Republican lawmakers say that Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes is operating outside of her authority and is “picking and choosing” which state laws she’ll defend in court.
Mayes and Oscar De Los Santos, the No. 2 Democrat in the Arizona House of Representatives, both called the committee that Republicans created to investigate her a “sham.”
“House Democrats will not be participating in this joke of a committee,” De Los Santos told reporters during an April 4 press conference. “We urge our Republican colleagues to put an end to their immature and useless political theater. As always, House Democrats are proud to be the adults in the room.”
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Republican members of the Committee on Executive Oversight, which was created less than two weeks ago, chided their Democratic colleagues for not showing up to the April 4 meeting.
“This is supposed to be a bipartisan committee and, as you see, the other side didn’t even bother to show up to exercise their duty to their constituents,” said Rep. John Gillette, R-Kingman.
The Republican lawmakers spent more than a hour on April 4 interviewing Andrew Gould about the various authorities of the attorney general, as well as discussing public records requests they’ve made to Mayes’ office that they say could implicate her in some kind of wrongdoing.
Gould, a former Arizona Supreme Court justice, lost the Republican primary in the 2022 race for attorney general. The winner of that primary, Abe Hamadeh, went on to lose to Mayes in the general election by only 280 votes.
During her press conference, Mayes described Gould as her “former opponent and sore loser.”
The committee is looking into Mayes’ series of town hall meetings in rural Arizona, in which she’s gathering evidence for a possible public nuisance lawsuit against foreign companies that she says are over-pumping groundwater. The committee is also investigating what they called Mayes’ targeting of Cochise County officials and their handling of elections.
Two of the county’s three supervisors, Republicans Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, were indicted on felony charges last fall for attempting to interfere with the certification of the 2022 general election. The lawmakers on the committee didn’t mention those charges, but only specifically spoke about Mayes’ failed suit alleging that the supervisors had improperly delegated their election authority to their county recorder.
The chair of the oversight committee, Rep. Jacqueline Parker, R-Mesa, said that Mayes should have gone after “bad acting” counties like Maricopa and Pima, which she said had many more election issues, instead of targeting Cochise County.
After initially refusing to certify the election results in what Judd described as a form of protest against unproven claims of voter disenfranchisement in Maricopa County, a judge ordered the Cochise County supervisors to certify.
During the committee meeting, Rep. Austin Smith accused Mayes of using her groundwater town hall meetings as a “fishing expedition to essentially campaign against the legislature on water issues.”
Mayes said she intends to go after those like a Saudi-owned dairy company that pumped water to grow alfalfa in La Paz County, something not allowed in their own country, in order to take advantage of the lack of groundwater pumping restrictions in rural Arizona. But the Republicans on the committee accused her of going after local farmers.
Mayes said her focus was on the Saudi-owned company, Fondomonte.
“They knew they could take advantage of our state because this GOP-controlled legislature has failed to act on updating our decades-old groundwater laws for years, and instead chose to allow the Saudis and others to just stick a straw in the ground and drain us dry,” Mayes said.
During the committee meeting, Gould refused to answer specific questions about Mayes’ actions, but attempted to inform the lawmakers broadly about the attorney general’s power and obligations.
Mayes does not have “broad common law authority” to pursue whatever cases she would like, Gould said, but only has the authority given to her through the state constitution, as well as the laws passed by the legislature.
But Gould said that, while Mayes has a duty to defend Arizona’s laws, she can decide not to if she believes any law is unconstitutional.
And Mayes said that’s the reason she refused to defend multiple state laws, including Arizona’s 1864 ban on abortion that was drafted during territorial days, as well as the state’s ban on transgender girls playing on sports teams that fit their gender identity.
Mayes told reporters that she couldn’t say for sure what specifically inspired the creation of the committee, but her office has been investigating Arizona’s 2020 fake electors, has recently sent multiple grand jury subpoenas in the case and appears to be closing in on indictments.
“I think it’s fair to say that the underlying motive is to distract from everything that we’re doing at the AG’s Office,” she said.
The purpose of the committee, according to Republicans who created it, is to examine the duties and powers of the attorney general, to investigate allegations against Mayes and to make recommendation to the House, which could include “legislation to promote the rule of law and deter partisan abuse and weaponization of the office of Arizona Attorney General or other state offices.”
The committee is planning to field additional complaints against Mayes and possibly file public records requests, as well as to hold more meetings.
“If they wanted a different attorney general, they should have won the election,” Mayes told reporters. “I won, so tough luck. Try again. Come back in 3 years and try to beat me, but don’t start some sham investigative committee here in the legislature and waste taxpayer dollars.”
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