'In Arizona and throughout the American Southwest, it's time for good-government activists worried about the subversion of democracy via 'dark money' to join conservatives and libertarians to put an end to taxpayer-funded lobbying.'
As the smackdown over school choice in Arizona intensifies, taxpayers in the Grand Canyon State should know that they’re paying for both attacks on and defenses of the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program.
Meanwhile, Tom Horne, the state’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, is a champion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. The website of the Arizona Department of Education — the bureaucracy he runs — recently tweeted that school choice “will not bankrupt the state,” and linked to an interview Horne gave in which he explained “how he is empowering parents and students.”Local and state governments employ three tools to affect the policymaking process.
The Southwest Public Policy Institute recently published a paper on intragovernmental advocacy in the eight states of the American Southwest. We found that Arizona is no different than Texas or Utah or California: taxpayer-funded lobbying is commonplace. Battles over corporate welfare, occupational licensing, criminal justice, environmental regulations, and many other matters of importance to everyday life are heavily swayed by public-sector entities.
The need for reform is great, and activists of all ideological stripes should meet on common ground. Texas offers a national model for prohibiting taxpayer-funded lobbying. There, statutes forbid “a state agency” from using “appropriated money” to “employ, as a regular full-time or part-time or contract employee, a person who is required … to register as a lobbyist.
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