Senate President-designate Bob Burns

The winter holidays are over, a New Year has arrived, and much of Arizona’s political attention now turns the pending opening of a new Legislature followed shortly thereafter by a new governor (unless Janet Napolitano unexpectedly runs into confirmation problems with the U.S. Senate). This could be a legislative session unlike any other in living memory — if incoming Senate President Bob Burns has anything to say about it.

Burns has pledged to prevent any bill from reaching the Senate floor until the Legislature has addressed the state’s massive budget problems. This promise hasn’t really discouraged rank-and-file lawmakers from writing up bills, with House members filing more than 900 proposals and the Senate adding another 550 so far.

Legislative leaders have tried before to halt all business to compel lawmakers to focus on budget matters like a laser. One prominent example was in 2002, when all bills were frozen in their tracks mid-session for about three weeks.

While this tactic makes lots of common sense to outsiders, it never has worked as legislative leaders intend. As a budget deal wasn’t immediately forthcoming, those lawmakers not involved in the closed-door negotiations (and that would be most of them) would get bored and then anxious about their special bills slowing twisting in the wind. They would start linking their support for specific budget proposals to getting their own bills moving again. Legislative leaders couldn’t appear to be giving special treatment, so they turned the spout on again, bills resumed flowing through the legislative session, and the budget would again be rushed to a finish at the end of the session.

However, it could be much different this year. Burns strikes me as committed enough or stubborn enough to withstand psychological pressure for a long time. He will have a loyal ally in this endeavor with his appropriations chairman, Sen.-elect Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, who has pointed out repeatedly that adopting a balanced budget is the only action that the Legislature is required to do by the state constitution.

And at the outset, Democratic leaders Rep. David Lujan and Sen. Jose Luis Garcia have said they support no action on non-budget bills until the fiscal woes are handled. It’s going to hard for them to take back these public statements later and criticize Burns or incoming House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, for holding up measures not directly related to spending or taxes.

In January and February, we should see one of the most interesting sets of early days in a legislative session in Arizona history.

Barrett Marson

Tribune writer Mary K. Reinhart’s in-depth profile Sunday of Kirk Adams, the next speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, revealed the answer to a question being tossed around by journalists and public relations officials alike: Is Barrett Marson in or out as the spokesman for House Republicans? Marson won’t be part of the new administration as Adams looks to replace all of the top staff members from the Jim Weiers administration.

“We’re making a clean break,” Adams told Reinhart. ”This is a good time, especially for Republicans.”

Marson has been the House communications director for more than three years, serving as Weiers’ voice to the media and writing press releases for other House Republicans as well. Marson could be annoyingly aggressive as he tried to get traditional media and bloggers to cover an issue that he believed made his bosses look good or would embarrass Weiers’ most potent foe — Gov. Janet Napolitano. But Marson is generally well-liked for his sense of humor, and always has respected the role of journalists in the politcal system even when some lawmakers didn’t. He also gained extra attention earlier this year during his one-on-one debates with state Democratic Party spokeswoman Emily DeRose on “Horizon,” the local news issues PBS show.

Still, elected leaders who defeat an incumbent, as Adams did with Weiers, typically want new key advisors who don’t have close ties to the prior administration.

A former award-winning print reporter, Marson cover state politics for several years for the Tribune and then the Arizona Daily Star. In 2001, he broke the story of then-Gov. Jane Dee Hull’s frequent weekend flights in a state-owned airplane to stay at her cabin retreat in the White Mountains. That story helped to shape a rather negative image of Hull during her final two years in office.

REP. KIRK ADAMS SPEAKS WITH STATE CAPITOL REPORTERS THURSDAY AFTER BEING SELECTED BY FELLOW REPUBLICANS TO BE THE NEW HOUSE SPEAKER (Photo by Capitol Media Services).

A fair number of people were unimpressed when I wrote a few weeks ago about Rep. Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, seeking to unseat Rep. Jim Weiers, R-Phoenix, as speaker of the state House of Representatives. Few outsiders I talked to gave Adams any realistic chance of winning the House’s top leadership post, unless Republicans suffered a bloodbath in Tuesday’s election.

