Archive for the 'Janet Napolitano' Tag
July 6th, 2009, 10:46 am by Le Templar
 Senate President Bob Burns (left, sitting down) and Gov. Jan Brewer might need some mediation after his harsh words last week about Brewer's budget vetoes and a special session today (Photos by Capitol Media Services). When state lawmakers gather at 1 p.m. today to again deal with budget woes, a new set of clouds will darken the proceedings after the top two legislative leaders lashed out at Gov. Jan Brewer for her vetoes last week, which included striking down all funding for public education just to make sure Brewer has the Legislature’s attention.
Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, was particularly caustic. As Capitol Media Services reported, Burns essentially called Brewer incompetent and accused her of a “strong-arm tactic to take control of the legislative process.”
Several Capitol insiders noted Burns was angry, in part, because he had to cancel a long-anticipated trip to Europe that was supposed to start over the July 4th holiday. His language was so strong that it prompted a direct, public response from Brewer, in which she said she won’t take his comments personally. Nice words, but it’s going to be a while before these two become political friends once more.
House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, didn’t go quite as far as Burns. But he did call the vetoes “irresponsible and reckless.” That’s not something a leader says in public and then expects to quickly resolve the source of the conflict.
What has to be galling for Burns and Adams is they find themselves trapped in the same position as their predecessors while Janet Napolitano was governor. Not that Brewer is much closer to Napolitano’s political ideology than previously suspected. But Brewer is demonstrating that many of the budget conflicts between Napolitano and lawmakers arose from the tension between the executive and legislative branches instead of naked partisanship.
In the end, Burns and Adams counted on Brewer’s loyalty to her fellow Republicans to accept she had received all they were willing to approve. But Adams and Burns ignored the long independence streak of Arizona governors who consistently have been willing to stand up to their own party, when they believed it would in the best interest of the state (and their own political careers).
Now, unless some Republican lawmakers changed their minds over the weekend about a temporary sales tax increase, Brewer is going to look for help from Democrats to get a final budget done. The governor’s challenge is putting together a strong enough coalition that can move a new budget package through the legislative process that Burns and Adams still firmly control.
Posted in: Arizona Legislature • Arizona government • Congress • Election issues • Governor • Presidential campaign • Bob Burns • Jan Brewer • Janet Napolitano • Kirk Adams • State budget countdown | 1 Comment »
July 2nd, 2009, 10:21 am by Le Templar
 U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (far left) was part of a White House meeting in February with President Barack Obama in this photo posted at whitehouse.gov by the Obama administration. With the state budget crisis on hold until Monday, I can take a moment to mention other tidbits that have happened in the past week or so. Here’s a few items that caught my eye:
- Janet Napolitano, one-time governor and now U.S. Homeland Security secretary, was named by President Barack Obama to be his lead negotiator with Congress on immigration reform policies. Obama revealed this after a high-level June 25 meeting at the White House intended to jump-start an effort to finally resolve the nation’s broken immigration system. Napolitano received a huge amount of media attention when the swine flu pandemic was first identified. She seemed to be on my television news every day for weeks. Now, she it’s likely she’ll be back in the spotlight this fall on an issue that, until the economy collapsed, had been one of hottest domestic topics especially among talk radio and television and certainly here in Arizona.
- Have you taken the Tribune’s Fourth of July quiz yet? And you passed, right? Of course you did, that’s why you read this blog! But if you are, say, under 30, you are likely to be in a shrinking minority who actually understand basic American civics. Tribune writer Mandy Zajac used questions from the official test given to all immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens. The Goldwater Institute used the same test when it recently surveyed 1,350 Arizona public high school students and found nearly 97 percent couldn’t pass the exam! The institute’s Matthew Ladner suggests high schools should require the citizenship test for graduation, or colleges should require it for admission. I’ve got to say, if we expect foreigners in this country to have this knowledge, how we can fail to demand it from everyone else?
