One candidate’s voting records are resurfacing amid a heated race for the 1st Congressional District seat.
Democratic nominee Amish Shah, while a state representative, voted against a measure banning sex change surgeries for minors.
Shah took the vote in 2022 while representing the 24th Legislative District. He did not explain his vote during the House floor decision on the bill.
Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, sponsored the legislation.
Shah also voted against bills perceived as noninclusive of transgender individuals, including a ban on males from participating in female sports, and a requirement for students to use bathrooms in accordance with their biological sex.
This resurfaced voting record provides a context of continuity with Shah’s approach as a lawmaker, considering his promises to voters in recent months to represent a further-left faction of the Democratic Party.
Publicly, Shah has styled himself as an independent that works beyond political party.
His platform proposes advancing socialized medicine, codifying abortion, ending tariffs, and increasing public school funding. When Shah first announced his candidacy last May, he pledged to defend abortion access, namely for the abortion drug mifepristone.
I believe in universal healthcare. The system is broken. #LD5#ShahForAZ
During his time in the state legislature, Shah balanced his public commitment to bipartisanship by introducing legislation that aligned with a more progressive arc, such as a bill to expand anti-discrimination laws by affording protections for gender identity and sexual orientation, and another bill to redefine marriage within the state constitution.
That anti-discrimination expansion bill has been included within Shah’s bipartisanship count, since Shah cosponsored the bill alongside former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican.
Shah played an active role in the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Shah headlined a town hall for the Sanders campaign and endorsed his approach to socializing healthcare. In one town hall, Shah proposed replacing capitalism with socialism.
It was prior to his unsuccessful 2024 campaign for this same seat that Shah openly situated himself within the socialist camp of the Democratic Party. Shah lost that 2024 race despite outspending his opponent by several million, Rep. David Schweikert.
Shah also signed onto a compact to make Washington, D.C., into the 51st state. Shah was among 33 Democratic lawmakers from Arizona to sign the 2021 letter. In 2023, Shah followed up on that letter by cosponsoring a 2023 resolution to support D.C. statehood.
Shah has declined to sign onto other compacts. Shah is not among the signatories on board with Promise to America, a commitment for Democratic elected officials and candidates to oppose socialism.
Shah’s primary election opponent, Marlene Galan-Woods, did sign onto the pledge.
Apart from himself, among Shah’s biggest single donors have been the IA Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee based out of D.C., and 314 Action Impact Slate, a hybrid PAC based out of D.C.
Shah has raised more than $1.8 million this reporting period, per Federal Election Commission data.
The Republican nominee in the race, Jay Feely, has raised more than $2.5 million. As with Shah, apart from himself Feely’s top donors include Grow the Majority, a Virginia-based PAC, and Emmer Majority Builders, a Georgia-based PAC.
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A coalition of U.S. House Democrats have banded together to pledge against socialism, but none of Arizona’s Democrat congressional leaders signed on.
Reps. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ-07), Greg Stanton (D-AZ-04), and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ-03) have not signed the Promise to America, an organization pushing a pledge to align the Democratic Party around the principles of capitalism, safety, fiscal responsibility, effective government, common purpose, and patriotism.
The three congressional leaders have not publicly aligned with socialism, and are not known to be members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Stanton’s primary challenger, Kai Newkirk, was a self-identified democratic socialist.
However, top Democrats in Arizona appear to be looking to reclaim and redefine socialism. Gov. Katie Hobbs’ consultant Stacy Pearson, who has represented her campaign to the media, recently told KJZZ that all public goods qualified as socialism, and that Democrats needed to reclaim socialist ideology as their own.
“[W]hen politicians are arguing against socialism, they’re arguing against well-funded public education and good universities and public transportation and affordable housing,” said Pearson. “The Democrats need to get a hold of the word socialist like we did with abortion, and we stopped using weird pitter-patter words like ‘reproductive freedom’ and ‘reproductive rights.’ No, we’re really talking about a woman’s right to have an abortion when she needs one, period. And so I think we need to get a hold of the word again and remind people what it really means.”
