By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Driving west from downtown along one-way Washington Street here, one sees straight ahead the bright copper dome of the Arizona State Capitol topped with a pure white winged goddess of liberty, or maybe of victory, said to be 17 feet high.
Firmly affixed, the goddess didn’t look lost up there by herself, but behind her was the nine-story executive tower of a governor who is.
A few blocks east of the Capitol, the variegated tents of a homeless camp occupy land on the south side of Washington Street, a settlement of the impoverished that’s a brief jog from where legislators, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and other officials do their daily duty on big budgets, bills, and blarney before an audience of visitors, journalists, and other characters.
As on many mornings, well-dressed people with briefcases and paperwork walked across narrowed 17th Avenue from a parking lot into the Capitol courtyard, and thence to a particular destination the morning of April 25.
On this sunny morning with a mild, cool breeze and temperature around 80 degrees, there was an outdoor news conference by the House wing and interest groups in open-sided white tents on the lawn to attract desired audiences.
This was the business of politics at work, like all businesses around town proceeding according to their own routines. However, despite the familiar bustling and schedules being followed at the Capitol, there was a scent of unreality here, just as also thousands of miles to the northeast, in Washington, D.C.
In both the capital of the Grand Canyon State and of the United States, the bumbling chief executives had been installed by elites that fancied they knew better than mere voters and covertly overrode their choice, much to the detriment of the public welfare.
Arizona’s left-wing Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs and extremist Democrat President Joe Biden left people wondering who’s really in charge.
Hobbs left people hopelessly puzzled why she vetoed so many bills, and whatever she hoped to gain by offending more or less everyone. Eighty-year-old Biden continued to show that the so-called Leader of the Free World was little more than a befuddled, shuffling puppet who barely could appear in public without the aid of extensive directions and prompting.
By mid-April Hobbs had vetoed about one-third of the bills sent to her, setting an all-time record for an Arizona governor, and the legislative session wasn’t even over. KFYI radio news (550 AM, Phoenix) said that as of then, she had signed “more than 90” bills.
The veto victims included the popular “tamales bill” passed by legislative supermajorities that legalized a widespread practice of selling home-cooked foods like Hispanic items popular with consumers and economically beneficial to aspiring chefs producing them.
Hobbs said food safety was an important consideration, but backers of the bill scoffed. Liberal Democrat State Rep. Alma Hernandez tweeted, in part: “As a public-health professional, I am VERY disappointed to see that a bipartisan bill allowing Arizonans to make an honest living by selling things like tamales, tortillas, and sweets legally was vetoed by Gov.@katiehobbs. It makes no sense. People are NOT dying from street-food poisoning.”
Bill sponsor Rep. Travis Grantham, a conservative Republican, said he’d never become ill from consuming this street food, but he had from restaurant food.
Fearing being personally embarrassed more than caring about Hispanic home businesses, Hobbs sent out her aides to get Democrat legislators in line, and the April 25 attempt to override the veto in the House failed.
Democrat Rep. Hernandez was distressed that Hobbs placed herself above working people’s welfare. The liberal AZ Mirror website quoted her: “We were elected by our constituents, not by Gov. Hobbs. I will never forget where I came from. I will never forget the community that works hard in my district, the single mothers that I personally know.”
Hobbs has been rated as one of the least-popular governors in the U.S. Well, it’s not as if she got out in public and built support during the 2022 campaign. She hid in her basement, ducked all debates, then waited for the elite to hand her the victory over GOP nominee Kari Lake.
Meanwhile, on the same April day in Washington, D.C., Biden, or whoever controls him, chose to release a brief video announcing that he’s running for reelection as president. It was easier to edit and do as many retakes as necessary of the video rather than chance that one of the most powerful men in the world would fall all over himself again in a live appearance.
A vivid illustration once more of how seriously cognitively impaired Biden is occurred the very next day, April 26, when he held a joint news conference with the visiting president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol.
