Here’s the primary reason—not the only reason, but the primary one—why I’m planning to hold my nose and vote yes on Prop 123, then hate myself in the morning. It’s either pass the proposition or not see any more money for our schools any time in the foreseeable future.

Some people who plan to vote against Prop 123 believe that, since we won the battle for school funding in the courts, Prop 123 will mean losing what we’ve gained. If we vote down Prop 123, they believe, the court decision will come back into play and we’ll get, not just 70 percent of what the state owes the schools but the whole 100 percent, and we’ll get it without all those triggers Ducey and his henchmen built into the proposition which could let the legislature pull the money out from under the schools as easily as Lucy used to pull the football away from Charlie Brown. Under that scenario, defeating Prop 123 is a win-win.

It’s a lovely thought. If it were true, even if it took a few years for the courts to force the legislature to pay up, I’d be at the front of the line voting against Prop 123. The problem is, it just ain’t so. The courts can tell the legislature to pay up, but all the anti-public-school legislators have to do is shrug, fold their arms across their chests and say “Make Me!” That’s it. Game over. The courts can’t make the state pay up.

On Saturday, Tim Steller had an instructive column about the balance of power between the legislative and judicial branches in Arizona. The article is about Ducey’s desire to pack the Supreme Court by adding two seats. Naturally, he’d be the one who would appoint the new justices meaning the court would be in his pocket. Supreme Court justices past and present say they don’t want the two extra members and the court doesn’t need them, but the current justices are reluctantly going along with the idea. Why? Because it would come with a much-needed ten million dollars for the court system, including a 3 percent raise. The reason the courts need the money so badly is that the legislature swept up $6 million to help balance the budget. To get it back, they have to bow to the governor’s will. Of the two supposedly independent branches of government, the one holding the purse strings is a whole lot more independent than the other.

There are two likely scenarios if Prop 123 fails and the whole school funding thing goes back to the courts. One is if Ducey succeeds in packing the courts. The state will appeal the decision, and it’s not likely the schools will come out the winner in a court decision made up of Ducey appointees working together with other conservative-leaning justices. The other is if Ducey’s court packing plan doesn’t pan out. In that case, the courts may persist in saying the state owes money to the schools, but what will they do then? Likely, nothing. It would be damn difficult for the courts to force the state to pay up no matter how hard they tried, and really, how hard are they going to try knowing how easily an angry legislative majority can cut their funding stream?

The basic Prop 123 choice facing school supporters is, are you willing to go for the short term, $350 million a year funding gain and worry about the future in the future, or are you willing to live with the current funding level hoping that somehow, some way, a better deal will come along somewhere down the road? It’s a lousy choice—lose now or possibly/probably lose later.

This retired teacher knows what it was like to suffer under dwindling school funding when I taught in Oregon, watching class sizes grow while supplies and support services shrank. I know how dispiriting it was, how it hurt the quality of education we offered to our students. And yet in Oregon we had about $3,000 more per student than here in Arizona. It’s hard to imagine how dispiriting it must be to work for Arizona’s ridiculously low salary while trying to teach too many students with too few resources. I say, take the $350 million now and see if we can throw out some of these anti-public-school elected officials in November, then a few more two years later and replace them with people who put our children first, not last.

This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2016.

16 replies on “The AZ Legislature Has the Court System By the Short Hairs”

  1. There is third option, although I seriously doubt it would succeed based on the past behavior of the Arizonian electorate – vote them all out. They are no longer serving the needs of ALL Arizonans, and if their past behavior is any indication, I am not entirely sure that they are only serving the needs of out-of-state business interests. As long as voters continue to vote by rote we will continue to see the quality of life in Arizona dwindle for everyone except the one percent and special interest groups in and out of the state. Stop enabling the liars, thieves and cheats and take back the government.

  2. You definitely won’t win if you yield to blackmail and stop fighting for the principles you should be fighting for.

    Arizona Democrats: the majority of the county parties are whipped, submissive, grovelling. It’s pitiful to see. Safier’s county party, the Pima County Democrats, actually took a stand on the right side of this issue, bless them.