The new pledge from U.S. House Democrats against socialism declares a belief in an economy driven by merit and hard work, secure borders and orderly immigration, a balanced budget, reduced bureaucracy, free speech, common political ground, and confidence rooted in patriotism.
“We are proud, not ashamed of America,” stated the pledge. “We believe America’s story is one of extraordinary achievement and unfinished work. We honor America’s strengths and exceptional character while striving to build a freer, stronger, more prosperous, and more perfect union.”
Ten congressional Democrats and five candidates have signed the pledge as of this report. Signatories hail from California, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas.
The pledge was developed by New York Rep. Tom Suozzi and California Rep. Adam Gray alongside a team of fellows following sizable wins from socialist candidates in the June primaries. The founding fellows were Felix Frisch, who serves as director; Mac Healey; Sarah Buchanan; Molly Uthoff; Aarynn Deleon; Chloe Stevelman; and Yenjay Hu.
Suozzi and Gray market themselves as the two Democrats to have successfully flipped districts that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election cycle.
Promise to America appears to be aligned with the Welcome Party, which has an affiliated political action committee with millions in funding from the likes of LinkedIn cofounder and tech venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, former 21st century Fox CEO James Murdoch, and Walmart heir Samuel Walton.
Only one Democratic candidate from Arizona was listed as having signed the pledge: Marlene Galan Woods, who lost the Democratic nomination for the 1st congressional district seat to Amish Shah.
Candidates Jonathan Nez, 2nd congressional district; Elizabeth Lee, 5th congressional district; JoAnna Mendoza, 6th congressional district; Bernadette Greene-Placentia, 8th congressional district; and Dani Sterbinksy, 9th congressional district, also have not signed the pledge.
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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.
From harvesting timber in national forests to grazing cattle on the open range, our nation has faced many tragedies of the commons over the years. Whether hunting big game in the wild or extracting oil and gas from underground reservoirs, each example presented our leaders with the same, fundamental issue: if nobody owns it, everyone will overuse it.
For rural Arizona, groundwater is no different. As explained in Part 2, Arizona’s groundwater challenges are a tragedy of the commons, stemming from the fact that groundwater is a finite resource with multiple landowners on the surface, any one of whom can tap into the common supply.
How we approach this tragedy moving forward will determine not only the health of the aquifers but also the future of our rural communities. While some proposals have been offered to date, none have been sufficient to earn legislative support, and most have been wrong for our state.
To get it right, we must consider the approaches that have been taken in other contexts to see which have worked and which have not, allowing us to determine which could be the best fit for groundwater.
The socialist approach views self-interest as the problem. It seeks to control human behavior through mandates, permits, and fees. Whether renewable energy standards for climate, catch limits for fisheries, or sustained yield mandates for national forests, all prioritize resource preservation through government control—maintaining communal ownership and regulating beneficial use through bureaucrats who decide who can use what, when, and how much.
The property-based approach, on the other hand, views communal ownership as the problem. It seeks to eliminate the tragedy by establishing private property rights to the resource, allocating individual shares and allowing users to manage and conserve their own supplies, limited only by the fundamental principles of private property rights, such as the “no harm” principle and “right to exclude.”
Mining claims have operated on “first in time, first in right,” and grazing allotments grant exclusive rights to leaseholders, thereby reducing conflicts among users and making individuals responsible for their own supplies.
To address rural groundwater, Arizona leaders must decide which of these approaches they will take.
Socialist options don’t work
Quod nullius est, est domini regis. It means: “What is the property of no one, belongs to the king.”
In 1976, after the Arizona Supreme Court declared groundwater a public resource, the Court said: “The legislature has the authority to determine which groundwater uses are most important to the general welfare and to allocate the state’s groundwater resources accordingly.”
This statement illustrates the truth about communal ownership: if no one owns the resource, then the government has absolute authority to act as king over its use. This is why the Arizona Department of Water Resources frequently reminds landowners that their right to use water is only “usufruct” to the land they own: meaning they don’t own the groundwater itself, the state does.
