Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill into law on Monday that requires the accommodation of in-person spiritual care visitations for residents of long-term care facilities, including nursing homes and hospices.
The bill, HB2449, had bipartisan support. It passed 57-2 in the House of Representatives and 18-10 in the Senate.
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An Arizona judge has ruled against efforts to keep two Republican congressmen and a state representative off the November ballot on the argument they committed “insurrection” in connection to the Jan. 6, 2020, Capitol riot.
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The federal agency that regulates water in Lake Powell warns that it may have to limit downstream water flow, affecting drinking water in Arizona and other western states.
Tanya Trujillo, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science for the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote governors’ offices of seven states about the continually falling water level in Lake Powell.
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Arizona is inching closer toward enacting new legislation allowing a patient the right to try remedies that could save their lives but not given government approval for use.
The Arizona House of Representatives passed the Right to Try for Individualized Treatments (SB1163) on Monday. The bill passed in the Arizona Senate in February, so now it will soon head to Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk for his signature.
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Inflation is soaring under the Biden administration, and it’s even worse in Phoenix. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation in metro Phoenix jumped 10.9% from February 2021 through February 2022, significantly more than the national average increase of 8.5% and higher than any other major metro area. This is one of the highest levels reported for Phoenix, the Common Sense Institute found.
The 8.5% inflation rate is the highest in the U.S. in 41 years. In 2020, the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was only 1.5%. It began spiking as soon as Joe Biden entered office. The main goods driving the spike nationally are food, gas, and housing.
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Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill to ensure that students will have time to take a moment of silence at school each day.
Ducey signed House Bill 2707. It’s a bill that requires all public and charter schools to give students a moment of silence at the beginning of the day. The one-to-two-minute moment of silence can be used in a way determined by the student and their parents.
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Arizona’s governing body for the state’s three public universities has given the go-ahead to make an education more expensive.
The Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) voted to approve tuition and fee hikes at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona. Tuition increases will range from 2% to 3.5%.
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Since President Biden has taken office, Arizona has been at the frontline of a savage battle currently underway on America’s southern border. This battle is being waged against a constant wave of undocumented illegal immigrants and deadly drugs that are entering our country with very little oversight or repercussions.
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Twenty-one states have filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s continued mask mandate on public transportation, including on airplanes.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody are leading the effort. Moody filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida along with 20 other attorneys general. DeSantis said the mask mandate was misguided and heavy-handed.
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Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma are the latest states considering bans on biological males participating in girls’ and women’s sports, with all three states passing legislation Thursday addressing the issue.
The Arizona legislature passed two bills addressing transgender issues that currently await Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s signature. If enacted, one bill will ban biological males from girls’ sports teams while the other will ban gender reassignment surgeries for minors.
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Technology giant Apple now allows Arizonans to keep a copy of their driver’s license and other state ID in their digital wallets.
Apple announced Wednesday that most iPhone and Apple Watch users with Arizona state documents are now able to upload digital copies in the same manner as credit or debit cards, making it the first state to do so.
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The theft of catalytic converters has become a big problem in Arizona, and State Rep. Diego Espinoza (D-Tolleson) is sponsoring legislation to expand the law against it. Current law only prohibits buying or selling a used catalytic converter outside of regular transactions; HB 2652 goes beyond that to make it illegal to possess, solicit, or advertise a used catalytic converter outside of regular transactions. It would also mandate reporting sales to DPS and tracking.
HB 2652 looks very likely to pass, as 49 members of the House voted for it and only 10 Republicans voted against it. It passed the Senate Committee on Transportation and Technology 9-0, and is now headed for the Senate Rules Committee.
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It is National Sunshine Week, which celebrates transparency in government, including creating awareness about requesting information from governments through FOIA public record requests. In Arizona, there are two tools provided by state agencies which allow anyone to look online at some of the government spending by state and local governments. Although it is a minimal amount of data, it reveals some missteps and waste.
The Arizona State Treasurer manages AZCheckbook.com, which provides information about funding the state gets from all sources, including the federal government, and how much it is distributing to schools, cities, and towns. The Arizona Department of Administration operates OpenBooks.AZ.gov, which provides checkbook-level information about individual state expenditures, including on the city and county level.
