Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/Illustration by Jim Small | Arizona Mirror
Arizona’s Senate Republicans say they’re unified behind an ambitious plan for the 2025 legislative session that begins next week, aiming to pass laws on border security, water rights, quicker election results and battling “wokeness” in public schools.
“The 2025 legislative session offers an opportunity to reaffirm the principles that have made Arizona a beacon of freedom and prosperity,” Senate Republicans wrote in their plan, which was released Wednesday. “This agenda is built upon three unshakable pillars: securing our cities from the front door to the border, preserving the American Dream in Arizona, and embracing federalism and state sovereignty.”
Even with increased majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs still stands in the way of many Republican priorities. Hobbs has pledged support to the LGBTQ community and has promised to veto any anti-transgender bills, and since she took office in 2023, she’s put a stop to several GOP election reform bills that county officials claimed would be impossible to implement and make it harder to vote.
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Senate Democrats did not provide a comment on the Republican plan before this article was published.
Republicans can get around a Hobbs veto by sending a resolution to voters in 2026 — typically proposed laws must get approval from majorities in both legislative chambers before getting a sign-off from the governor.
And there’s no guarantee that voters will favor those resolutions: Republicans sent 11 measures to the 2024 ballot to bypass a Hobbs veto, and voters rejected seven of them.
Legislative Republicans have promised that one of their top priorities will be implementation of Proposition 314, a border security measure that was approved by more than 60% of voters. Some portions of the measure, like making it a felony to submit false documentation to apply for jobs or public benefits and the creation of a new class of felony to criminalize people convicted of selling fentanyl that later ends in someone else’s death, are already in effect.
But the main driver of the proposition is a provision that would make it a state crime for undocumented immigrants to cross the border from Mexico into Arizona — allowing Arizona law enforcement to arrest undocumented immigrants that they believe broke the law and for judges in the state to issue deportation orders. And that provision, which mirrors a 2023 Texas law that is tied up in the courts, clashes with federal authority to enforce immigration law.
Arizona’s version is stalled until the Texas law goes into effect, or the U.S. Supreme Court overturns a 2012 ruling against the Grand Canyon State. Critics of the new law, dubbed the “Secure the Border Act,” said that it would put financial pressure on law enforcement in border communities and would lead to increased racial profiling.
Other border focused plans include strengthening the state ban on sanctuary cities and increasing penalties for fentanyl trafficking and possession.
Shortly after the November election, legislative leaders from both parties told the Arizona Mirror that water issues might be a good area for bipartisan collaboration. But Republican plans to do away with “heavy-handed mandates and bureaucratic modeling” might make coming to a consensus with Democrats difficult. Last year, Hobbs signed some bipartisan water legislation but vetoed several additional GOP-backed bills that she said “threaten(ed) to erode the water protections that Arizonans rely upon.”
Republican water plans that might be more palatable to their Democratic colleagues include tying development to water sustainability, advocating for balanced agreements with the other states that rely on water from the Colorado River and encouraging industries to recycle water within their operations.
The Senate’s majority caucus also promised to push back on Hobbs’ moratorium on new housing, which she announced in June 2023. It affects some areas of Queen Creek and Buckeye that rely on groundwater and don’t have the required 100-year assured water supply for new residential development required by state law.
“Her reckless Order halted critical housing projects, limited available land to address our housing supply shortages, and created unnecessary housing inflation and costs,” Senate Republicans wrote in the plan. “These misguided decisions have exacerbated an already critical housing supply crisis.”
Estimates for Arizona’s need for new additional housing have varied widely, from around 65,000 to 270,000, with increased housing costs pushing home-ownership out of reach for many.
“The Senate Majority caucus will support legislation to increase the supply of housing while protecting our groundwater aquifers,” Senate Republicans said in the report.
The report only indirectly mentions a new “Alternative Path to Assured Water Supply” approved by the Governor’s Regulatory Review Council in November, which is meant to provide communities within the moratorium with a new way to demonstrate an assured water supply to allow new residential development.
But Republicans on the Joint Legislative Study Committee on Water Security on Dec. 18 accused the Arizona Department of Water Resources, along with Hobbs and the council, of overstepping their authority and bypassing the Legislature when they created rules for the new pathway, dubbed ADAWS.
“(O)ur Majority will work on legalizing Starter Homes for a new generation of first-time homebuyers and we will restore private property rights the way our founders envisioned,” Senate Republicans wrote in the plan. “Private property rights over the years have been eroded by local bureaucracies, delayed regulatory approvals, and confusing rules.”
The majority’s plan for education includes increased oversight of some aspects of public K-12 schools and colleges and universities with no mention of additional oversight for Arizona’s universal school voucher program, which provides public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, for homeschooling or other educational needs like tutoring.
“To preserve Arizona’s commitment to educational excellence, we must protect academic freedom and foster environments where intellectual diversity thrives,” Senate Republicans wrote.
This promise harkens back to proposals last year from Freedom Caucus member Sen. Anthony Kern, who called public universities “anti-American indoctrination camps” and sponsored a bill that would have allowed students to challenge their grades based on the “political bias” of their professors.
Republican lawmakers have also set out to continue their campaign of anti-transgender legislation in schools, saying that students should only play on sports teams, and use bathroom and locker facilities that align with their biological sex, instead of their gender identity.
The plan also gives a nod to a bill proposed last year by another Freedom Caucus member, then-Sen. Justine Wadsack, who lost her reelection bid, to “increase transparency in school board elections” by making them partisan, something that critics said would only add to political divisiveness.
They also plan to invest in vocational training, “to hold schools and their leaders accountable for mismanagement of resources” and to “(t)ake extreme ‘woke’ politics out of classrooms by ending the teaching of curricula related to critical race theory and radical transgender ideology.”
The claim that critical race theory, a graduate-school-level concept that examines how institutions in the U.S. impact racial groups differently, is being taught in K-12 schools has been widely and repeatedly debunked.
As promised, Senate Republicans plan to make changes to the state’s election laws, including quicker tabulation of ballots, banning ranked-choice voting and defending “the integrity and security of our elections process against executive overreach through litigation where needed.”
Maricopa County has reported its final election results an average of 13 days after the election over the past 16 years, but public dismay about that timeline fueled by conspiracy theories that longer ballot counting time increases the likelihood of fraud only date back to the 2020 election.
In November, Arizona voters rejected both a proposal to open up the state’s primary elections to all parties, which some on the right called ranked-choice voting, as well as a resolution put to voters by Republicans to ban ranked choice voting.
The Senate GOP’s plans also include:
- Requiring able-bodied adults who use public benefits to work, take part in education or training programs, or volunteer within their community as a prerequisite to receive benefits.
- Tying the duration of unemployment benefits to job market fluctuations
- Auditing publicly funded programs that serve homeless people to “ensure financial accountability and program effectiveness.”
- Investing in law enforcement training, recruitment and retention to build public trust and improve relationships with their communities.
- Addressing a projected shortage of medical doctors by expanding residency programs and incentivising work in underserved communities
- Establishing a third-party alternative to government licensing of medical professionals
- “Eliminate(ing) waste, fraud, and abuse in welfare and unemployment programs, protecting these funds for the truly needy.”
- Eliminating “unnecessary positions” in the government workforce and replacing them with artificial intelligence
- Reforming regulatory boards created to protect Arizonans “that have increasingly become weaponized against the citizens.”
- Reducing regulations on businesses
- Cutting taxes
- Investing in infrastructure
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