Katie Hobbs in February 2023. || Photo by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Governors use their orders for political purposes in the same way their opponents use politics to decry them
CAITLIN SIEVERS
Arizona Mirror
Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs is facing backlash and retaliation from Republicans over recent executive orders that would bar county attorneys from prosecuting abortion providers and allow state insurance to pay for gender confirmation care for state employees.
Republicans on the state Senate’s Committee on Director Nominations even went as far as canceling all future meetings of the committee until Hobbs agreed to meet and to discuss what they called her abuse of power. Hobbs still expects the Senate to confirm her nominees, she said during a news conference last week.
While Sen. Jake Hoffman, the committee’s Republican chairman and the leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, has contended that Hobbs’ executive orders are outside of the norm, history says otherwise, said Erin Scharff, a professor of law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.
“I think both the record of many, many years of Arizona governors doing this work and using their executive orders, but also a national framework that governors use executive orders to do these exact kinds of things, is an important piece of the debate that I think sometimes is missing,” Scharff told the Arizona Mirror.
After the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, governors across the country, including in Colorado, Maine and California, issued executive orders protecting the right to abortion in their states.
According to the Council of State Governments, the executive power of the Arizona governor is implied, meaning there’s no state statute that directly lists the extent of the governor’s executive power, including when it comes to executive orders.
The Arizona Constitution establishes three co-equal branches of government, including the governor’s office, which is tasked with implementing legislation.