- The Associated Press reported on a Republican candidate for Maine’s governor who appears to have “borrowed” the Obama campaign logo from last year. I’m detecting a pattern here, as we noticed a similar concern in April with John Paul Mitchell, a Republican candidate for Arizona governor.
Posted in: Election issues • Immigration • Journalism • Presidential campaign • Barack Obama • Goldwater Institute • Independence Day • Janet Napolitano • John Paul Mitchell | Post a Comment »
June 19th, 2009, 4:18 pm by Le Templar
 The typical trailer bill in the state Legislature winds up looking like this (Thomas Boggan/Tribune file photo). Gov. Jan Brewer has sued the Legislature to get her hands on a package of budget bills, claiming Republicans leaders could keep them until June 30 in an attempt to compel her to sign the measures to avoid a government shutdown. Given Brewer’s lengthy political experience, I have to believe she has a good idea what some Republican lawmakers are thinking. But there’s also a more noble reason for Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, to hold on to the budget bills until an deal is reached with Brewer — the trailer bill.
This term refers to a piece of legislation that “trails” along after approved bills with the intent of solving a political problem. One typical example is the governor wants a few items changed in a complex, important bill headed to her desk and, without those changes, she’ll veto the entire thing. Ignoring the governor’s wishes means legislative leaders would have to seek an veto override, or rework the bill after spending months to win enough votes for passage in the Senate and House.
As an alternative, legislative leaders promise to send the governor a new bill, a trailer, that corrects the few concerns she has about the original legislation. In theory, the governor can safely sign the first bill knowing that what she doesn’t like will be removed or changed almost immediately with the trailer bill. (Trailer bills also have been connected to disputes between the Senate and House over proposals that already have moved through most of the legislative process and sponsors desperately want to get to the governor’s desk before a session ends).
I don’t know how long the Arizona Legislature has used trailer bills, but they had a dismal track record during the Janet Napolitano years. The timing between an approved bill and its trailer never seemed to work out, and the trailer bill would get dumped under pressure to wrap up the regular session. Napolitano always could wield the veto stamp to block what she didn’t like. But rank-and-file Republican lawmakers who counted on trailer bills to deliver something they wanted out of negotiations with Napolitano or legislative leaders got left out in the cold.
A key downfall for trailer bills is once a bill is sent to the governor, she has five days to act on the legislation or it automatically becomes law. Few new bills can get through the legislative process in that time.
Burns’ handling of this year’s budget bills solves that problem. Assuming the Legislature and Brewer eventually agree to changes in the current $8.2 billion plan that can be handled with trailer bills, Burns could wait until the trailer bills are approved and send the whole package to Brewer at the same time.
So the question is, can that be done before the fiscal year ends in 11 days, especially now that negotiations between the governor and Legislature have been suspended until Monday, according to news alerts from The Associated Press and Capitol Media Services?
Posted in: Arizona government • Governor • Bob Burns • budget countdown • Jan Brewer • Janet Napolitano • trailer bills | Post a Comment »
June 18th, 2009, 5:21 pm by Le Templar
 Current Gov. Jan Brewer and predecessor Janet Napolitano As the June 30 deadline approached for adopting a state budget in 2008, there was plenty of discussion around the state Capitol about the possibility of a government shutdown once spending authority had expired. Then-Gov. Janet Napolitano claimed to have a plan to keep most agencies functioning, but never publicly disclosed it. Sen. Bob Burns, R-Peoria, then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he said a draft bill that would offer “bare-bones” funding for one month only for the most critical areas. But the public never saw that plan either. In the end, it didn’t matter, as the Legislature and Napolitano finally agreed to a $11 billion budget three days before the fiscal year ran out.
Now in 2009, with the same deadline just 12 days away, our state leaders have picked up where they left off a year ago. This time, Burns as Senate president is looking at a temporary proposal to fund all of state government at current levels, similar to the continuing spending resolutions adopted every year by Congress because it never adopts a complete budget before a new fiscal year starts. In his role as Senate Appropriations chairman, Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, still wants to go with the “bare bones” approach with funding only for public safety and education.