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Last year, Arizona enacted historic tax cuts, changing the state’s tax code law to mostly a 2.5% flat tax rate. But opponents collected enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot this fall, Prop. 307, that would reverse the legislation. In response, Republican state legislators are working with Gov. Doug Ducey to pass legislation that would make the initiative null and void — and maybe implement even more striking tax cuts.
State Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), who sponsored legislation last year that would have repealed and replaced the historic tax cuts with an even more far reaching 1.5% tax rate, told The Arizona Sun Times, “I told the Governor’s office that the 2.5% tax rate he’s pushing for can only be the starting point. With yet another year of record budget surpluses of nearly $4 billion, the people of Arizona are being overtaxed. We must cut taxes even more during the budget process.”
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Democratic former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who is running for Arizona Secretary of State, is calling for the Arizona Legislature to impeach Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich. The former county elections chief said it is due to Brnovich’s “grotesque political self-service, abuse of office, and other bad acts.”
Fontes declared, “It is well past time for Arizona’s legislative leadership to investigate, for possible impeachment proceedings, the increasing instability of our state’s top prosecutor.”
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Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network‘s National Political Editor, Neil W. McCabe, on Wednesday’s WarRoom: Battleground to discuss Arizona’s late-night legislation push to outlaw precinct strategy after being cheered by former President Trump. Bannon: People only have so much energy, so much time to put their shoulder to the wheel here. What is this fiasco in Arizona? We don’t have time to get Dan Schultz on today. We’re going to get him on tomorrow. Dan just texted me this thing from Harris County, where they didn’t count 10,000 ballots down in the Houston area. I think they just got rid of one of the Democratic officials and they’re tweeting out this is the result of the Bannon precinct strategy. It is really the Schultz precinct strategy. But where it was formed and when it came to birth in Arizona, President Trump – and just make sure everybody understands this – Trump comes out after Steve Stern and Schultz have done this incredible job. We’ve been on the WarRoom for over a year. People have responded. The posse is signing up all over the country. There are tens of thousands of people. It’s making the Left media melt down.…
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed War Room Pandemic’s Stephen K. Bannon to the newsmakers line to talk about their partnership with The Star News Network to bring hyperlocal news to the national level.
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Arizona conservative activist and lawyer Dan Schultz has been informing people for years about the importance of becoming a precinct committeeman (PC), something many political activists overlook, swept up instead by major political campaigns and national issues. Considered a national expert on the topic, Shultz authored the book “Taking Back Your Government: The Neighborhood Precinct Committeeman Strategy.” In the book, which got him an award from legendary Republican Party influencer Richard Viguerie, he explains how the best way for patriots to take back their government is to take back control of the Republican Party — through precinct committeemen.
He calls it the Precinct Strategy. Its focus is on influencing the policies of the Republican Party and who gets nominated and wins elections. He said PCs are actually the “elite” of the party, noting that fewer than one in one hundred political party members can be a voting member of the party. He pointed out that “the office of precinct committeeman has been called ‘the most powerful office in the world’ because the PC is the closest structured political officeholder to the registered voter.”
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The Arizona Legislature has voted to send the Arizonans for Voter ID Act to the ballot as a proposition this fall, and 15 more election integrity bills have passed the Arizona House. The Arizonans for Voter ID Act was initially launched as a citizens’ initiative by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which would have required 237,645 valid signatures to get on the ballot. SCR 1012, which passed along party lines, bypasses that time-consuming and often difficult process.
State Senator Kelly Townsend (R-Apache Junction), told the Arizona Sun Times, “Today the Senate Republican caucus met to discuss which bills they can support. We were able to get through much of what we have been proposing and received support from nearly all the members with two absent and not weighing in. I’m excited to see good election reform moving forward, ideas that will fortify election security so that voters can feel more secure about their votes. Bills deal with securing technology, ballot paper, chain of custody, removing drop boxes, improving signature verification, cleaning of the voter rolls, and many other items that we are looking to fix.”
