By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Can a politician be a dictator and a prisoner at the same time? Arizona’s left-wing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs shows how to do it — as well as how someone can behave who may have feared she was a useless loser but then gets power into her vindictive hands.
In 2023 Hobbs was on the way to nearly tripling the number of vetoes ever cast by any Arizona governor against the state legislature’s actions during one year’s session while she also asserted she had broad powers over Arizona policies just because she issued executive orders saying so.
She thereby acted as a dictator although she lacked any mandate from the voters while also being a prisoner of her far-left ideology that made her ram her views through.
Local NPR station KJZZ (91.5 FM) posted that as of June 20, while the legislature continued in session, Democrat Hobbs already had vetoed 143 bills — yes, nearly 150 bills — from the Republican-majority legislature since January.
The highest previous veto total, after an entire legislative session was completed, was 58 vetoes cast by left-wing Democrat Janet Napolitano against a majority-Republican legislature in 2005.
In a veto letter of June 16, Hobbs excused her nixing of four bills related to drag shows by writing: “Intolerance has no place in Arizona, despite the legislature’s frequent attempts to pass legislation that says otherwise. SB 1026, SB 1028, SB 1030, and SB 1698 are attempts to criminalize free expression and ostracize the LGBTQIA+ community both implicitly and explicitly, creating statutory language that could be weaponized by those who choose hate over acceptance.
“I have made it abundantly clear that I am committed to building an Arizona for everyone and will not support any legislation that attempts to marginalize our fellow Arizonans,” Hobbs wrote.
Except, that is, the majority of Arizonans, whom the radical Hobbs constantly attacks, lectures, and marginalizes while her admiring media smirk.
This vetoed legislation included restriction on drag-show performances “targeting minors.”
Dennis Welch, political editor for Phoenix television stations 3 and 5, wrote, “Hobbs shot down four bills that originally dealt with drag shows — one of the latest targets in the ongoing cultural war. Lawmakers watered down legislation by removing specific references to drag shows in all but one of the bills. But the governor still felt the proposals attacked the LGBTQ community.”
During the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, who would forget how nominee Hobbs jumped up from her outdoors fast-food table, knocking over her drink as she prepared to flee, when a conservative writer approached her to talk? She also resolutely refused to debate either her Democratic Party primary-election foe or her Republican general-election foe lest people see her deficiencies.
In her latest blast of action by executive order, Hobbs on Friday, June 23, declared that she was assuming power over any possible county prosecution of abortion violations, while the following Tuesday, June 27, the plain Jane who had attended Catholic schools imposed her views mandating preference for transgenderism.
After the abortion move, a freshman GOP state representative, Cory McGarr, tweeted, “The sitting governor does not have the authority to make law! Lawless tyrants and authoritarians abuse their power and abuse the people by stripping away their representation through the legislature. This cannot stand.”
Complicit dominant media looked on complacently, although they would have been screaming in outrage if a conservative GOP governor were teetering on the edge similarly to reverse liberal policies in favor of traditionalist ones.
The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic posted admiring headlines on the afternoon of June 27, “Hobbs aims to protect LGTBQ youth, medical care” and “Hobbs signs new executive orders focused on LGBTQ rights.” (Yes, the two headlines disagreed on whether the T or the B comes first for Alphabet People.)
Wikipedia says Hobbs “went to Catholic schools throughout her childhood and graduated from Seton Catholic High School in 1988,” a secondary school in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler.
Moreover, Hobbs was made governor after the November 2022 election despite widespread concern over the reliability of her narrow victory margin in a vote that she not only helped supervise as incumbent secretary of state but had refused to recuse herself from supervising despite the request of GOP foe Kari Lake back in 2021.
After a prolonged vote count lasting nearly a week after the November 8, 2022, election day before media outlets declared Hobbs to be the gubernatorial winner, she supposedly triumphed by two-thirds of one percent, with more than 2.5 million votes cast.
The Associated Press quoted her, “For the Arizonans who did not vote for me, I will work just as hard for you — because even in this moment of division, I believe there is so much more that connects us.”
Back in 2018, Hobbs also was declared the narrow victor after a long count for her previous position, secretary of state, when the AP reported on November 16, 10 days after that year’s November 6 election, that she was winning by more than 15,000 votes out of about 2.3 million cast.
Voting machinery seemed to have a pro-Hobbs quirk after many hours of counting stretched out.
