the Arizona House Government and Elections Committee passed HCR 2015 for an amendment proposal convention that would help put term limits on Congress. The resolution is sponsored by Rep. Ben Toma representing District 22, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area.
The resolution passed the house committee with a vote of 7-6. Thirty-five Arizona state lawmakers in the 2021 legislature have taken the term limits pledge (see listing below) promising to support an Article V convention for term limits on Congress.
The state senate counterpart resolution, SCR 1025, is sponsored by Sen. Kelly Townsend. Both resolutions are being guided through the legislature by U.S. Term Limits (USTL), a national, nonprofit advocating for term limits at all levels of government.
“This has been a great week for Arizona passing the USTL resolutions in committees in both chambers,” says USTL’s Arizona State Director, Jim Olivi. On Monday, Sen. Townsend’s bill passed its hearing in the Senate Government committee. “When 85% of people approve of anything, you know it’s a bipartisan proposal,” said Olivi.
According to a 2020 poll by McLaughlin & Associates, congressional term limits is the most popular and bipartisan issue in Arizona, with 85 percent support statewide. That includes backing from 87 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of independents and 83 percent of Democratic voters.
Both resolutions are expected to be voted on in their respective chambers as early as next week.
Every time you think the energy policies pushed by the Democratic Party can’t possibly get any crazier, they go and fool you again.
Politico’s E&E News published an article Friday with a headline that should scare the bejeebers out of anyone who hopes for sanity in energy policy: “Progressives look to recharge the Green New Deal for the AI era.”
The piece quotes Melat Kiros, the socialist who unseated longtime incumbent Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette in the party’s recent Colorado primary as saying, “The Green New Deal, frankly, is a floor now, not a ceiling, for what we need to actually be looking at doing.”
This, of course, parrots the classic mantra of every generation of new socialists, who, when presented with the reality that socialism fails disastrously everywhere it is tried, invariably claim that it just hasn’t been done the right way, and they know better.
But they never really do know better.
Let’s be clear: what any version of the Green New Deal introduced by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Sen Ed Markey in 2019 would kill the AI era. Why? Because it is a classically socialist program by its very nature. It is a program which would seize the means of production through the central government, invoke a gigantic array of top-down command-and-control regulatory structures and utterly destroy the spirit of human initiative and innovation that leads to human flourishing and prosperity.
All the various socialist candidates quoted in the E&E piece are supported by The Sunrise Movement, a far-left activist NGO funded mainly by leftwing billionaire interests like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Soros-affiliated Open Society Policy Center. What a surprise – it’s like a who’s who of far leftwing astroturf protest funders who have been behind every U.S. protest movement since Occupy Wall Street.
The Green New Deal as proposed by AOC and Markey seven years ago involved ending discretionary air travel; heavily restricting all other travel; heavily restricting personal driving; de facto banning oil, natural gas, and coal; building a vast network of high-speed rail lines which would cost trillions of dollars and take a century or more to develop (assuming the economy didn’t enter a major depression in the meantime); and destroying power grid reliability by forcing mass adoption of wind and solar.
To this new generation of Sunrise-supported socialists, that array of destructive and frankly impossible options is now the “floor” for what really needs to be done. You just can’t make this stuff up.
“The Democrat Party – the socialists, the Marxists – have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after New York voters nominated three socialist candidates.
The speaker isn’t wrong; in fact, he’s a master of understatement. The insurgent left is not just on the rise, it is being funded by the same leftwing billionaire interests who funded the destruction of America’s coal industry, the anti-fracking movement and the effort to kill the shale revolution that has generated hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth and made the United States the world’s dominant energy powerhouse.
Any revitalization of the Green New Deal would be intentionally designed to destroy all of that and much more. Any effort to apply a renewed Green New Deal to the AI industry would be designed to destroy it, too. Because socialism at its base is never about building anything, but about destroying things, with human flourishing being its main target.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The Goldwater Institute has filed a motion in Maricopa County Superior Court seeking to intervene on behalf of two Air Force veterans in a lawsuit challenging a proposed constitutional amendment that would protect certain scholarship funds for children of military families.
The motion was filed on behalf of Nickolas Kupper and Robert Figueroa, whom Goldwater identified as Air Force veterans whose children currently participate in Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The proposed intervenors are seeking to defend House Concurrent Resolution 2048, the “Military Families College Savings and Scholarship Protection Act,” which the Legislature recently referred to the November 2026 ballot.