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The Arizona Republican Party, along with its secretary Yvonne Cahill, has filed a lawsuit against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs over more actions she has taken that appear to be making it easier to commit voter fraud. The AZGOP’s Application for Issuance of Writ Under Exercise of Original Jurisdiction asks the court to compel Hobbs to include signature verification procedures in the election procedures manual and remove the language she added authorizing the set up of unmonitored ballot drop boxes, and challenges “no-excuse” early ballots as violating the Arizona Constitution.
AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward, who has been out on the forefront combating election fraud since the 2020 presidential election, told The Arizona Sun Times, “We want to make sure that our elections are secure so we can restore voter confidence and strengthen our representative republic.”
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The Phoenix Police Department (PPD) announced on Wednesday that around 100 officers and detectives from specialty divisions such as Violent Crimes are being transferred to patrol units due to a severe lack of officers on the streets and handling 911 calls. Their goal is to get the number of officers on patrol duty back up over 1,000.
The PPD acknowledged officer attrition reached an “unprecedented” rate in early 2021. “These trends indicated the loss rate would become critical due to insufficient hiring and increased employee separations,” Phoenix Police Department Chief Jeri L. Williams said in the plan.
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Phoenix Elementary School District 1 is cutting the merit-based pay of veteran school teachers, which accounts for 15% of their salaries, while offering $1,500 bonuses to new teachers who join the district. Some of the teachers believe it is in part due to the fact more experienced teachers are less likely to support CRT and other radical curriculum. Teachers at one of the district’s schools, Shaw Montessori, held a protest in front of the district’s administration building Wednesday night while its leadership was meeting.
The teachers found out in early February about the pay cuts. Administrators, principals and other staff are getting pay raises, veteran teacher Vanessa Stricker told the Arizona Sun Times. And Phoenix Elementary School District 1 School Superintendent Larry Weeks got a 12% pay raise last year, just in time to substantially increase his retirement pay when he retires in May.
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A consortium of Left-leaning groups is seeking to add an initiative on the Arizona ballot that is very similar to the federal HR 1. “Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections” rolls back recent election integrity laws passed by the Arizona Legislature, makes it easier for people to vote without proving citizenship, and removes standard election fraud safeguards like requiring registering to vote in advance of elections.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club called the initiative “a leftist wish list of election law changes.” AFEC contends, “[T]heir federal takeover of elections has been held up in the U.S. Senate for months, so they have moved to ‘Plan B ’— taking over the election process in Arizona.”
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According to a statement from its president, the Navajo Nation will continue its mask mandate, even as surrounding states begin to lift restrictions.
The large reservation, which is located in three different states, has witnessed a decline in cases in recent weeks.
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America Pack, a grassroots movement “built to empower citizens to hold elected officials accountable, advocate for honest elections, support law enforcement, and fight for freedom and liberty,” has issued a list of its most important bills this session in the Arizona Legislature. The topics primarily address election integrity, education, and COVID-19. They must be scheduled to be heard in a committee by Feb. 18, or they will die.
Election Integrity – House Government and Elections Committee
HB 2023, sponsored by State Representative Mark Finchem (R-Mesa) with several co-sponsors, requires digital images of ballots to be posted publicly online after elections.
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A renowned constitutional scholar said what is happening now at the southern border does constitute an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution.
“The kind of organized entry that we are seeing now where you got some of the gangs down in Mexico facilitating it and getting paid to put people across the border, that does qualify as an invasion even when no arms are involved,” Rob Natelson, the Independence Institute’s senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence, said.
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Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward has a new book out revealing what happened behind the scenes with the independent Maricopa County audit of the 2020 presidential election. Ward was one of the first to call for an audit, and was heavily involved in it every step of the way. “Justified: The Story of America’s Audit” is the story of how it all went down. As someone who was on the ground in Arizona, close to the polling and an ear to intel from the top Republican operatives, Ward’s opinion that there was significant fraud allowing Joe Biden to win Arizona carries weight.
“The state is still very much socially and fiscally conservative — deep red,” she summarized after experiencing the election and audit. “I believed that if every legal vote was counted and every illegal vote was rejected, President Trump would be the uncontested winner of the election.” Ward said the election was far more important than most people realized, “Many people have told me that as Arizona goes, the country goes.”