And current Gov. Jan Brewer is rapidly putting together her own plans, in case the Legislature fails to send her any acceptable spending proposal by July 1. Unlike Napolitano, Brewer’s administration is releasing at least a few details about what would happen with a government shutdown.
But it appears Republican leaders in the Legislature might be serious this year about avoiding the worst-case scenarios if July 1 arrives without an adopted budget.
Posted in: Arizona Legislature • Arizona government • Congress • Election issues • Governor • Presidential campaign • Bob Burns • Jan Brewer • Janet Napolitano • Russell Pearce • State budget countdown | 1 Comment »
January 16th, 2009, 10:31 am by Le Templar
(File photo by Capitol Media Services)
We seem to have two choices to solve the state’s budget crisis — slash more than a $1 trillion from education (that’s billion with a “t”), or borrow up to our eyeballs and hope the Santa Claus in Washington delivers Christmas in February.
Outgoing Gov. Janet Napolitano released her final budget proposal this morning. On paper, it eliminates a $1.2 billion deficit this year (although legislative budget experts now predict a $1.6 billion gap) and a nearly $3 billion deficit for the next fiscal year. Her numbers claim she would reduce state spending by $975 million over the two years. But Napolitano couldn’t find a single program or state worker that Arizonans can live without during this deep recession.
Instead, she managed to find new accounting gimmicks such as postponing, but not eliminating, payments to the public universities and state Medicaid insurance program. She also would borrow more by pledging future tobacco settlement money and lottery revenues.
As uncomfortable as many of these proposals are to fiscal conversatives, the alternative that Republican budget-writers have come up with includes slashing $900 million from K-12 education or 20 percent of total state spending. Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa County Community College District, has started to prepare for the possibility of losing all state aid for the largest system of its type in the country.
Dire days for Arizona, indeed.
Posted in: Arizona Legislature • Arizona government • Schools • Gerry Rafferty • Janet Napolitano • Joe Egan | 2 Comments »
January 12th, 2009, 4:16 pm by Le Templar
Gov. Janet Napolitano delivered her State of the State address today, the first day of the 2009 legislative session. Her basic message was she can wipe out the state’s multi-billion budget deficits without huge cuts to just about any priority that someone has for state government:
“I have already given you a balanced budget plan for 2009; and as I have in every year I have served, I will present to the Legislature a detailed plan on how to balance next year’s budget, still protecting important investments and accomplishing that without raising taxes.”
Most conservatives and libertarians have a much different view of the outgoing governor’s record on the budget. I think she does deserve credit for publicly opposing new tax increases, when many other Democrats would like someone to champion that approach rather than some of the enormous budget cuts likely to come out of the Republican-controlled Legislature. But there’s simply no way to sustain a state government as envisioned by Napolitano in the near future unless tax increases were part of the package.
Meanwhile, the Arizona chapter of Americans For Prosperity has taken a different approach to its watchdog role for the Legislature this year. Americans For Prosperity is one of those groups that annually rate individual lawmakers based on their votes for bills and issues that each group supports or opposes. With its libertarian-leaning perspective, Americans for Prosperity favors less government spending across-the-board and lower taxes.
Traditionally, groups like Americans For Prosperity issue their “scorecards” several weeks or months after a session has concluded, but in time for lawmakers and other activists to use during the election season.
But this year, Americans For Prosperity is sharing a profile of its expected scorecard right now, so lawmakers know exactly what to do if they want to pick up a high ranking from this group. I do know that many lawmakers love getting AFP’s title of “Hero of the Taxpayer,” while others dread being called an “Enemy of the Taxpayer.” I wonder if watchdog groups from other perspectives will try something similar to elevate their own influence this year?
