In his first year as House minority leader, Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, D-Laveen, helped lead his caucus to gather the most votes for a budget negotiated under Gov. Katie Hobbs among House Democrats. In a recent interview with the Arizona Capitol Times, De Los Santos discussed the recent legislative session and the challenges it presented.
The questions and answers have been edited lightly for style and clarity.
What were the biggest wins for House Democrats this session?
I think the two biggest issues that the state Legislature saw this year were the Division of Developmental Disabilities fight and the budget. On both of those issues, House Democrats were the power players and the power brokers and we got extremely big wins in both. I mean, without House Democrats, you don’t have DDD being saved. You don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars going into some of the most vulnerable human beings in the state and their health care. And then on the budget, you have the biggest investment in child care and making child care affordable in the past 10 years for working families. You have the Aggregate Expenditure Limit lifted for two years, which has never happened before. You have opportunity weight funding, District Additional Assistance, you have access to free school meals, and you have the largest investment in the Arizona Promise program in Arizona’s history. We’re funding the Community College Promise Program for the first time. We’re drawing down over $200 million for tribal health care in the budget. We’re expanding access to cover treatment for patients with neck and head cancer. These are some huge wins, especially in this revenue environment that we’re in, which is tough. I think it’s a remarkable success for the caucus.
More House Democrats voted for the budget this year than the last two budgets that have been negotiated with Gov. Katie Hobbs. How involved were Democrats with this budget and what was different this year?
You had a supermajority of the House Democratic caucus on the budget and that’s for a reason. We were involved in the budget process from day one, engaging with Republicans and the Governor’s Office, and ultimately influencing the final product. As I mentioned, there are some significant wins for Arizona’s working families in there. But after two years of the relationship with the Governor’s Office, I think we’ve sort of on both sides figured it out a bit and understood how to work better together. When you also have a House Republican caucus that is dysfunctional and in disarray, you’re going to need Democratic votes to get this thing passed and that’s one of the first things I said on opening day was that you will not get a budget without Democratic votes. And, you know, that’s exactly what we did.
Why is waiving the AEL for two years instead of just one year such a big deal?
It’s a big deal on a policy level because schools are on the brink of financial calamity every year, which is insane. This is money that obviously has already been appropriated. It’s been approved. There’s an artificial limit here that makes no sense. It’s outdated, and yet the Republicans politicize it and jeopardize the education of hundreds to thousands of public school students and they sort of use it as a bargaining tool here at the Legislature and it’s ridiculous. So, we avoid this fight for the next two years. On a political level, though, it’s incredibly important because it takes away one of the bargaining chips that the Republicans have to extract concessions from us.
JLBC estimates that the federal budget reconciliation package will cost Arizona approximately $381 million to conform to the tax policy changes. What do Arizonans need to know about what’s going on federally?
That number is a massive understatement because it doesn’t take into account the cost shifts on SNAP, Medicaid, and the job cuts. When you have job cuts, you’re going to see a decline in income statewide. A decline in income means a decline in revenue for the state. You’re just gutting the health care economy in particular. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce is saying that we’re looking at at least 36,000 jobs lost because of this. Experts are predicting five critical access hospitals in rural Arizona are going to close. These are hospitals in rural areas where it’s the only hospital in that area. If they close, people are going to die. If you’re a pregnant woman who is having an emergency late during your pregnancy, where are you going to go? If you’re having a heart attack or a stroke that needs immediate care, what are you going to do? And so I think the most important thing is understanding the human cost of this, and the reason it happened is because Republicans want to give tax cuts to the billionaires. Every single Republican in Congress owns it, and every single Republican in the House and Senate here in Arizona owns it because they cheered it on. So, I think Arizonans need to know who to blame and it’s squarely the fault of the Republicans.
What’s next for Prop 123?
House Republicans need to stop using this as a political football. They’re trying to attach ESAs to Prop. 123, which has never happened before. And what they’re trying to do is enshrine ESAs into the Constitution. This is ridiculous for two reasons. One of them is they know the program is unpopular. If you recall, voters rejected ESAs at the ballot box by a massive margin just a couple of years ago. They know they can’t win on the issue alone, so they’re tying it to funding for public schools. It’s a stunning admission about how unpopular ESAs are that they can’t fight it on their own terms. But second of all, we just need a clean extension of Prop. 123 at this point. I mean, this is hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools depend on. We are ranked 49th in the country in per pupil funding for education. Meanwhile, you’ve seen the reports, it’s like hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in ESA accounts. It’s ridiculous, and so we need to do what we did with the budget and with DDD, which is to strike a commonsense compromise that sends a responsible Prop. 123 package to the ballot.
What was the most disappointing part of the session?
I think it’s the failure again to address ESAs. I mean, this is a billion-dollar boondoggle that is robbing public schools and is just rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. The fact that Republicans here are looking the other way toward this disaster is extremely disappointing.
There were a lot of real pressing issues this session. DDD, the budget, even Axon. Why did it feel like all of these came down to the wire?
It’s because the House Republicans don’t know how to govern. Frankly, the House Republican caucus is rife with incompetence and irresponsibility. I mean, the budget that passed was basically identical to the budget deal that was struck weeks beforehand. It’s just tantrums and games, and then we wind up where we started, and I don’t understand the theater that happens in the middle because the end result is effectively the same. Same thing with DDD. We drove families to the brink of calamity here. I mean, the number of moms I talked to who were in tears and who were having panic attacks. Somebody spoke about having suicidal ideations because they didn’t know whether that money and that support were going to be there. It’s insane, and it’s solely because the Republicans just don’t want to govern in a bipartisan manner. They throw a fit and a tantrum, and then at the end of the day, they fold like a cheap suit, and we’re back to where we were, square one.
What will your focus be in the interim, and what is priority one in the upcoming session?
House Democrats are going to be traveling all over Arizona to examine the impacts of the state budget. We’re going to head to the Navajo Nation, for example, to look at the new dialysis treatment center at Sage Memorial Hospital. We’re going to plan visits to things like veteran treatment courts that we funded in this budget. So, we’re going to go out into the community and show that Democrats are delivering for our constituents, and also to hear from people and learn about what we should be prioritizing in the coming session. All over the state. Rural and urban, red districts and blue districts, to learn about what the people expect from their leaders. The second thing that we’re going to be working on is understanding the impacts of Trump’s billionaire bill on Arizona and particularly on our state budget, and what it means for next year.
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