Guests - Mark Mix, Tim Le Sota, Sine Kerr, Jay Tolkoff
Kathleen Winn's Tuesday show made a habit of taking the national and running it local — Medicaid fraud in California to Arizona's own pay-to-play problems, a WNBA controversy to a ballot measure on girls' sports, a union-dues scheme to the stakes of a governor's race. Four guests carried it: the head of the nation's leading right-to-work organization, the attorney chairing the Yes on 318 campaign, Arizona's first Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, and the citizen watchdog who has become the show's recurring guide to the Pima County budget.
Mark Mix: How Union Officials Got Between Medicaid and the People It Pays
Mark Mix — president of the 2.8-million-member National Right to Work Committee and of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation — joined to explain a form of Medicaid fraud recently spotlighted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who Mix said has told states that public-sector unions are among the biggest beneficiaries of the abuse.
The scheme, as Mix described it, runs through home health care. Many home providers are relatives — a mother, a grandparent, an aunt — caring for a disabled family member who receives Medicaid, with some of that money paying the caregiver. Those caregivers were long treated as private-sector W-2 contractors, and so weren't subject to unionization. The move, Mix said, was to redesignate them as public-sector employees "for the purposes of unionization and collective bargaining" only — making them an identifiable group unions could organize and draw dues from. He dated the strategy to the 2000s and pointed to a 2012 executive order by then-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich placing SEIU as the representative of the state's Medicaid-funded home providers.
That case reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Harris v. Quinn, argued in January 2014 and decided that June, brought by Pam Harris, an Illinois woman caring for her own developmentally disabled child. Mix said the Court held that these caregivers couldn't be made state employees purely for bargaining purposes, meaning they could no longer be forced to pay dues skimmed from the Medicaid money flowing to their clients. He tied it to the Foundation's 2018 Janus victory, which established that no government employee can be forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of the job. The stakes, he said, are enormous: 11 states still carry this public-sector designation on the books, channeling what he called billions to organized labor — chiefly SEIU and AFSCME, the two largest public-sector unions.
Mix framed it as fundamentally about political money. Because federal Medicaid dollars to a state are finite, he argued, dues of up to roughly $1,000 a year per provider take "resources that would be used to take care of people" and put them "in a private organization's treasury that they turn around and use for politics." He described coercive enrollment tactics — a provider locked in a room until they signed an authorization card, and a Connecticut arrangement in which the legislature agreed to give unions providers' bank information so dues could be pulled by draft if the law ever changed. The policy's history, he said, is nakedly partisan: begun under Obama, ended by Trump in his first term, restored by Biden, and not yet reversed again — work he hopes the current administration and Dr. Oz's letters to the states will finish, since a federal statute requires Medicaid and Medicare payments to go directly to the recipient with no third party in between.
Winn tied it to her own life — she and her husband, 80, are at home, with her mother in their guest house, and she does much of the care — and to her recurring themes: that government has grown too big to track its own money, and that one party keeps empowering unions "over the will of the people." Mix was blunt that officials likely knew: "I think Tim Walz and Keith Ellison knew in Minnesota," he said, and, more carefully, "I suspect you're correct" about Gavin Newsom. He directed listeners to myjanusrights.org and rtw.org, noting a similar union push could come to Arizona and that "Katie Hobbs would love to do something like this if she had the chance."
Tim La Sota: The Case for Prop 318, and a Copycat Campaign
Tim La Sota — an attorney and chairman of the Yes on 318 campaign — joined after his "Protect Girls Sports in Arizona" committee filed a campaign-finance complaint against what he called a copycat opponent operating a deceptive website. Prop 318, he explained, protects girls' sports from competition by biological males and bars forced co-ed locker rooms and bathrooms.
The complaint's substance: La Sota said the opposition built a website that "essentially stole our trade dress" to trick voters into voting no, without the legally required disclosure and behind private registration that hides who is responsible. The domains are nearly identical — the Yes campaign is protectgirlssportsinaz.vote, the copycat protectgirlssportsaz.vote, a one-word difference La Sota said was deliberate. He argued the opponents "realize how unpopular and how extreme their position is" and "turned to trickery" to preserve it. He also faulted Secretary of State Adrian Fontes for a slow response, noting his July 2nd complaint drew only a form acknowledgment 25 days later — "justice delayed is justice denied" with early ballots dropping in under two months.
La Sota grounded the measure in specifics, citing a case at Tucson's Canyon del Oro High School where, he said, a single male student identifying as a girl led administrators to route all the school's girls to the nurse's-office bathroom rather than accommodate the one student differently. He argued the issue is biological rather than personal — "there are biological differences, strength, size" that "can't be ignored" — while stressing sympathy for transgender students and support for designated co-ed sports and single-occupancy facilities that the market already provides. He put the public firmly on his side, calling it an 80-20 issue, and argued the WNBA controversy — two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, declaring for the 2027 women's draft to make a point — underscored it.
His sharpest criticism was of Attorney General Kris Mayes, whom he said has called laws like Prop 318 "extreme" and "insanity," and, more significantly, has refused to defend Arizona's existing (weaker) law protecting girls' sports — a law he said the legislature passed and Governor Ducey signed. "Her job is to defend the duly passed laws of the state," La Sota said. "If she doesn't want to defend the laws of the state... she should resign as attorney general." He argued Mayes treats the office as "a sort of super governor" deciding which laws to defend. In a pointed aside, La Sota attributed Mayes's opposition in part to her personal circumstances, saying her husband performs transition surgeries — a characterization offered as his own. He named Christine Jones and Jeff DeWit as honorary co-chairs of the Yes on 318 effort. Winn urged listeners to confirm they're using the real site before donating, and both framed the measure as protecting a generation of girls from being "oppressed by those in charge."