Posted in: Arizona Legislature • Arizona government • Governor • Americans For Prosperity • Janet Napolitano • State of the State | Post a Comment »
January 8th, 2009, 5:33 pm by Le Templar
ARIZONA TREASURER DEAN MARTIN, LEFT, AND GOV. JANET NAPOLITANO COULDN’T AGREE TODAY ON WHETHER MARTIN’S OFFICE NEEDS TO START NEGOTIATING WITH BANKS FOR A LINE OF CREDIT IN CASE THE STATE RUNS OUT OF OPERATING CASH BEFORE A NEW BUDGET IS ADOPTED. (Photo by Capitol Media Services)
The most interesting news to come out of a special meeting today of something called the state Loan Commission was that Gov. Janet Napolitano attended and put on a rather fiesty performance. There’s been a lot of spectulation that Napolitano has basically checked out of her state job as she prepares for hearings next week on her nomination to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Napolitano has stopped holding weekly media briefings and her last scheduled public appearance here in Arizona was on Dec. 9.
But there she was today, live and in person, fulfilling her duties as chief executive — although she apparently thought the meeting called by state Treasurer Dean Martin was a waste of time. Her actions to prevent Martin from setting a maxium possible interest rate on any borrowing for operating cash, well, that has to raise expectations for the proposed budget her office is expected to release late next week. For Napolitano to be true to her words (”If the Legislature adopts the budget plans that I have proposed … there will be no need for borrowing.”), she’s going to have to come up with a rather compelling approach to fixing a $1.5 billion deficit with more than half of the fiscal year already over.
Posted in: Arizona government • Governor • Dean Martin • Homeland Security • Janet Napolitano • state Loan Commission | Post a Comment »
December 16th, 2008, 3:31 pm by Le Templar
BILLY SHIELDS (LEFT), FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE PHOENIX FIREFIGHTERS UNION, ESCORTS GOV. JANET NAPOLITANO AT THE FORMAL 2006 DEDICATION OF THE ARIZONA 9/11 MEMORIAL (Original photo at azgovernor.gov).
Randy Pullen, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, made an interesting point today about the news that Gov. Janet Napolitano is about to sign an executive order granting “meet and confer” status to unions that represent employees at most state agencies. Pullen points out Napolitano had six years to unilaterally recognize unions, but she’s doing so only now that she’s poised to resign as governor and become director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“Arizona is a right-to-work state and the governor is changing a long standing policy because she knows it won’t matter to her political future in Arizona,” Pullen said. “The Legislature has repeatedly refused to pass similar bills.”
I would add that Napolitano no longer would have to deal with the budget implications of granting state employee unions some direct negotiating power. So it’s easier for her to give these unions something they have long desired and could score her points with Democrats in other parts of the country. However, I wonder if the unions shouldn’t be somewhat insulted that Napolitano waited so long. Tribune writer Mark Flatten reported in 2002 that the firefighter unions played a key role in her first campaign for governor by gathering many of the $5 contributions that she needed to qualify for public campaign funds. Unions also have been large fundraisers for state Democratic Party efforts, and Napolitano certainly has been aware of this.
Pullen goes on to demand an official investigation, essentially claiming that Napolitano is consciously rewarding union campaign contributions with the “meet and confer” status, ala what’s going on with the Illinois governor right now. However, if Pullen has any actual evidence of such quid pro quo with the specific unions involved, he should be filing a criminal complaint instead of hoping some prosecutor reads his comments and is inspired to act.
Posted in: Arizona government • Governor • Janet Napolitano • Phoenix firefighters • Randy Pullen • Republican Party | 3 Comments »
December 4th, 2008, 4:32 pm by Le Templar
GOV. JANET NAPOLITANO (LEFT) ANSWERS A QUESTION MONDAY AFTER CERTIFYING THE NOV. 4 ELECTION RESULTS WITH SECRETARY OF STATE JAN BREWER (RIGHT). (Photo by Capitol Media Services).
There’s a growing drum-beat among Republican activists and bloggers that Gov. Janet Napolitano should step down immediately now that she has been formally selected to run the Department of Homeland Security when Barack Obama becomes president. The cheerleaders include radio talk show host Austin Hill on the Tribune’s Opinion 2 page, Len Munsil, who ran against Napolitano for governor in 2006, Greg Patterson at espressopundit.com, and the team of pro-life activists at Sonoran Alliance.
