Gov. Katie Hobbs gives the annual State of the State address in the Arizona House of Representatives on Jan. 13, 2025. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
In Arizona, a divided state government means elected leaders spend a lot of their time blocking one another’s policy proposals instead of creating bipartisan compromise.
Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs signed into law 265 pieces of legislation that had bipartisan support, but she also beat her own veto record, throwing 174 bills into the trash bin.
That shatters the previous record — one Hobbs set in 2023, her first year in the governor’s office, when she rejected 143 GOP-backed bills.
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The bills that Hobbs vetoed were debated, amended and discussed in public view in legislative committees and on the floors of both chambers before Republican legislators voted to pass them and send them to the governor.
The overwhelming majority of legislation proposed by Democrats was never considered at all.
In the legislative session that began Jan. 13 and ended 165 days later on June 27, legislators from both parties introduced a total of 1,854 pieces of legislation — 1,250 sponsored by Republicans and 604 that were brought forward by Democrats.
Of the 439 bills that ultimately passed through both chambers and were sent to Hobbs’ desk, only 10 were introduced by Democrats.
That’s because the Republican Senate president and House speaker appoint the committee chairmen who decide which bills get a committee hearing. Bills must get committee approval before being sent to the full House of Representatives or Senate for consideration. And with Republicans heading every committee, those chairmen have incredible power to block bills they don’t like, even if they know that those proposals would have enough support to get a passing vote from the whole chamber.
House Democrats aired their frustration with this practice after a late evening vote on the state budget on June 26, when Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin attempted to make a rule change limiting each legislator to proposing seven bills each session.
He claimed that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle had complained to him that committees were overwhelmed with the number of bills being proposed, without time to properly vet each one.
Kolodin himself sponsored 74 bills this year, but claimed he did so to prove his point that a cap was necessary.
“I knew that this body would not get desperate to change the rule to seven until the system was well and thoroughly overwhelmed,” he said. “And guess what? The system was well and thoroughly overwhelmed.”
The House actually does have a seven-bill limit, but it’s designed in a way to let lawmakers effectively introduce many more bills than that: The limit only applies to bills introduced after the first week of the annual legislative session. That means measures filed during the first work week, or before session begins, don’t count against the limit.
Kolodin’s proposal was swiftly voted down, with ample criticism from Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats argued that their main source of exasperation came from never having their bills heard in committee at all.
Rep. Lorena Austin, D-Mesa, said that not a single bill they’ve proposed in three years has gotten a committee hearing — even ones they said were not “egregiously partisan.”
“There were over 1,800 bills submitted, and here in the House, only 38 were heard from Democrats and only 12 in the Senate were from Democrats,” Austin said.
Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton, D-Tucson, said that a government truly representative of the voters would at least give more Democratic bills a chance.
“I was appreciative of actually … having one of my bills get a hearing in committee,” she said. “That has never happened before.”
With a 33-27 split in the House and 17-13 in the Senate, 56% of Arizona’s legislators are Republicans and 44% are Democrats. But with only 10 out of the 439 bills sent to the governor this year sponsored by Democrats, that means a paltry 2.3% of the legislation that had a chance of becoming law was introduced by the minority party.
Even with 255 Republican-sponsored bills signed into law this year, many of their proposals were blocked with vetoes.
In most cases, the sponsors of those bills knew the vetoes were coming. Hobbs promised to nix any anti-trans legislation and any bills that she believed would make the voting process more difficult, and broadly refuses to sign any bills that lack bipartisan support.
Republican Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, repeatedly bragged that his two packages of failed budget proposals meant he achieved the most Hobbs vetoes from a single legislator in one day: 28.
House Republicans’ refusal to work with Senate Republicans, Democrats from both chambers and Hobbs to craft a bipartisan budget before the June 30 deadline led to weeks of long nights ahead of the final budget passage on June 27. It also created hostility between Republicans who acknowledged a need to compromise with Democrats and members of the far-right Arizona Freedom caucus, who insisted their wish list be included without regard for any of the other lawmakers involved in the budgeting process.
“We have to wait for a Republican governor, that’s just the reality,” Sen. John Kavanagh, the Senate’s chief budget negotiator, said during debate on the Senate floor on June 19. Kavanagh was reacting to a slew of conservative amendments to the spending plan from the Freedom Caucus that would have blown up the budget deal and elicited a veto from Hobbs.
With Republican bills that lack Democratic support blocked by vetoes and most Democratic legislation blocked by committee chairman, as well as a slew of Republican bills similar to one another with slight policy variations that must be consolidated, most legislation proposed this year ended up in the garbage bin.
Many bills that passed through both chambers with bipartisan support and were signed by the governor include minor law changes, such as making certain specialty license plates available or tweaking certification requirements for professional licenses.
But there were also several significant pieces of bipartisan legislation passed this year, including:
- House Bill 2704, which gives $500 million in sales taxes over the next 30 years to the Diamondbacks for improvements to Chase Field.
- Senate Bill 1500, which provides compensation to wrongfully incarcerated for each year they were imprisoned and funds their mental health treatment.
- House Bill 2945, which prevented the Division of Developmental Disabilities from going broke before the end of the fiscal year, which would have caused 60,000 people with disabilities to lose vital services.
- House Bill 2581, which creates a sexual assault kit tracking system.
- House Bill 2281, which creates a missing indigenous person alert system.
The legislature also approved three resolutions this session, with only Republican support that bypassed a veto from the governor and will be sent directly to the ballot in 2026 for the voters to decide. They are:
- House Concurrent Resolution 2021, which would cap local municipal sales taxes on groceries.
- House Concurrent Resolution 2055, which would classify drug cartels as terrorist organizations
- Senate Concurrent Resolution 1004, which would prohibit the state from taxing drivers based on the number of miles driven
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