Sine Kerr: Arizona's First Nominee for Lieutenant Governor
Sine Kerr — Andy Biggs's running mate and the first Republican nominee for Arizona's newly created office of lieutenant governor — sat for her first extended interview with the show since the announcement. Winn walked through her record: state senator from 2018 to 2025 across redistricting, representing West Valley agricultural areas and three military installations out to Yuma County, chair of the Senate Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee, Senate majority whip, and a hand in Kaylee's Law in 2021 — the point at which she and Winn first intersected.
Kerr explained the office itself. Arizona was one of about five states without a lieutenant governor, with the secretary of state next in line — an arrangement that several times flipped the governorship to the opposite party upon a resignation, removal, or death. Senator J.D. Mesnard's measure, which Kerr voted to refer, sent the fix to voters, who approved having the governor choose a running mate. Kerr recalled the old system firsthand from her own time and Winn recalled it from the Attorney General's office under Tom Horne. Kerr called serving as Biggs's pick "easy to answer — absolutely, yes," describing a whirlwind campaign focused on "turning Arizona around."
The interview's throughline was girls' sports and family. Kerr was prime sponsor of the Arizona Women's Bill of Rights — vetoed by Hobbs — which she framed as the same principle behind Prop 318. A mother of a son and three daughters, all of whom played college or junior-college sports, including one who earned a full-ride Division II basketball scholarship, Kerr said she couldn't imagine "seeing my daughter's dreams dashed because some biological male identified as a female," and pointed to a granddaughter now trying out for high school volleyball as a third-generation Buckeye Union athlete. "In the name of fairness and safety, we need to save women's sports."
On agriculture and water — her signature areas — Kerr made a national-security argument for a locally produced food supply, calling Arizona farmers "the most efficient anywhere in the world" for growing some 300 crops on less water and land through new technology. "We don't just raise beef and grow crops," she said. "We grow economies," with rural towns depending on farm success. On the Colorado River, she said she'd been in the negotiating room where Hobbs "doesn't show up" and her people "are just not capable of negotiating from a position of strength," pledging that a Biggs-Kerr administration would negotiate with urgency. She backed Biggs's plan to go after Medicaid fraud — "by Kris Mayes's own admission, more than two and a half billion dollars" in Arizona — and use recovered funds to reduce the state income tax.
Kerr described herself as "a stealth type of politician," known for bringing opposing groups to the table rather than seeking cameras, and contrasted that with Hobbs's record of more than 400 vetoes: "weak and lazy leadership to pick up a veto stamp and just veto everything." Married at 18 to her husband Bill, now 46 years, she built the family dairy from 15 cows and was inducted into the Arizona Outdoor Hall of Fame in October 2025. Winn, who said the rally feedback on Kerr had been glowing, called the ticket "the dream team," praising Biggs for choosing a running mate whose strengths in agriculture and rural Arizona complement his own.
Jay Tolkoff: A Board Vote, and the Case Against 425
Jay Tolkoff closed the show on that evening's Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting and item 26 on its agenda — buried, he noted, near the end where "you put the garbage." He was careful to source the underlying reporting to the outlet Three Sonorans, whose deep dive and a 37-page county memo he was drawing from directly.
The item, as Tolkoff described it, concerns Roque Perez — a former state Senate candidate who was appointed to the Tucson City Council at 25, the youngest ever, at a salary of $96,600. Before that appointment, Perez was president and CEO of the Southern Arizona Education Council, formerly the Metropolitan Education Commission, a nonprofit whose main activity was an annual awards event. Tolkoff noted two board members of that nonprofit are Supervisor Jennifer Allen, chair of the Board of Supervisors, and Vice Mayor Lane Santa Cruz. The arrangement, as he laid it out: when Perez left the council on December 2nd — when new council members were installed — the nonprofit agreed to bring him back at $91,770, about 95% of his council pay and tied going forward to the supervisors' salary. That evening, Tolkoff said, the board was set to vote to give the organization $122,000, which would fund Perez's back pay to December 2nd. He noted the group's signature awards event had been canceled the prior year, with the county memo citing scheduling conflicts and security fears following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Tolkoff and Winn framed it as exactly the argument against Proposition 425, the measure that would lift the county's spending cap. "This is the ad for 425 — it just wrote itself," Winn said. "This is why you can't entrust these people with all that money." She ran through the affordability squeeze: property taxes up nine cents, a plan to raise three cents a year for a decade to fund $250 million in affordable housing, all while, in Tolkoff's telling, the board funnels a six-figure salary to a political ally who is "almost twice what the median income is in Tucson." Tolkoff added that part of Perez's prior job had been to integrate Santa Cruz County into the education council — a regional expansion behind the name change — which he said Perez failed to accomplish. "Is this money we're paying an incompetence fee?"
Both turned it into the case for the November ballot. Tolkoff, who said the tip came from "one of my Democrat friends who just can't stand what's going on," and Winn urged disaffected Democrats and independents to send a message this cycle. Winn pointed again to Supervisor Steve Christy as the board's lone dissenting voice — outvoted four to one — and to Republican Jeff Rhodes, now on the November ballot in Supervisor District 5 against appointed incumbent Andrés Cano. Tolkoff, who rode to a Phoenix training with Rhodes, praised his stack of advanced degrees, and both sketched Cano's rise from a young aide to the late Supervisor Richard Elías through the legislature to a Harvard degree and his appointment — what Tolkoff called part of a political "machine" that now advertises itself by that name. "It's time to throw a monkey wrench into the machine," he said. Winn's close was her season-long refrain: give Christy reinforcements, check your voter registration, and "send a big no to this board of supervisors."