The consistent theme is that if Napolitano truly cares about Arizona’s future, she will give Secretary of State Jan Brewer an opportunity to get up to speed on all of the challenges facing state government before the start of the 2009 legislative session in January. There’s also talk in practical terms that state lawmakers and other politicians will simply ignore the Napolitano administration for the next few weeks as they wait for Brewer to take charge.
There’s a tiny flaw with this analysis. Napolitano likely will call the Legislature into special session within the next few days to start addressing this year’s budget deficit that already has reached $442 million. In the past when things didn’t get done on budget issues, Napolitano was a master at shaping public opinion and media coverage to make it appear that the Legislature was almost exclusively at fault. Republicans always cried foul because Napolitano and her Democratic allies usually worked behind the scenes to delay or trip a majority plan that Napolitano wouldn’t support.
But many people who don’t work at the Capitol look at the process this way: it’s the Legislature’s job to pass a budget for the governor to sign or veto. If lawmakers can’t approve a package for her to even consider, it’s their fault, not hers.
And when Napolitano does veto a budget, she always makes sure to pin her action on protecting hot-button issues such as education and health care. That way, it’s still the Legislature that tends to looks bad if it doesn’t meet her demands.
So, if Republicans go into a special session expecting to ignore Napolitano’s agenda in her waning days, they could be the ones who end up looking foolish.
Posted in: Arizona Legislature • Arizona government • Governor • Homeland Security • Jan Brewer • Janet Napolitano | Post a Comment »
December 1st, 2008, 6:36 pm by Le Templar
GOV. JANET NAPOLITANO ANSWERS MEDIA QUESTIONS MONDAY IN PHOENIX ABOUT HER PENDING NOMINATION TO BE SECRETARY OF U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY (Photo by Capitol Media Services)
The Tribune Editorial Board spent a long time today discussing the implications of today’s formal announcement that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano will be nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after President-elect Barack Obama takes office Jan. 20. I learned from those chats that I’m holding on to an antiquated idea: that elected officials make a contract with the voters when they run for office to serve a specific period of time for a specific purpose. Apparently, it has become a given among many people that smart, ambitious politicians will, and should, jump into higher office when the opportunity arises.
But I heard from one friend today who said she definitely would have voted differently in 2006 for secretary of state, or at least considered the candidates more closely, if she had known that Napolitano would leave in the middle of her second term and voluntarily turn the governor’s office over to Jan Brewer. I’m not one of the people who subscribe to the notion of Arizona is somehow doomed with Brewer as governor. When it comes to the state budget crisis, this change might be exactly what Arizona needs right now.
But I understand the widespread angst among Democrats and even independents that the governor’s office likely will see a sharp change in focus and philosophy with Brewer in charge. Many voters elected Brewer solely on her qualifications to manage the state’s elections and to administer business filings, and not as a potential chief of state.
I’m not comfortable with the notion of the governor’s office as a political stepping stone. The job’s just too important, and too difficult to perform if the office-holder isn’t committed heart and soul. I don’t know anyone who thinks this year was among Napolitano’s best as she devoted a significant portion of her time and attention to help Obama win. At the very least, I think the failure of the initiatives on a transportation sales tax and state trust lands to even qualify for the election ballot can be attributed to Napolitano’s focus on other issues.
By the way, I’ve been fairly consistent on this point of view. In 1998, I was working for the daily newspaper in Wichita Falls, Texas, when then-Texas Gov. George Bush was running for re-election. He already was positioning himself to run for president but wasn’t saying so publicly. On at least two occasions, I directly asked Bush to explain if he would run for president or not, so Texas voters had that information when they voted for governor. Bush blew off the question, as I’m sure he did for other reporters, and the only people who seemed to care assumed he would be campaigning for president in 2000.
But my concerns might have more resonance here than in Texas, where the governor and lieutenant governor run for office as a team. My guess is proposals to create a similar system in Arizona will get more serious attention here in the next couple of years.
Posted in: Arizona government • Governor • Homeland Security • Jan Brewer • Janet Napolitano | 6 Comments »
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