Like wild animals in Old England, communal resources belonged to the Crown—hunters could only hunt when, where, and how the king said they could. Those systems, like today’s socialist groundwater regimes, treat resources as communal property controlled by government fiat.
Such approaches typically fail because they lead to higher scarcity, higher prices, and worse outcomes for the resource itself. The federal government’s centralized control over national forests, for example, has produced catastrophic wildfires, endangered protected species, and restricted affordable timber.
In Arizona, the infamous “management area” is the hallmark socialist approach to groundwater— including 1948 “Critical Management Areas” and 1980 “Active Management Areas.”
According to Dean E. Peterson and Larry L. Deason in Arizona’s Groundwater Problem & Proposed Legislation, the 1948 Critical Management Areas “did not adopt any of the basic principles of water law,” but rather were an “exercise of the general police power of the state” through centralized restrictions.
In 1980, Arizona doubled down on its socialist approach with the Groundwater Management Act, establishing “Active Management Areas” that centralized control into the Arizona Department of Water Resources. This gave the agency near-absolute power over groundwater in AMAs, allowing its director to effectively act as king over the common supply.
In both cases, users rushed to drill before grandfathering deadlines, and corporate and municipal users entrenched their historical pumping, distorting market incentives. After 40 years, the 1980 Act has failed to achieve “safe yield” in most AMAs.
Despite their clear failures, proponents today continue to argue that Arizona should “finish what was started” with the 1948 and 1980 groundwater acts by expanding socialist-style control statewide through “Rural Groundwater Management Areas” and “Local Groundwater Stewardship Areas.”
These proposals must be rejected, as they would only impose new bureaucracies, tax personal groundwater withdrawals, and mandate volumetric reductions while maintaining the same communal ownership model that led to the tragedy in the first place.
Property-based solutions are best
Meum et tuum. It means: “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours.”
According to John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, the role of government is not to seek to control human behavior, but rather to protect private property by using the limited power of government to quantify and secure individual rights, prevent takings, support transferability, and uphold the “no harm” principle and biblical golden rule between and among property owners.
Rather than mandating conservation through coercion, property-based systems embrace human nature and seek to harness the power of self-interest to guide the invisible hand toward voluntary conservation.
History has proven that this approach works. When socialist mandates in American fisheries led to overfishing, policymakers switched to property-based catch shares and individual transferable quotas, which restored fish populations.
When hunters arrived in the New World, they rejected the Old English system and adopted the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which includes transferable hunting permits, helping to maintain healthy wildlife populations while providing a fair system of access.
Even “adopt a highway” programs harness self-interest to address trash and litter on public highways, granting exclusive naming and advertising rights to private parties in exchange for maintenance.
Overall, individual ownership protects scarce resources better than bureaucratic control because direct ownership creases individual responsibility. Where individuals are given ownership and responsibility, conservation increases because what belongs to someone is protected by someone.
Arizona needs correlative rights
To solve Arizona’s groundwater tragedy, we must remove it from communal ownership and apply a property-based approach. One solution designed specifically for finite underground resources like groundwater is “correlative rights.”
Derived from oil and gas law in resource-rich states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, correlative rights allocate proportional shares of the resource to adjoining landowners on the surface, based on the amount of land they own. If a person owns five percent of the surface, then they own five percent of the oil and gas below, plain and simple. This is consistent with the ad coelum doctrine described in Part 1.
In many of these resource-rich states, policymakers have already adopted correlative rights for groundwater. In Texas, for example, the Edwards Aquifer Authority uses correlative rights to allocate groundwater. In Nebraska, natural resource districts administer correlative rights.
Because allocations are treated as real property, users are free to trade their shares among themselves within the same basin—allowing market forces, rather than government bureaucracy, to dictate the most efficient use of limited resources.
This is why correlative rights have been such an effective way to prevent the tragedy of the commons in finite underground resources to date. As a proven, property-based framework rooted in America’s traditional values, correlative rights are the right approach for Arizona.
