Gov. Katie Hobbs at an Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry event on Jan. 5, 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
A judge on Tuesday signed off on an agreement between Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican legislative leaders, in which she consented to nominate directors for several state agencies early next year.
The agreement followed a lawsuit filed in December by Senate President Warren Petersen, a Queen Creek Republican, who accused Hobbs of violating state law by circumventing legislative approval hearings for 13 of her appointees to head state agencies.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney agreed with Petersen in a June 5 ruling , confirming that Hobbs had illegally circumvented the Senate approval process, and ordered them to work out an agreement for new director nominations.
Hobbs sidestepped the Senate approval process after she struggled to get many of her director nominees through a newly created Republican-led Senate approval committee last year. Prior to the creation of that committee, Senate confirmations occurred with little fanfare following brief interviews with relevant legislative committees.
The Senate voted not to approve several of her nominees after the committee questioned them about culture-war issues that did not directly relate to their jobs, Andy Gaona, an attorney for Hobbs, wrote earlier this year in a failed request to dismiss the lawsuit.
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Hobbs claimed that this forced her hand, spurring her to go around the chamber and appoint deputy directors who would effectively act as directors, but without the title. Agency directors are subject to Senate approval, but deputy directors are not.
Blaney wrote in his June ruling that Hobbs had “improperly, unilaterally appointed de facto directors for these 13 agencies, despite the actual job title she has assigned to each of them.”
Petersen and Hobbs already came to a nominations agreement on Aug. 12, but Blaney didn’t approve it. The judge didn’t like that the original agreement superseded his ruling, in which he said that Hobbs’ nominations broke the law. The amended agreement , which Blaney signed on Tuesday, did not supersede the earlier ruling.
The agreement requires Hobbs to nominate directors for the open positions and transmit the nominations to the Senate by the first week of the next regular legislative session, which begins in January. The nominees must be approved by the Senate within a year or Hobbs will have to appoint new ones, which would also require the chamber’s approval.
Christian Slater, a spokesperson for Hobbs, previously told the Arizona Mirror that, while the governor disagreed with the Senate’s take on the law, and was disappointed in the June ruling, she came to an agreement with Petersen to ensure stability for those who rely on the state agencies that currently have no formal directors.
After the ruling, Hobbs asked the state Court of Appeals to review the case, but it declined to do so.
“Governor Hobbs won critical stability and security for veterans, small businesses, and working families who rely on state agencies for important services,” Slater said in a written statement on Wednesday. “And we expect to have fair hearings moving forward, not the political circus of the past.”
But Jake Hoffman, the head of the Senate’s nominations committee — he’s also leader of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus and one of the fake electors indicted for attempting to give the state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2020 — told Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services that he has no plans to take it easy on the new nominees.
“Questions pertaining to the ideologies held by far-left politicians like Katie Hobbs and their nexus to the statutory and policy implementation of nominees is a reasonable and important area of vetting, given the substantial impact our state agencies and departments have on hardworking, everyday Arizonans,” Hoffman told Fischer.
In previous court filings, Gaona used the committee hearing for Martín Quezada as an example of how the committee “slow-walked” confirmation of Hobbs’ nominees. Quezada is a former Democratic state senator and was Hobbs’ nominee to lead the Arizona Registrar of Contractors, a small state agency that licenses and regulates construction contractors.
“It’s the very definition of a non-political agency with a limited — yet critically-important — function,” Gaona wrote.
But during Quezada’s hearing, committee members asked him about his opinions on polarizing political issues like transgender student athletes, white nationalism, racism and sexism in hiring, mass shootings, antisemitism, border security, the state’s school voucher program, critical race theory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Of course, none of this had anything to do with Mr. Quezada’s fitness to head up ROC,” Gaona wrote.
The committee voted along party lines not to approve Quezeda’s nomination, and Hobbs then withdrew his nomination.
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