    But Safier can’t follow them or affiliate with them on Prop 123. I wonder if TUSD board majority and senior administration rubbing their hands together in the background at the prospect of an infusion of cash with no strings attached might be influencing Safier’s position on this issue.

    If Safier thinks that saying that he’ll hate himself in the morning makes his capitulation on 123 any less despicable, he can think again. What is worthy of respect is sticking to your guns and using the public pressure and outrage that builds up behind the starving of our schools to get the right things accomplished politically. Not yielding to bad actors and hoping that saying you don’t like doing so will inspire your audience to excuse you. That’s contemptible.

  3. If the Marajuana Proposition passes ; maybe we can all go to Maricopa County and somehow smoke enough pot to levitate the Capital Building complete with all its losers and send them to some other planet.

  4. Hold your nose, hate yourself in the morning, yet vote for it because it’s money. And money is all you have been after for years of incessant whining here.

    Take the money and run. Principles be damned, but do teach our children well.

    Wait, what?

  7. The League of Women Voters is open to men, and there are male members.

    The League has a long history of voter education and policy advocacy benefiting both women and men. It was a group originally formed by suffragists just before the movement they had organized won women the right to vote, hence the name.

    If the US presidential debates were still handled by the League, political discourse in this country would not be as debased as it is now. When the League withdrew its willingness to organize the debates in 1988, its president at the time, Nancy Neuman, made this statement, “”The League of Women Voters is withdrawing its sponsorship of the presidential debate scheduled for mid-October because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.”

    Well said, Nancy. Too bad, in the aftermath of the League’s exit, the quality of our debates has declined steadily and now what we see are degraded spectacles that don’t properly deserve the name of “debates.”

    The League continues its tradition of plain speaking and informed advocacy by taking a strong (and correct) position on Prop 123.

    Yes, let’s get the Justice Department into AZ to investigate the illegal disenfranchisement of Arizona Voters.

    Thank God SOMEONE in this state is capable of standing on principle and telling it like it is.

  8. the schools are not the end game here , they are being used to sell the deal. After all every year we vote on another tax increase for the marana schools in order to protect our property values only to hear later that teachers are leaving in droves and how bad our schools are. The end game is the amendment they are adding to the Az. Constitution thst allows them to go to the well as in state lands whenever they need more money while their masters the develpoers and koch brothers are waiting to cash in their vouchers.

  9. Five former treasurers (Republicans and Democrats) are against this, saying it is terrible fiscal policy. It would raid the principal of the land trust, which has been funding education for 100 years and was designed by the constitution to continue to do so FOREVER. That’s why Prop 123 is an amendment to the constitution to alter our fiscal infrastructure–alter it for the worse. It takes from future dollars for education to fund it now. In ten years, there would be a fiscal cliff when the spigot from the trust shuts off and a future legislature has to figure out what to do with the crisis. Imagine what that will look like. Maybe another raid on the land trust?

    Prop 123 is bad governance. We Arizonans have been so poisoned by our toxic government that we don’t know what real, solid governance looks like and we think there is no hope for us to ever have it. When education supporters buy in to a shell game like this and advocate that others “hold their noses” and do it, too, we create our own disastrous destiny.

  10. Whatever happened to a finding of Contempt of Court? Is this not a possibility? Someone please explain this.

  11. Submit to extortion, never! You know what it got Neville Chamberlain, appeasement or holding your nose is not the answer. It is either stand your ground now or continue to fight the battle well into the future. The current power structure with its well financed political muscle must be hauled down. Legislators may be immune from arrest while in session, they are not exempt from voter disgust. Supporters of better operated and organized public school system need to get serious about joining the growing chorus of public organizations such as the League of Women Voters who realize it is not the courts who are authorized by the Constitution to appropriate money. If the people of Arizona allow the Republican governor to pack the Courts with the assist from his fellow Republicans in the Legislature, shame on them. While Chamberlain was meeting secretly with Hitler, FDR was trying to pack the US Court and who stopped him? A very different breed of Republicans than the bunch in power in Arizona today. Can you believe the Legislature with the Governor are attempting to Blackmail the Arizona Supreme Court through the budget process? This kind of governance by extortion is out of hand, Courts, schools, cities, counties, children’s health and on and on. Enough, time to stand together and start some wholesale firing.