The lawsuit was filed by the Protect Education Accountability Now Committee, Save Our Schools Arizona, and voter Linda May Lyon against the State of Arizona and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. According to Goldwater’s motion to intervene, the plaintiffs are asking the court to block HCR 2048 from appearing on the November ballot.
Arizona's military families don't deserve to have their children's educational opportunities ripped from their hands. That's why we're stepping up to defend them. https://t.co/ayRcX5JbBE
— Goldwater Institute (@GoldwaterInst) July 2, 2026
Goldwater said in a July 2 announcement that Kupper and Figueroa are seeking to defend the measure because their families have used ESA funds for years and have a direct interest in the outcome of the litigation.
“Proposed Intervenors seek to intervene as Defendants to defend the constitutionality of House Concurrent Resolution 2048 (‘HCR 2048’), the ‘Military Families College Savings and Scholarship Protection Act,’ which is a legislative referral passed to protect the educational stability of military families,” the motion states.
HCR 2048 proposes adding a new section to Article XI of the Arizona Constitution. Under the measure, the state could not confiscate funds from the scholarship account of a child of a military family if the account is maintained under a state program that designates such students as eligible and allows the funds to be used for tuition or fees at eligible postsecondary institutions.
The measure defines a “child of a military family” as a student who is the child of a person serving on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, who was serving on active duty when the student’s eligibility was initially determined, or who was killed in the line of duty.
The proposed amendment also contains a nonseverability provision. If a future law or voter-approved measure violates the military-family scholarship protection, the entire conflicting law or measure would be void, and a court could not sever only the offending portion.
The House passed HCR 2048 initially on March 2, the Senate passed it on June 12 by a 16-13-1 vote, and the House passed the final reading on June 13 by a 31-22-7 vote.
Goldwater’s motion argues that Kupper and Figueroa have a right to intervene because the lawsuit directly threatens their ability to secure long-term constitutional protections for their children’s education funding.
“By seeking to keep HCR 2048 off the ballot, Plaintiffs directly threaten to block Proposed Intervenors’ ability to secure long-term constitutional protections for their children’s educational funding,” the motion states.
The filing also argues that the existing government defendants cannot adequately represent the families’ specific interests. Goldwater said Fontes is defending the measure as a neutral election administrator, while Kupper and Figueroa are defending the substantive validity of the proposed amendment because their children rely on ESA funds.
In its July 2 statement, the Goldwater Institute said, “The Arizona Constitution is clear: Arizona voters have the right to amend the state constitution, and the Military Families Protection Act would trump the activists’ efforts to cripple the scholarship opportunities currently afforded to Arizona military families and others.”
The lawsuit comes as ESA opponents are also seeking to place the Protect Education Act on the ballot. Save Our Schools Arizona says the proposal is intended to “reform Arizona’s universal ESA voucher program” and increase transparency and accountability.
The Protect Education Campaign announced last week that it submitted 421,451 signatures to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The Protect Education Act proposal would require unused ESA money to revert to the state and be directed to public schools, and it would bar families making more than $150,000 annually from joining the program. It would also ban ESA spending on non-educational or luxury items and require the Arizona Department of Education to report how much voucher funding each school receives.
HCR 2048 could conflict with the Protect Education Act because the proposed constitutional amendment would block future laws or ballot measures from changing the protected scholarship-account funds for military families.
Goldwater argued in its motion that the litigation is directly tied to that conflict, saying an adverse ruling could remove HCR 2048 from the ballot and leave the families’ ESA accounts vulnerable to “regulatory and financial rollbacks” under the competing Protect Education Act.
“Without HCR 2048, Proposed Intervenors’ educational accounts will remain highly vulnerable to systemic legislative and political volatility, including the exact regulatory and financial rollbacks slated under Plaintiffs’ competing ‘Protect Education Act,’” the motion states.
Kupper and Figueroa are asking the court to allow them to enter the case as defendants, either as a matter of right or by permission. They also said they intend to file a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claim rather than expand the litigation with counterclaims.
The case is assigned to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kreamer.
Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ-02) has backed an arrangement to secure lawfare protections for American farmers and ranchers.
Crane was present for the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Small Business Administration (SBA) that establishes a joint process to intake, investigate, and resolve lawfare complaints.
As part of the signing, the two agencies hosted a roundtable where farmers and ranchers shared personal testimonies of alleged regulatory and legal overreach.
Two Arizona rancher families impacted by that kind of alleged overreach were present at the event: Dustin and Becki Ross of Windmill Mountain Ranch, and Casey and Meggan Murph of H Bar and Y Ranch.
