By Howard Fischer
Mail | X: @azcapmedia

PHOENIX — State senators have no legal right to demand that Gov. Katie Hobbs immediately send them her nominations for directors to head more than a dozen state agencies, an attorney for the governor is arguing.

In new legal filings, Andrew Gaona told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney that Arizona law allows the governor to nominate agency chiefs on her own timeline. The only thing the statutes require is that she promptly sends those names to the Senate.

Gaona said Hobbs did that.

But he pointed out that after the Senate balked at some of her nominees she withdrew all of their names. And that, Gaona said, means there are no names waiting to be sent — and no violations of the law.

More to the point, he told Blaney that Hobbs was within her rights to use a procedural maneuver to name each of her choices that never got Senate confirmation instead to the positions of “deputy executive directors” of each of those same agencies. And those slots, Gaona said, are beyond the reach of Senate confirmation or rejection.

In any event, Gaona told the judge he should toss the effort by the Senate to create a legal battle out of a “political dispute” and the “political circus” he said was created by lawmakers. He said this is something that just needs to be worked out between Hobbs and state lawmakers, without court interference.

The dispute goes back more than a year to when Senate President Warren Petersen created a new process to review nominations.

For years before that, gubernatorial choices were reviewed by whatever standing committee had purview in that area. So a director of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state’s Medicaid program, might go to the Health Committee. And someone tapped to head the Department of Insurance and Financial Services could be reviewed by the Banking Committee.

Instead, Petersen created a new Committee on Director Nominations and tapping Sen. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, a vocal critic of the governor and her policies, to head that panel.

The result, said Gaona, was a hearing process focused not on the qualifications of the nominee but on other political issues.

For example, former state Sen. Martin Quezada was nominated as director of the Arizona Registrar of Contractors, an agency that Gaona said is not political.

But GOP lawmakers on the panel peppered him with questions about everything from transgender people in sports and white nationalism to racism, vouchers and Israeli-Palestinian relations, the last having to do with statements Quezada made while a senator — long before the current war — supporting the interests of Palestinians in their political battles for a homeland.

When the panel voted to reject the nomination, Hobbs withdrew it.

Several other nominations did not even get as far as a hearing as Hoffman demanded that Hobbs first rescind various executive orders, including one in June that gave Attorney General Kris Mayes exclusive authority to decide whether to prosecute anyone for violating abortion laws.

So Hobbs, in a way, outmaneuvered him.

First, she withdrew all the pending nominations that were awaiting action, leaving each agency without a director.

Then she tapped Ben Henderson, the operations director of her office, to be the director of the Arizona State Lottery Commission. He, in turn, named Alec Thomson, the former nominee to be the deputy executive director and then quit, leaving the deputy — the person whom Hobbs wanted in the first place — in charge.

Henderson then went on to the next agency, the Department of Administration, and repeated the performance with Elizabeth Alborado-Thorson. And so it went through all 13 agencies.

And Hobbs told Petersen she’ll submit their names again for confirmation as the actual agency directors when Hoffman and the Senate are willing to get serious.

Petersen sued a month ago, demanding Hobbs submit those names — and now.

Gaona, in providing the governor’s legal response, said Petersen has no legal basis for his demand.
“She nominated directors for executive agencies, withdrew her nominations, and informed the Senate that she would resume sending nominations when it agrees to consider them in good faith,” he told Blaney.

“Nothing in (the law) requires her to nominate individuals on the Senate’s preferred timeline.”

Gaona also said the governor did nothing wrong in naming those deputy executive directors to ensure someone was in charge.

“To uphold her constitutional and statutory duties to effectively oversee and manage state government, the governor thus took lawful steps to prevent the Senate’s antics from obstructing the operation of critical executive agencies,” he said.

A hearing on the dispute is set for next month.