It’s time to restore private property rights to groundwater
When the Arizona Supreme Court enshrined “communal ownership” into law, it likened groundwater to a wild animal, saying it was “free to roam as [it] please[d]” and the “property of no one” until “captured.”
In so doing, it wrongfully embraced the Old English model that Americans rejected and failed to follow the American path that utilizes private property rights to advance the public good. This must be undone.
To address the tragedy of the commons in Arizona, we must recognize the harms of communal ownership and reject the socialist schemes that seek to maintain it. Only by restoring private property rights to groundwater through the adoption of correlative rights can Arizona finally address the tragedy and allow landowners to protect and conserve the supplies beneath their feet.
It’s time that Arizona leaders consider a new approach to groundwater supplies. As Arizona Justice Duke Cameron wrote in 1976: “The time has come to consider again the doctrine of correlative rights.”
Suppose you were an evil genius who decided to create a permanent underclass out of a particular race. What provisions would you make to ensure that they remained permanently poor and outcast?
Here are some ideas. First, physically separate them from the rest of the population. Give them room to live, but make sure the land is not owned by individuals who could grow their net worth, but by the collective, each tribe with its own sovereign government within the national government.
Encourage economic dependency by supplying them with lots of free stuff, some available only to them. Create a bureaucracy to manage the financial affairs of only this particular race. Grant them special privileges exclusive to their race, such as the right to operate certain businesses, but again on the condition that the ownership is by the collective.
Finally, emphasize the history of oppression this selected race has experienced and how the guilty oppressors owe them these “favors” in perpetuity.
If you’ve deduced that this roughly describes the treatment whites accorded to American Indians, that’s because it does. We all know the story of how this came about. When Europeans settled the New World, the clash of civilizations often wasn’t pretty.
Yes, there were atrocities on both sides, and it probably was historically inevitable that the more technically advanced culture would prevail. Nevertheless, our treatment of the indigenous populations can never be totally defended.
In a better world, when the fighting finally ended, we would have worked out a shared arrangement where both sides would have enjoyed equal citizenship rights and responsibilities. We would all have had the right to participate in the religious and social structures of our choosing with no special legal status belonging to any group.
In short, we could all be Americans, a blessing sought after around the world.
That’s not what happened of course. Instead, in the words of an 1881 Supreme Court ruling, the tribes were fashioned into separate “domestic independent nations” with a relationship like “that of a ward to his guardian.” The federal government began management of the land use and title management for millions of acres in Indian country.
Moreover, the government to a large extent assumed responsibility for the care and upkeep of Indians, including everything from schools and medical care to infrastructure projects and routine maintenance on reservations.
The result in hindsight was predictable. American Indians, no surprise, did not become the first group ever to achieve prosperity through welfare benefits. Instead, of all the racial minority groups in America, they today have the lowest average income, despite, or maybe because of, receiving the most economic aid from government.
In fact, of all our ethnic groups, the less access historically to entitlements they have received, the more wealthy they have become.
Also unsurprisingly, the federal government has done a notoriously terrible job of overseeing Indian economic affairs. For example, 66 million acres of land are held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), presumably to be managed for the Indians’ benefit. Yet the lands have produced minimal profits for the tribes.
The reservation lands contain abundant uranium, coal, and gas reserves. Still, Senate hearings concluded that only two million of the 15 million acres of energy reserves have been developed, leaving $1.5 trillion in underground resources untapped.
BIA rules or “white tape” often result in stricter regulations for tribes than for others. The result is that up to 49 steps can be required to obtain an oil lease in Indian country that requires four elsewhere. Excessive regulation also explains why valuable farmland is often left unused.
Before the European conquest, American Indians operated self-governing states in which they were “strong, self-sufficient, self-initiating, independent powerful individuals,” according to an historian of the period. Now they’re trapped in a no-man’s land between citizenship and status as wards of the state. Worse, after living under these conditions, many Indians themselves have now developed the habits of chronic dependency.
Some sympathetic observers call for more effective supervision of Indian affairs. But bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to reform. Let’s work instead to achieve for our countrymen full status as free Americans.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
