The Arizona Supreme Court ruling that the Arizona Legislature’s laws banning school mask mandates and a series of other measures in the budget bills are “unconstitutional” is an unfortunate and ill-conceived development, depriving Arizonans of their rights and liberties and destroying Arizona’s election integrity on a technicality.
By siding with Democrat-controlled education groups who argued that the Legislature violated a requirement that the titles of bills specifically describe all parts of the law, the Court is nullifying the will of the Arizona Legislature, itself representative of the will of the people of Arizona, for what amounts to little more than a typographical error. Rather than bend to the will of radical left-wing interest groups, the Court should have allowed the laws to remain in effect until that simple error could be corrected by the legislature.
Meanwhile, there has been little acknowledgement of the cause of the Legislature’s action: that our hands were forced when Governor Doug Ducey vetoed 32 bills of substantive law that would have benefited every parent with children in government-run schools and helped secure every future election. With the court’s strike down of several laws that would have taken effect, we will have to work quickly to re-enact those measures separately.
We have to protect the integrity of the vote, a foundational issue for our national sovereignty and national security. We have to safeguard our rights and liberties, given to us by God, including the rights of parents to decide what is best for their children. Those are the priorities of the Legislature. So, too, they should be the priorities of the Court.