlier this month. He told Fontes that the statute is clear and unambiguous, and he stated that only a voter’s signature used to register to vote is valid.
While the case isn’t over yet (we anticipate that Fontes will appeal), this is a great development as we move forward. The judge ruled in our favor on all questions of law. And we will keep fighting this case all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure a final victory for the integrity of our elections.
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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