The Ross family has endured a two-year-long stall on their grazing allotment due to archaeological-clearance requirements, affecting their property maintenance and herd management.
The Murph family faces the potential loss of their grazing leases to a foreign company’s solar project. Their family has worked the land for over 100 years, predating Arizona statehood.
In a press release, Crane accused the federal government of historically siding with environmentalists to target farmers and ranchers. However, Crane said the Trump administration has taken a novel, friendlier approach to the welfare of families like the Rosses and Murphs.
“Farmers and ranchers are the foundation of a strong and thriving nation. Despite their tremendous contributions to our way of life, the federal government has too often stood by as radical environmentalists targeted them,” said Crane. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, Secretary Rollins, and Administrator Loeffler, those days of bureaucratic neglect are over. This Memorandum of Understanding will help protect America’s producers from senseless red tape and litigation. We look forward to continuing this critical partnership and laying the groundwork for a healthy, robust industry for generations to come.”
Under this lawfare protection arrangement, the USDA will collect complaints and the SBA will handle case management and resolution.
The SBA said in its announcement of the memorandum of understanding that the Trump administration has taken a posture of believing the plight of farmers and ranchers first, and seeking justification for the regulations and legal actions that allegedly burden them.
“The goal is to identify patterns of abuse and eliminate regulations that drive up costs and drive down productivity,” stated the SBA. “Family farmers do not have the time or legal resources to fight back when Washington gets it wrong. Under POTUS, we are answering to the producers who power this country, not the bureaucrats who hold them back.
SBA and @USDA have signed a new MOU to help farmers, ranchers, and rural small businesses report costly federal rules and lawfare.
Under this partnership, USDA will collect complaints and share them with SBA for case management and resolution.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said their agency’s Lawfare Portal received over 600 submissions from producers across 47 states, including Arizona, who she says were “unfairly targeted by their own government.”
The USDA launched its Lawfare Portal last April in the wake of a high-profile criminal trespass trial involving a South Dakota ranching couple in a land dispute with the U.S. Forest Service. Like the Arizona families at Thursday’s event, the South Dakota couple’s family have worked the land for over 100 years.
There is still so much more work to do.
Since launching USDA's Lawfare Portal last April, we've received more than 600 submissions from producers across 47 states—farmers and ranchers who have been unfairly targeted by their own government. We review every single case because… pic.twitter.com/KLg0w1ykR5
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) July 2, 2026
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The U.S. House of Representatives has unanimously passed H.R. 7396, the Native American Entrepreneurial Opportunity Act, a bipartisan measure aimed at strengthening Small Business Administration (SBA) outreach and support for Tribal entrepreneurs across the United States.
The legislation, led by a bipartisan coalition in Congress, seeks to formally establish and codify the Office of Native American Affairs (ONAA) within the SBA by amending the Small Business Act.
The goal is to improve coordination, accountability, and targeted support for Native American and native Hawaiian business owners who often face structural barriers in accessing federal resources.
The bill was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ-02), alongside Rep. Shanice Davids (D-KS-03), Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX-06), and Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-MN-03). The measure passed the House with unanimous support after previously clearing the chamber in the last Congress with strong bipartisan backing before stalling in the Senate.
If enacted, the legislation would formally embed the ONAA within the Small Business Administration and assign its responsibility for expanding access to entrepreneurial development programs, contracting opportunities, and capital resources for Tribal communities.
This evening, the House unanimously passed the Native American Entrepreneurial Opportunity Act to strengthen @SBAgov outreach to Tribal entrepreneurs.
The office would also be tasked with improving coordination with other federal agencies and increasing education about available programs for Native entrepreneurs.
Tribal business owners, particularly those operating on reservations, often face unique challenges including complex tax structures, regulatory barriers, lending difficulties, and questions surrounding property rights.
Supporters of the legislation argue that these issues have been compounded by inconsistent outreach and limited access to federal small business programs.
By codifying the Office of Native America Affairs into federal law, the bill also strengthens congressional oversight by requiring annual reports to Congress detailing outreach efforts, consultations with Tribal governments, training initiatives, and the number of entrepreneurs served.
“I’m proud to be part of the bipartisan coalition working to improve and expand SBA outreach to Tribal communities. As the representative of over half of Arizona’s tribes, I’m focused on solutions to help expand economic growth throughout rural Arizona,” stated Rep. Crane. “I’m grateful to Rep. Davids for her leadership, as well as Reps. Ellzey and Morrison for their support of this important bill. I urge my colleagues in the Senate to quickly take up and pass this measure.”
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