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Arizona doesn’t have an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which mostly gives straight cash to those who don’t earn enough money to obtain a state tax refund, but Gov. Doug Ducey wants to change that. He is supporting SB 1018, sponsored by Senator Sean Bowie (D-Phoenix), which would create one, joining 30 other states which have adopted one patterned after the federal EITC.
A state EITC would take $74 million from the state’s coffers annually and give it to low earners. In order to qualify, income levels would face the same ceilings as the federal credit. Both families and singles are eligible, with a family of four children earning $20,000 maxing out the most with $325.
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State Representative Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) asked Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich for a legal opinion on whether there is an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution on the U.S. border with Mexico, allowing Arizona to defend itself. Brnovich responded affirmatively on Monday, saying it’s up to Governor Doug Ducey to initiate action.
Hoffman told The Arizona Sun Times, “I’m glad to see that Attorney General Brnovich today agreed with my assessment that the crisis occurring on our southern border constitutes an invasion and a total failure by the Biden administration to fulfill its constitutional obligation to protect the people of Arizona.”
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Former President Donald Trump released a blistering attack Friday afternoon on former Vice President Mike Pence’s claims earlier in the day about the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress over which Pence presided at which Electoral College votes submitted by the states were counted.
In a speech before the Florida Chapter of the Federalist Society in Orlando on Friday, Pence asserted, “There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” (emphasis added)
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Sixteen states again are challenging a federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care workers who work at facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Friday’s filing in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana comes after the issuance of final guidance on the mandate from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS), arguing the guidance is an action that is reviewable.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled by 5-4 vote Jan. 13 against the original Louisiana challenge to the mandate and a similar Missouri filing.
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The Arizona Free Enterprise Club is referring to a transportation bill that is sailing through the Arizona Legislature as a “Maricopa County Transit Slush Fund Tax.” HB 2598, with its corresponding Senate version, SB 1356, would send to the ballot a question to voters of whether to extend the Prop. 400 tax increase for transportation for another 25 years. It would increase taxes by $33 billion, allowing localities to direct the money with very few strings attached.
AFEC said the extension “creates a big slush fund for liberal city mayors to spend on light rail, street trollies, bike paths, trails, complete streets and other undefined ‘regional programs’ and NO REQUIREMENTS that the money be spent on actual freeways or roads to relieve congestion.”
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Arizona legislators are busy dropping bills to address election fraud this session, due to concerns there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Rep. John Fillmore (R-Apache Junction) is sponsoring one of the most sweeping bills, HB 2596, which makes substantial changes to elections including giving the Arizona Legislature the final say on approving elections, eliminating most voting by mail, and requiring hand counting of ballots.
Fillmore explained the need for the significant reform during a committee hearing. “I don’t care what the press says,” he said. “I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me. This is not a President Biden thing. This is not a the other red-headed guy thing. We should have voting in my opinion in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day. We need to get back to 1958-style voting.”
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One of the biggest priorities in the Arizona Legislature this year is election integrity, due to concerns about fraud in the 2020 Arizona presidential election. Legislators have dropped many bills to combat voter fraud, with seven passing out of the Senate Government Committee on Monday.
Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, who has been one of the strongest proponents of cleaning up election fraud, including helping get an audit launched into the Maricopa County 2020 election, told The Arizona Sun Times, “It is encouraging to see our state legislators taking action and focusing on election integrity. The objective information from the Arizona Audit — America’s Audit — is showing us the way to make voting more secure. These bills are yet another reason why the full forensic audit was justified.”
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State Rep. Justin Wilmeth (R-Phoenix) is sponsoring legislation to block state and other public entities in Arizona from contracting for services or products from companies that use forced labor from the ethnic Uyghurs in China. Under HB 2488, companies that do business with the state will be required to certify in writing that they do not use that labor.
“As a student of history, I know what happens when good people remain silent,” said Wilmeth. “The Chinese Communist Party keeping millions of people locked in internment camps, which harkens back to the darkest chapters of the 20th century. HB 2488 sends a strong message that the State of Arizona won’t do business with anyone that turns a blind eye to this horrible human rights abuse.”
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Arizona State University instituted a COVID-19 vaccine booster mandate on Jan. 11 for student-athletes participating in away games. Outraged student-athletes launched a petition to demand that ASU reverse the mandate, which has over 1,700 signatures so far.
