Hobbs asks appeals court to reverse ruling that her agency director appointments broke the law

Gov. Katie Hobbs at Intel's Chandler plant, where President Joe Biden announced an $8.5 billion grant to help the company expand its chipmaking capacity there. (Photo by Sam Ballesteros /Cronkite News)

As she promised, Gov. Katie Hobbs has appealed a judge’s ruling that she violated state statute when she bypassed the Senate confirmation process for appointing directors of state agencies.

Hobbs filed a request for special action to the Arizona Court of Appeals on June 18.

In it, Austin Yost, an attorney for Hobbs, argued that Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney erred when he ruled on June 5 that the governor had acted illegally when she withdrew a slew of agency director nominations and instead named the same people to lead the agencies, but with different titles, including executive deputy directors.

Blaney gave Hobbs and the Senate time to confer to work out the dispute, before resolving the issue with additional court proceedings set for August.

After Hobbs struggled for months to get many of her director nominees through a newly created Republican-led Senate approval committee last year, she went around the chamber . Agency directors are subject to Senate approval, but deputy directors are not.

Senate President Warren Petersen, a Queen Creek Republican, filed a lawsuit in December, accusing Hobbs of violating state law by circumventing legislative hearings for her appointees and asking a judge to restore the decades-long practice of requiring Senate approval for the governor’s hand-picked choices to lead state agencies.

Yost accused the Senate’s nominations committee of never having “taken its responsibilities seriously.”

“It repeatedly questioned the Governor’s nominees about hot-button political topics untethered to their fitness to lead the executive agencies for which they were nominated,” he wrote. “And it slow-walked the confirmation process for many other nominees, declining to schedule any hearings for several months while improperly trying to use its confirmation authority to influence executive actions.”

He argued that the Senate’s slow-rolling compelled Hobbs to “pursue other lawful avenues to ensure that executive agencies could continue to function.”

Yost claimed that Blaney’s decision was “erroneous” and created “a massive cloud of uncertainty around everything that the Executive Deputy Directors in 13 state agencies have done — dating back to their appointments in September 2023 and continuing to the present.”

He argued that Arizona law does not mandate that the governor nominate people for vacant director positions within any specific time frame, as Blaney ruled. Interpreting the law that way would violate the separation of powers, Yost said, and improperly expand the Senate’s say about the governor’s appointments.

Yost also claimed that Blaney conflated the separate statutes regarding director appointments and executive deputy director appointments, incorrectly applying the rules for directors to deputy directors.

“(D)eputy director appointments cannot violate statutes governing agency director appointments,” Yost wrote. “Separate statutory schemes govern those appointments, and courts must give effect to both.”

Additionally, Yost wrote that Blaney’s decision was improper because it granted the Senate relief beyond what the Senate president had asked for.

While the Senate only asked the court to declare that Hobbs had violated the law in not appointing agency directors, it didn’t ask the court to determine that she had broken the law when appointing deputy directors, but the judge ruled that she did anyway.

“The superior court’s decision is wrong,” Yost wrote. “Substantively, the superior court’s decision conflates separate statutory schemes governing agency director and deputy director appointments, disregards and makes superfluous the statutes authorizing these deputy director appointments, and ignores the stipulated (and thus undisputed) facts.”

Yost asked the appeals court to accept special action jurisdiction, to reverse the superior court’s decision and to order the superior court to instead rule in Hobbs’ favor.

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