Pandering To Her Base
After Hobbs’ abortion and transgender executive orders in late June 2023, conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer that she was pandering to her base, regardless of legality.
“I would expect that many of the moves Hobbs makes end up swatted down by the courts, but it isn’t her intention to make legally and constitutionally sound moves,” Querard said on June 27. “She is just looking to be seen as active and fighting for far-left ideas so that her political base has reasons to like her.
“Her actual record as governor isn’t making anyone happy, so she has some press conferences, oversteps her authority, and can be seen as fighting for her causes even if she knows she loses at the end,” he said.
As for Hobbs trying to yank prosecutorial authority over abortion crimes from Arizona’s counties, Querard said, “Governors can’t decide all by themselves which prosecutors get to prosecute which crimes. These county attorneys are all elected in their own right and have their own jurisdictions in which to operate.”
The previous day, before Hobbs sprang her transgender orders, The Wanderer asked Phoenix radio conservative talk host Seth Leibsohn (KKNT, 960 AM) about Hobbs asserting that she can centralize all possible abortion prosecutions into the office of strongly pro-abortion Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes.
Mayes, another plain Jane and former Arizona Republic reporter, supposedly won her spot as attorney general last November over Republican Abe Hamadeh by even a far smaller margin than Hobbs as governor. Mayes was declared the winner by fewer than 300 votes out of about 2.5 million cast, a result that Hamadeh still is challenging legally.
Leibsohn told The Wanderer: “The governor’s action is unprecedented in Arizona history. She has a constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ It’s hard to reconcile this duty with the underlying premise of the executive order, namely that, despite the law in Arizona, no abortion prosecutions will occur. The Arizona attorney general has vowed to never prosecute such a case.
“The legal authority that she cites seems to be limited to individual cases and not wholesale categories of cases,” Leibsohn continued. “Were this order to stand, there is no limiting principle. She could transfer any kind of case out of the jurisdiction of the county attorneys who are charged with the duty to prosecute all crimes in their counties. I am hopeful the courts here will have a chance to overturn this.”
Contempt For The Law
A rarity at The Arizona Republic, a columnist who gets to express some conservative views, Phil Boas, posted on the morning of June 27 that Rachel Mitchell, the Republican county attorney for Maricopa County, was “furious” that Hobbs yanked Mitchell’s authority without even briefing her about it.
Boas quoted Mitchell: “As county attorney, I have sworn to uphold the law. The governor’s attempt to undermine the 15 elected county attorneys’ authority is outrageous.”
Maricopa is by far Arizona’s most populous county. Although Arizona is the nation’s sixth-largest state by area, it has only 15 counties, most of them large.
Noting the unpopularity of Hobbs’ and Mayes’ abortion extremism, Boas wrote: “Hobbs and Mayes are thumbing their noses at the separation of powers by circumventing the legislative branch to impose abortion on demand. Abortion without restriction.”
He added later that “this is a raid on the legislative branch that creates our laws. Those who would make such a move relish raw power and demonstrate openly their contempt for the law.”
The Arizona Republican Party sent out an email blast on June 26 seeking signatures on a petition asking to prevent Hobbs from blocking GOP prosecutors from pursuing criminal abortion cases.
“She wants to punish Republican prosecutors for protecting unborn babies and the right to life,” the GOP email said. “…Katie Hobbs has exceeded her authority as governor. This is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and we will FIGHT her in court. This executive order FORCES Republican counties to cooperate with prosecutors that are PRO-ABORTION.”
The politics-oriented Arizona Capitol Times posted on June 23: “A spokesman for Mayes confirmed on Friday that the AG has no intention of bringing any abortion prosecution forward, meaning the order would have the practical effect of blocking — at least while Hobbs and Mayes are in office — any abortion lawsuit in the state.”
In a quick response, Republican leaders at the State Capitol announced that they would stop hearings on Hobbs’ nominations for directors until she met with them to disclose where she was headed.
The AZ Free News site posted on June 27 that “Sen. Jake Hoffman, the chairman of the Committee on Director Nominations, announced that he was cancelling Tuesday’s [June 27] hearing and requested a meeting with the Hobbs administration ‘to discuss any additional overreach [her] office intends to take requiring complicity from executive directors’.”
The afternoon of June 27, Kim Quintero, director of communications for Arizona Senate Republicans, told The Wanderer that they had not received a response from Hobbs about setting up the meeting.