The petition, which was started anonymously probably due to fear of retaliation, states in part, “In a collective and respectful agreement amongst the athletes of various sports teams at Arizona State, we are voicing our stance to fight for the right to dictate what we decide goes into our bodies regarding the COVID-19 vaccination booster shot. … We want to express that there should NOT be a forced decision to be made by us athletes that causes us to sacrifice the season and competition we come to Arizona State for.”
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The Kari Lake campaign for governor continues its strong momentum, raising $1,462,115 in 2021 according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s campaign finance database. Two of her Republican opponents brought in more money, but both are funding their campaigns with millions of their own dollars. Steve Gaynor reported $5,009,655, which came almost entirely from his own funds, and Karrin Taylor Robson raised about the same amount as Lake, with almost another $2 million added of her own money. Matt Salmon brought in a little over a million.
Lake told The Arizona Sun Times, “I am thrilled by our fundraising. The pundits expected us to only raise $500,000. We raised nearly $1.5 million. Our swampy opponents hired up all of the political fundraisers in town in order to starve us from being able to raise money. But the people stepped up and made donations because they know in me, they have the first politician to run for governor who will truly represent the people of Arizona.”
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As the economy turns around with the COVID-19 pandemic receding and lockdowns and restrictions fading, some states are recovering better than others. Only Arizona, Texas, Utah, and Idaho, some of the reddest states in the country, have all returned to pre-pandemic job levels.
According to Adam Kamins, director of regional economics at Moody’s Analytics, this is largely due to people wanting to move to those states. “Those four states have experienced persistently strong population growth, which really wasn’t dented by the pandemic,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “More and more people keep coming from expensive coastal cities to places like Dallas and Phoenix, which have a relatively lower cost of living and higher quality of life.”
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State Sen. Kelly Townsend (R-Apache Junction) announced she is running for Arizona’s newly redrawn 6th District Congressional seat, which is an open seat due to Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick declining to run for reelection. The sprawling southeast Arizona rural district runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Mogollon Rim and the New Mexico border to Casa Grande. Townsend lives in Apache Junction, in the newly drawn CD 5, about 60 miles from CD 6, but there is no requirement for her to live in the district she runs in, only that she live within the state.
Townsend told Capitol Media Services, “Anybody who knows me knows that my heart has been down in the southern part of the state anyway. That’s where I go for leisure, and that’s where I go to work.” Townsend filed a complaint last year with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich about Tucson’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. After Brnovich issued an opinion declaring that the mandate was illegal, the city paused it.
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President Donald J. Trump gave his full support to Arizona conservatives, who are still investigating the handling of the 2020 presidential election, and he expressed confidence that state Attorney General Mark Brnovich would take action on the findings of the Maricopa County audit and other investigations Saturday at his Canyon Moon Ranch rally in Florence, Arizona.
The president said he was counting on state Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate how the 2020 presidential election was handled in Arizona.
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Arizona State Capitol demanding that Gov. Doug Ducey do something about the “border invasion.” The officials were responding to Ducey’s final State of the State Address, which focused on the border crisis. The numbers of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border, especially into Arizona, has skyrocketed since the Biden administration took office, with migrant counters in the Yuma sector up 2,405%.
Ken Cuccinelli, deputy secretary of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump and former Attorney General of Virginia, said, “It takes not just the governor, but a commitment of these legislative folks right here.” Due to all the dangerous drugs coming across the border, “Every town, in Arizona and across the country, is now a border town.”
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At a “Save America” rally in Arizona Saturday night, Former President Donald Trump treated a raucous crowd of followers stretching “as far as the eye can see” to a blistering indictment of President Biden, who, he said, has caused “more destruction than five presidents in the last year.”
Trump, who has fueled speculation that he may mount another run for the White House in 2024, told a crowd in Arizona Saturday night that “our country is going to hell” and “the American people must take their lives and future back.”
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The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) held a forum on Tuesday entitled “Restoring Election Integrity in Arizona.” Former Republican official Ken Cuccinelli and other panelists discussed how the left started dominating elections, left-wing lawfare, poll observer problems, what’s going on at the federal level, and solutions to fix voter fraud.
