Senate Committe on Director Nominations halts hearings following Gov. Hobbs abortion executive order
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Upset with her executive order last week on abortions, Republicans who until now have been slow to confirm the governor’s nominations are now bringing the process to a dead stop.
In a letter Monday to Katie Hobbs, the three Republican members of the Committee on Director Nominations said their role, at least in part, is to ensure that the people the governor picks to head state agencies will follow the laws as written by the Legislature.
But Sens. Jake Hoffman, Sine Kerr and T.J. Shope said the executive order Friday by the governor to strip the state’s 15 county attorneys of their ability to prosecute all abortion cases and give that to Attorney General Kris Mayes, a supporter of abortion rights, gives them “tremendous concerns about your office’s future attempts to act outside its vested authority.”
“Based on your recent executive actions, we have grave concern that the direction you intend to provide to your nominees will not allow them to fulfill this obligation,” wrote the senators from Queen Creek, Buckeye and Coolidge, respectively.
Now they want to meet with Hobbs — or at least members of her administration “to discuss any additional unlawful overreach your office intends to take requiring complicity from executive directors.”
For the moment, the decision to halt hearings — the next of which had been scheduled for Tuesday — has no immediate effects.
Gubernatorial nominees can serve for up to a year without Senate confirmation. And that would allow each of those awaiting Senate action to keep their jobs — and run the state agencies — into 2024.
But unless resolved before then, it would mean that the people the governor has picked since taking office in January will be out when their year is up. And that would force Hobbs to make new picks, submit their names and, depending on the Senate, have to go through the same thing again.
In a response, Hobbs press aide Christian Slater did not address the executive order and whether his boss actually has the legal right to tell the 15 county attorneys they no longer have the authority to prosecute medical professionals who perform abortions. Instead, he lashed out at Hoffman.
“Sen. Hoffman has shown a reckless disrespect for small businesses, veterans, children and everyday Arizonans by failing to fairly consider nominees and holding state agencies hostage to his partisan political games,” Slater said in a prepared statement. And he made it clear that, as far as his boss is concerned, this latest maneuver by Hoffman, based on the Friday executive order, is hardly anything new,
“Based on his current pace, Gov. Hobbs would not have all her nominees confirmed until her second term,” Slater said.
The ire of the three senators was not directed solely at the governor.
In their letter to Hobbs, they accused her of “conspiring” with Mayes.
She was part of the decision-making process that led to Hobbs on Friday concluding that Arizona law entitles her to direct the attorney general to handle all future abortion cases. That effectively decriminalized abortion in Arizona as Mayes contends that the right of privacy built into the Arizona Constitution makes the decision by a woman to terminate a pregnancy beyond the reach of the government.
That was based on professed concerns by the governor that a legal fight playing out in the Arizona Supreme Court could lead to conflicting conclusions among the 15 county attorneys which of two laws is enforceable: one that outlaws all abortions except to save the life of the mother and the other which makes the process legal through the 15th week of pregnancy.
But an aide to Mayes aide confirmed that she believes that right to privacy includes even so-called “late-term” abortions which, even before the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, were not performed in Arizona.
All this overflowed into the efforts by Hobbs to get her nominees confirmed based claims by the three GOP members of the nominations committee that her actions and that of Mayes “give the Legislature tremendous concern about your office’s future attempt to act outside its vested authorities.”
In a separate statement, Hoffman, who chairs the committee, said that the governor left lawmakers no choice.
“We are now forced to redirect our attention, form confirming directors and creating good policy for the people of Arizona, to examining the fallout of Hobbs’ unconstitutional maneuver, as well as the likelihood of future overreaches of her authority,” said Hoffman. He also chairs the Arizona Freedom Caucus composed of GOP lawmakers who espouse limited government and taxes.
But the caucus has become more vocal and combative this year, even saying in its self-description on Twitter that “Katie Hobbs’ Democratic Fascism will not win under our watch.”
That hostility has flowed both ways as the governor, for her part, has been openly critical of Hoffman, saying he has slow-walked hearings on her nominees.
“I don’t think fake elector Jake Hoffman is interested in good government at all,” she said in February as he criticized her selection and vetting process of nominees.
That refers to the fact that Hoffman was one of the 11 names sent by the Arizona Republican Party to Congress as electors pledged to vote for Donald Trump after the 2020 election despite the fact that Joe Biden had won the popular votes and was entitled to the state’s 11 electors.
“He’s interested in creating a stage for his political theater,” the governor said. And she said what the Senate has been doing is “serving to potentially grind government to a halt.”
Earlier this year the committee recommended that the full Senate not confirm Teresa Cullen, the Pima County health director, to head the Department of Health Services.
They raised questions because the county had some of the most stringent public health rules during the COVID-19 outbreak and often was at odds with former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. Hobbs withdrew the nomination, but not before the full Senate, insisting it had not gotten the message, voted to reject her.
Hobbs also was forced to withdraw the nomination of former state Sen. Martin Quezada to be the Registrar of Contractors after the Republican-dominated screening panel voted 3-2 along party lines not to confirm him. Republicans put out a press release shortly after the hearing calling Quezada an “unqualified extremist” with a “racist past.”