  12. BEWARE OF AZ GOVERNOR AND STATE SENATORS/REPRESENTATIVES
    BEARING GIFTS (PROP 123) FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS
    PART 1 of Prop 123
    Before you vote for Prop 123, the State’s proposition to fund Public Schools—–TAKE A GOOD LOOK IN THE HORSE’S MOUTH !
    List is prioritized from the most damaging language to the least.
    1. This gift is full of unpleasant surprises that the State is trying to slip by the unsuspecting Public. Prop 123 is a “slight of hand” maneuver to amend the State Constitution.
    (Back story) The voters passed an initiative to force the State to increase public school base level funding by 2% to cover inflation. The STATE STOLE this money by redirecting it to give tax breaks to corporations. The schools sued the State. The AZ Supreme Court found in the favor of public schools and ordered the State to pay up—$300 million dollars it kept, to fully fund public schools and to add the 2% that the voters paid to cover inflation. THE STATE HAS REFUSED TO FOLLOW THE COURT’S ORDERS.
    Since the State got caught violating the voter approved 2% inflation initiative, the State HID language in PROP 123 that will amend the State Constitution so that the State DOES NOT HAVE TO FOLLOW voter approved initiatives. In other words, the Voters will have no power to initiate new legislation. ONLY THE POLITICIANS will be able to make laws!
    2. In order to hoodwink the public, the Governor and the HOUSE and SENATE, put in some language that the STATE will raise the State’s Base Level per pupil funding for K-12 students from a measly $3,426.74 to $3,600.00, an increase of $173.26. The national average is $12,401 per pupil. AZ still ranks 49th and most likely will fall to 50th or dead last in Per Pupil Funding.
    3. It also appropriated $625 million dollars to be spread out over 10 years to public and charter schools to be used for maintenance and operations which includes salaries and capital outlay (buildings, busses, equipment, furniture, books, etc.) That works out to $62.5 million a year (or $25,000 apiece) for over 2000 Public and over 500 charter schools in the entire state. This would not even cover the price of one new school bus ($65-85,000 each). Any suspended inflation adjustments WOULD NOT HAVE TO BE PAID BACK. If a lawsuit is filed, no monies will be sent to classrooms.
    Janice E. Mitich
    30 year Public School Educator now retired
    16 years on Marana Unified School Board

  13. ….the Census Bureau said Arizona was one of the biggest beneficiaries of federal school support, getting 14.6 percent of its school budget from Washington. That was the fifth-highest percentage in the country.

    AZ Central June 2015

  14. Federal school funding in Arizona.
    I wonder if that isn’t because of the Native American population in the state?
    Add in the Military and what do you get?
    I am not an advocate of selling off Federal Lands, but certainly believe the Feds should pay the state revenue in lieu of property taxes lost with all the federal lands in the state taken off the local property tax rolls. Unheard of? Not really, Oregon has been receiving cash payments every year for over 100 years from the Feds in lieu of taxes.
    Time to send Uncle Sam a bill for services rendered to federal lands.

  15. Dare I say 123 has already lost? The D’s and the R’s are both against it. 90% of the likes above are against it. Everyone I know (and we all pretty much have kids in TUSD) are against it. Arizonans are smart enough not to sell out our future to make things better now. Moding the constitution so Ducey can sell off our state trust lands to his developer buddies even faster is total crap. It’s bad for hunters, bad for my grandkids, pretty much bad all around.

    We had to pass MMJ propositions THREE times as I recall to get the idiots up in the capital to take us seriously. I guess we got 2 more tries before we get our schools re-funded. 123 ain’t it, 123 is a bait-and-switch…

  16. A piece of free advice for the teacher’s union: “volunteering” at Cyclovia to hand out crap in support of an obviously bad proposition is going to do nothing to endear you to your supporters when Ducey decides to go all Scott Walker on you. You are shooting yourself in the foot. Use your heads next time instead of your wallets…I know, I know, no one else in America does that either…higher standards and all…

Comments are closed.