Republicans actually did better than expected Tuesday, and they have expanded the number of House seats they control. But Capitol Media Services is reporting that Adams defeated Weiers anyway today in a private meeting of incoming Republican House members.

Among the people who should be thrilled by this news is Gov. Janet Napolitano. She and Weiers have developed a rather intense dislike of one another during her six years in office. Napolitano and her Democratic allies tried both in 2006 and this year to knock Weiers out of the House with candidate challenges in his home district. But they failed.

While Adams isn’t any closer to Napolitano philosophically, he’s more likely to have an on-going working relationship with her — if she doesn’t leave Arizona for Washington, D.C., for a post in Barack Obama’s presidential administration.

Here’s Capitol Media Services’ first report:

House Republicans ousted speaker Jim Weiers on Thursday, choosing a Mesa lawmaker who promised a more effective effort to enact `”good Republican policy.” And that, said Kirk Adams, means adopting Republican budgets — budgets that have less spending and are actually balanced against revenues, “not one that has a $1.2 billion hole in the moment that it’s passed.”
Adams said he believes he — and the other Republicans — have a mandate from voters to pursue those policies by virtue of the fact that it appears that the GOP picked up two seats in the 60-member chamber. That gives them a 35-25 edge over Democrats. The lifelong Arizona resident said he is not planning to exclude the minority Democrats.
“They certainly should have a voice and it should be an open and transparent process,” he said.
“It should be respectful of everybody’s opinion,” Adams continued. “But at the end of the day, when we vote on those
bills or we vote on the budget, we also need to respect the will of the voters.”
And Adams said that shift occurred “in a year, in a country, where it wasn’t a good year for Republicans anywhere else, except perhaps in the Arizona Legislature.”

                KIRK ADAMS                         STEVE YARBROUGH

I recently wrote about two state senators from the East Valley entering the competition to be the next president of the Arizona Senate. Well, two House members from the Mesa-Chandler area apparently are preparing to challenge House Speaker Jim Weiers, R-Phoenix, for his post, assuming all three are re-elected Nov. 4.

Reps. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, and Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, are both committee chairmen and effective at getting their issues through the legislative process. A spokesman for Weiers tried to pass off the two challengers as “friendly competition.” But Adams, at least, seems pretty serious to me, given he’s put together this rather nifty 16-page booklet on how Republicans could stop losing so many budget battles to Gov. Janet Napolitano and Democratic lawmakers. (Hat tip to espressopundit.com for reporting this first).

 Adams wants to take advantage of the widespread anger that Napolitano drove the legislative budget process two years in a row, despite Republicans holding more legislative seats. Weiers was among those outraged in July when a handful of Republicans again worked with Democrat lawmakers to pass out the governor’s budget proposal. But Adams is implying that Weiers’ leadership (or lack thereof) contributed significantly to Napolitano’s victories.

“You have to ask yourself what’s the purpose of being in the majority,” Adams told me Thursday. “You can’t keep blaming what happens on a few wayward Republicans.”

Adams’ little white paper specifically calls for the House speaker to be far less than aloof from fellow Republicans, to attend all or most of that party’s caucus meetings throughout the session and to take direct charge of the major issues. Adams also wants the chairman of the House Appropriation Committee to lead any negotiations with the outside parties (Napolitano’s office and Democrat lawmakers). Of course, that’s easy to say with Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, leaving the House next year because of term limits. A new appropriations chairman appointed by Adams would have to be more willing to bend to the wishes of House leadership than Pearce ever was as appropriations chairman.

I haven’t been able to reach Yarbrough to hear his thoughts about running for speaker. Adams said the two haven’t discussed the possibility of uniting behind one candidate to improve a challenger’s chances of upsetting Weiers. But Adams was rather deferential.

“I think Steve would make a very good speaker who would serve our caucus and the state of Arizona very well,” Adams said.