Gov. Katie Hobbs defied Arizona law when she circumvented the Senate and nominated directors of statewide agencies without legislative approval, a judge ruled on June 5.
After the Democrat struggled to get many of her director nominees through a newly created Republican-led Senate approval committee last year, Hobbs went around the chamber and instead appointed deputy directors that essentially served as directors. Agency directors are subject to Senate approval, but deputy directors are not.
Senate President Warren Petersen, a Queen Creek Republican, filed a suit in December, accusing Hobbs of violating state law by circumventing legislative hearings for her appointees and asking the Maricopa County Superior Court to restore the decades-long practice of requiring Senate approval for nominees.
In a January court filing in which he asked for the case to be dismissed, Andy Gaona, Hobbs’ attorney, blamed the Senate for essentially giving the governor no other choice than to sidestep the Senate’s Committee on Director Nominations, saying the panel was “designed to slow-walk nominees.”
But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney, who was appointed in 2018 by Republican then-Gov. Doug Ducey, ruled that “the Governor has improperly, unilaterally appointed de facto directors for these 13 agencies, despite the actual job title she has assigned to each of them.”
Blaney conceded that Hobbs’ strategy to appoint deputy directors instead of directors “arguably” complied with some portions of state statutes regarding her duties as governor, but wrote in his decision that she “took those actions for an improper purpose, culminating in an improper result — one that violates Arizona law.”
“We do not … construe statutory phrases in isolation; we read statutes as a whole,” Blaney wrote.
The judge concluded that Hobbs must comply with state statutes that require her to nominate agency directors within a certain timeframe and that those nominees must be submitted for the approval of the Arizona Senate.
https://azmirror.com/2024/06/05/hobbs-illegally-bypassed-the-senate-when-appointing-agency-directors-judge-rules/