Journalists’ Roundtable: Arizona politics, resignations and DEI debate

May 2

This week’s topics:

Two state agency leaders resign

Attorney General Department inspector arrested

Kavanagh culture war bills

Fed election security funds and DEI

FBI whistleblower files for Congress

Two state agency leaders resign

“It seems like this is a battle we have been seeing since she has gotten into office,” Welch said. The news comes amid what Governor Katie Hobbs called “unprecedented politicization” of the offices. Welch continued by adding it “didn’t look like they were going to get confirmed anyway”

Under Arizona law, the governor’s picks for agencies are required to be approved or denied by the Arizona senate.

Attorney General Department inspector arrested

Dennis Welch was told of a produce inspector who was arrested on accusations on human smuggling “around the tenth or eleventh of last month federal agents spotted him picking up a couple of undocumented migrants, they followed him and picked him up. And at the time the government was very clear that this didn’t happen on state work time but he was wearing his uniform at the time.”

Additionally according to Welch, the two migrants combined to pay for about twenty thousand dollars to be smuggled into the U.S..

Kavanagh culture war bills

Bob Christie wrote about a bill that Arizona State Senator John Kavanagh has been pushing. “Kavanagh has been pushing what we call the bathroom bill. It started out targeting adults, transgender women who he wanted to ban from women’s bathrooms back in 2013,” Christie said. He added that at the time the bill was not popular but in the past few years it returned.

Christie went on to comment on Kavanagh’s other bill which says “you can’t call a student by another pronoun then the one assigned at birth unless you tell their parents which of course the democrats say is just outing them to their parents”