President of the Senate Warren Petersen is taking a victory lap after a Maricopa County judge ruled Wednesday that Gov. Katie Hobbs broke the law.
Specifically, the Democratic governor ended a state law that requires agency heads to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate.
“This case,” Petersen said, “is a prime example of how Democrats are using Arizona government as a weapon for their own political gain and to implement their radical left agenda.”
In fact, this case is a prime example of a bunch of big babies arguing over who runs the sandbox, more interested in throwing sand in each other’s faces than working together to build something for the state .
Can you guess who pays for their respective tantrums?
Hobbs and the Senate have been fighting since 2023
The great confirmation conflict in Arizona has raged since Hobbs took office in January 2023.
The prospect of a Democratic governor was enough to prompt Petersen to create a special committee to review all of Hobbs’ nominees, abandoning the decades-old process that assigned standing committees to review nominees to lead agencies in the Hobbs area. panel monitoring.
He then tapped the Legislature’s biggest bully, Sen. Jake Hoffman, a fake voter who chairs the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, to serve as chairman and saboteur-in-chief of his new Senate committee on appointments of directors.
Hoffman’s hearings sometimes felt more like interrogations than interviews, as Hobbs’ candidates were questioned not only about their qualifications but also about their political leanings.
His joy was evident as his panel rejected several of his nominations and even refused to schedule hearings for more than a dozen others.
Not because they were unqualified, but in retaliation for Hobbs issuing decrees he didn’t like.
Ultimately, the Senate confirmed only six of the nearly two dozen nominees Hobbs put forward last year.
Deadlocked on appointments, Hobbs made the rounds
Hoffman and his committee colleagues chased away a clearly qualified candidate to lead the Department of Health and rejected a former Democratic lawmaker appointed to run the Registrar of Contractors because they didn’t like his policies.
Hobbes withdrew a third candidate amid questions about his suitability to lead the Department of Child Safety.
Meanwhile, 13 agency heads found themselves left to their own devices. Never mind the damage done when we don’t have senior agency directors overseeing the state’s critical needs, from social services and prisons to public health to nursing home oversight and security children.
So Hobbs came up with a new plan, removing his 13 still-unconfirmed nominees to the agency last fall and renaming them as “executive deputy directors” who don’t need Senate approval.
“It is clear that this Committee is being used as a weapon, brandished at the personal whim of a few…