Republican State Sen. T.J. Shope tweeted that this was another instance of Hobbs failing to honor her big talk: “Oh — so much for that Open Door Policy we’ve heard about over and over again. I guess @GovernorHobbs would rather fight it out in an adversarial court setting as opposed to an adult conversation in an office setting.”
Regarding abortion prosecutions, the AZ Free News said Sen. Hoffman told it: “This partisan PR stunt by Katie Hobbs is a gross, unconstitutional overreach intended to do nothing more than pander to her far-left extremist base, and distract from her pathetic track record of failure, chaos, and instability.
“From getting rolled on the budget to historically high turnover of her senior staff, Hobbs continues to demonstrate how politically and intellectually weak she is with these half-cocked schemes that will never hold up in court,” the Free News quoted Hoffman.
As for Hobbs’ two executive orders on the afternoon of June 27 promoting transgenderism, the AZ Free News reported: “Unwilling to work with the Arizona State Legislature, Gov. Katie Hobbs has again chosen to exercise unilateral power in the pursuit of her progressive plans.”
The article said Hobbs’ office said the orders would “ensure the state employee health-care plan covers medically necessary gender-affirming surgery and barring state agencies from funding, promoting, or supporting conversion therapy against LGBTQ+ Arizonans.”
In other words, the state would fund mutilating procedures for seriously troubled state employees while forbidding any therapy aimed to improve their mental health.
Even reporter Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services, who is no conservative activist, sounded a skeptical note about Hobbs’ focus with the two orders.
On June 27 Fischer wrote that Hobbs “is again wading into culture wars, issuing executive orders . . . to halt the use of public funds for ‘conversion therapy’ while mandating them for ‘gender-affirming health care,’ at least for state and university employees and retirees.
“In her first order,” Fischer wrote, “the governor took aim at practices designed to convince individuals — particularly minors — that they are not gay. It specifically prohibits the use of state or federal dollars to ‘promote, support, or enable’ conversion therapy on minors.”
In the AZ Free News article, reporter Daniel Stefanski quoted Hobbs: “Our LGBTQ+ community should never have to face hate and discrimination, and I will do everything in my power to fight for full equality. The state is leading by example on this issue, and we will continue working until Arizona is a place where every individual can participate equally in our economy and our workforce without fear of discrimination or exclusion.”
An accompanying photo showed a smirking Hobbs at a desk defiantly decorated with small U.S. and Arizona flags, as if her morally sick mandates are the essence of patriotism.
The Free News article continued, “Legislative Republicans, already working through their options for addressing Hobbs’ recent executive order on abortion, were quick to react,” with Senate President Warren Petersen tweeting, “Instead of helping struggling AZ families plagued by inflation, the governor just issued an order for taxpayers to cover the cost of elective, sex-reassignment surgeries. This illegal, out-of-touch, unprecedented overreach did not receive proper JLBC [Joint Legislative Budget Committee] review as required by law.”
Meanwhile, on June 23 Phoenix-based KFYI Radio news (550 AM) reported that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer used an Arizona Republic “editorial” to announce he was suing 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake for defamation.
Actually, the article was bylined with Richer’s name as the writer, so it was an opinion column, not an “editorial,” which is an unsigned statement of the newspaper’s institutional opinion. However, some people mistakenly use the word “editorial” to mean any opinion piece, or even any article, in a newspaper.
Vote-supervising county official Richer is explicitly hostile to MAGA Republicans including Lake, as was another official vote supervisor, Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Gates recently announced he won’t run for another term as a county supervisor.
In a June 28 article, The Arizona Sun Times said that in his defamation suit regarding the 2022 election, “Richer claimed that Lake accused him of ‘intentionally sabotaging the election,’ and that she ‘knew or recklessly disregarded the falsity of those accusations’.”
However, the Sun Times article said, a conservative activist, Merissa Hamilton, said Richer had enlisted her help in putting together “reports of an investigation he did into fraud in the 2018 election” that “helped him get elected” as county recorder in 2020.
Richer narrowly had defeated the incumbent county recorder, left-wing Democrat Adrian Fontes, against whom Richer alleged fraud.
Fontes went on to be elected Arizona secretary of state in 2022, another election rife with accusations of fraud used to help Democrats.
The Sun Times article, by reporter Rachel Alexander, said Richer’s defamation suit against Lake “is being paid for by the Protect Democracy Project, which is described by InfluenceWatch as ‘a left-of-center litigation organization created to oppose the policies of President Donald Trump’.”
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