Cuccinelli, who served as the deputy secretary of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump and as the Attorney General of Virginia, is now the national chairman for the Election Transparency Initiative. He warned that the Democrats have moved far to the left in recent years, and no longer want to uphold the Constitution with its voting protections and delegation of voting administration to the states. “They don’t believe the U.S. is great. They don’t like the Constitution.”
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Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake unveiled a border security plan aimed at circumventing the federal government through the creation of an interstate compact.
Titled “Defend Arizona: We will do what Washington will not,” her plan will bring states together to use Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution to “declare their territories as under invasion and declare it their sovereign right to secure the borders of the United States.” Lake told The Arizona Sun Times, “The people of Arizona and the people of this country are dying to have real solutions to bring sanity and the security back to the border.”
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The Founder and CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity firm tapped by the Arizona State Senate to audit Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential election tallies, told The Star News Network his company shut down because the Republican-controlled State Senate did not fulfill its contractual obligations to the firm.
“At the end of the day, this is the call of Senator Fann,” said Doug Logan, speaking of Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann. Logan told employees in early December that the company would close its doors unless the State Senate fulfilled its contractual obligations.
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Maricopa County officials have issued a 93-page response to the findings of the independent Maricopa County ballot audit of the 2020 presidential election, which was ordered by the Arizona Senate. Presented during a meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Jan. 5, the officials claimed there were fewer than 100 questionable ballots out of the 2.1 million cast.
Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward watched a portion of the meeting and expressed skepticism to The Arizona Sun Times, “The part that I’ve seen so far was a group of related good ole boys attempting to convince people that they ran a perfect election,” she said. “They want Americans to believe them over what we saw with our own eyes. Arizonans were totally justified in demanding an audit of the 2020 election — and we should actually audit everything so we can restore voter confidence that our elections have integrity.”
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Three Arizona members of Congress are joining in on a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees. Reps. Paul Gosar (R-04-Ariz.), Andy Biggs (R-05-Ariz.), and Debbie Lesko (R-08-Ariz.) along with 180 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate filed an amicus curiae brief in NFIB v. OSHA challenging the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement the mandate.
The members of Congress argued that the mandate violates federalism, encroaching on the states’ authority. “[T]he sudden ‘discovery’ of authority under the OSH Act confirms that it was never intended to displace state authority in this area.” They assert, “Congress did not give that power to an agency bureaucrat.”
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Arizona is one of the fastest growing states in the country, ranked No. 6 in 2021 by HomeSnacks. New data from the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity reveals that the growth is taking place in red parts of Arizona, not blue strongholds like Tucson — which could mean Arizona is not trending blue.
“The growth is around Maricopa County,” Rep. David Schweikert (R-06-Ariz.) told The Arizona Sun Times. “Maricopa County, which leans Republican, already dominates the state. This will give it even more power.” Currently, 62% of the population lives there.
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Democrats four years ago rode a blue wave to governors’ mansions across the country, flipping Republican-held seats in the Midwest, Northeast and West alike.
Now, however, many of those governors face Republican challengers amid a political environment that looks potentially promising for the GOP, meaning that contentious races may lie ahead in some of the nation’s most pivotal battleground states. Republicans have already had two strong showings in states that lean Democratic, flipping the governor’s seat in Virginia and coming surprisingly close in New Jersey, a state that voted for President Joe Biden by 16 points in 2020.
Governors in less competitive states are also facing primary challengers from the left and right, making for multiple bitter, closely-followed primaries between candidates from different wings of the same party.
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Under the Trump administration, the VA Mission Act (VAMA) was enacted in 2018 to provide veterans access to healthcare outside of the Veterans Administration healthcare system in order to provide more options and speed up accessibility to medical care. Unfortunately, veterans are reporting that the VA under the Biden administration has cut back on that expansion.
VAMA allowed veterans who could not get a medical appointment within 20 days or who had to drive more than 30 minutes to a VA facility to use alternate private healthcare providers instead. This was crucial, because veterans were dying while stuck on waiting lists for medical treatment, Josh Stanwitz of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) told The Arizona Sun Times.
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