Photographs clearly showed that Biden was holding cheat sheets, including one with the color photograph and name of Los Angeles Times reporter Courtney Subramanian, the pronunciation of whose name helpfully was included on the card.
It wasn’t the first time that Biden had been given a list of reporters he should call on, along with their photographs so he could spot them.
This time the card not only instructed Biden to call on Subramanian first, but the instructions also told him what her question would be.
Now there’s a scandal by the left-wing press, informing the White House of the question the liberal reporter would ask, so that Biden was prepared for it.
It’s not as if the commander-in-chief of the United States should be mentally fast or up to date, you know.
In response, one challenge from the Twittersphere asked the reporter: “What’s the process for getting your question pre-approved by the Biden regime? Who do you send it to for approval? Do you find it debasing to submit yourself to this process, and then fail to disclose this coordination to viewers and readers?”
Another tweet suggested that the White House itself comes up with the questions, then assigns preferred reporters to ask them.
It’s worth remembering, too, that as open-borders Democrats, Biden and Hobbs are responsible for massive sex- and drug trafficking, swift entry for all sorts of criminals and diseases, and minors being compelled into what amounts to slave labor — all scandals that open-borders media don’t embarrass them about.
A Crazy Strategy
Back in Arizona on the morning of the attempted tamale-bill override, KFYI radio talk host James T. Harris chatted with conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard about what motive Hobbs could have for all her vetoes.
Harris said that Hobbs is the gift that keeps on giving for a talk host. “I can’t get enough of the tamale bill” as Hobbs exercises her “crazy strategy of just vetoing everything,” including bipartisan bills.
Querard mentioned the veto of a bill that would have made it easier to transition from prison back into daily life. He asked whether Hobbs’ vetoes are intended to pad her statistics and raise campaign cash by making her look tough. But because she’s vetoing bills the average person would support, Querard asked, how does that help her?
“It’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
He also cited what happened to a victims’ advocate after Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have required a registered sex offender with parental rights to notify his own child’s school of his status.
The victims’ advocate, Kayleigh Kozak, strongly criticized Hobbs, then was surprised to learn she was disinvited from being keynote speaker at a National Crime Victims’ Rights event here.
On April 15 the Arizona Daily Independent reported that an official with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office contacted Kozak to withdraw her invitation to speak because she had criticized Hobbs’ veto.
This harked back to 2003, when the office of the previous veto queen, left-wing Democrat Gov. Janet Napolitano, tried to put pressure on Phoenix police officer Tim Norton to change his stance on renaming a local mountain.
The name of Squaw Peak offended Napolitano, and soon after she took office, she demanded that rules be ignored and the name be changed quickly. Norton served as chairman of the state board on geographic and historic names. When he refused, Napolitano maneuvered the change through anyway.
Among other bills Hobbs vetoed was one to require medical care for a baby who survives an abortion, one to prohibit cities from taxing groceries, one to forbid erecting a makeshift shelter on a public right-of-way, one to increase the penalty for assaulting a woman who the attacker knows or has reason to know is pregnant, and bills for election integrity.
Hiding Bibles
Finally, another liberal Arizona state legislator, Democrat Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, helped set the continuing crazy tone of the Hobbs era when she was discovered to be hiding Bibles from the members-only lounge of the Arizona House.
After Bibles went missing, a security camera was installed to search for evidence. It revealed that Stahl Hamilton was stuffing the Bible under cushions in lounge chairs, and even put one in a refrigerator.
Confronted, she refused to explain to a television reporter, then texted that this was a playful commentary on separation of church and state. She also is an ordained minister in a liberal Presbyterian denomination, if that sheds any light.
On April 26 the Western Journal website, reporting the story, quoted state Republican Rep. Travis Grantham talking to the television reporter: “When I’m watching that, I’m thinking, ‘Well, this is obviously someone who’s got some purpose and some intent, and they know they’re doing something bad.’ For an ordained minister to do that, again, it’s nonsensical. I have no clarity as to why it happened.”
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