Arizona Politics & Government Online Community

After high turnout in the 2018 midterms gave Democrats big gains, several Republican-controlled states are considering changing the rules around voting in ways that might reduce future turnout.

John McCain is increasingly mad as hell about President Trump. And on Friday, he went after Trump — hard. During a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the Republican senator from Arizona delivered a pointed and striking point-by-point takedown of Trump's worldview and brand of nationalism. McCain didn't mention Trump's name once, but he didn't have to.

Jose Barboza was up early on March 22nd, the day of the Presidential primary in Arizona. Barboza, a twenty-four-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was volunteering for Promise Arizona, a local group dedicated to turning out Latino voters. That morning, he canvassed in the barrios of Phoenix, at the foot of the dry slopes of South Mountain, making sure that the people he had registered showed up to vote. When I interviewed him in April, in the offices of Promise Arizona, he recalled the extraordinary excitement of the primary voters. In the end, a record six hundred thousand people cast ballots in the city and the rest of Maricopa County, twice the number in 2012.

A police report indicates that an unarmed young father of two begged for his life before being shot dead by a police officer in Mesa, Arizona. His distraught widow is now fighting to ensure that the officer responsible ends up behind bars.

New data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that January of 2016 was, for the globe, a truly extraordinary month. Coming off the hottest year ever recorded (2015), January saw the greatest departure from average of any month on record, according to data provided by NASA.

Advocates for redistricting reform scored a crucial victory today when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission. Passed by the voters in 2000 in an effort to remove legislators' bias from the redistricting process, the commission was imperiled by the GOP's rabid desire to abolish it so that they could gerrymander the state's congressional districts to give themselves a partisan advantage.

Dear Dahlia, Walter, Judge Posner, Kenji, and Marty, Justice Antonin Scalia may have been the worst-behaved justice in the courtroom this morning, Dahlia—but the chief was the most obnoxious on paper. The Arizona redistricting case brought out the worst in Chief Justice John Roberts, the petty jibes and scornful mockery that this usually staid justice strives to avoid.

America has forgotten how to talk about important things. Instead we talk about politics, and mostly just the personalities. It’s worse on the left than on the right. For six years, debate among Democrats centered on Obama. Was he everything he seemed? Had he done all he could? Was it wise to criticize him? Now all the talk is of the next set of contestants: Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, perhaps Sanders or O’Malley or Webb. Electoral politics devours all other politics. It consumes three of every four calendar years. Its debates are empty but entertaining. Signing on to a presidential campaign is like running off to join the circus. Crafting an agenda or building a movement is like doing your chores. Caught up in horse-race politics, we neglect other vital duties.