Guests - John Riches, Walt Blackman, Jay Tolkoff, Cheryl Caswell, Lisa Von Geldern
Courts, Budgets, Ballots, and the Blueprint to Take Arizona Back
Tuesday on Winn Tucson was a full accounting of where Arizona stands — in the courts, in the legislature, in the county supervisor's chamber, and in the voting booth. Five guests. Five different battlegrounds. One through-line: the people who are supposed to serve Arizonans keep trying to circumvent the rules that protect them, and there are people in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and living rooms who are determined to stop them.
John Riches: The Goldwater Institute Strikes Down Hobbs' Illegal Water Grab
John Riches is Vice President for Litigation and General Counsel at the Goldwater Institute — and he came on with fresh news from Maricopa County Superior Court, where a judge had just handed the Hobbs administration one of its most significant legal defeats.
What the Governor Did
Water in Arizona is governed by a statute passed in the 1980s as a consumer protection measure. Its requirement is specific: before a builder can develop new homes in an area designated as an Active Management Area, they must obtain a Certificate of Assured Water Supply demonstrating there is enough water at the site of the proposed development to sustain the homes for 100 years.
For decades, the assessment was site-specific. You look at the land being developed, you confirm sufficient water supply for that project, and if the answer is yes, you build.
Governor Hobbs's Department of Water Resources changed the model. Under her unilateral policy — imposed not through legislation, not through formal rulemaking, but by executive fiat — the agency placed an arbitrary well at a location in the West Valley and declared that if that well's level fell below a certain threshold, there was insufficient water to build homes in the East Valley. The two locations have no physical hydrological connection. The standard was fabricated from whole cloth.
"It was one of the biggest bureaucratic overreaches in the state's history," Riches said. "She took an analysis that used to focus on whether there's enough water for this development, and said — I have a new model and a new policy. And if some arbitrary well I've placed in this model goes below a certain level, that means there's not sufficient water to build homes miles away."
The Goldwater Institute brought suit on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona. The judge's ruling was unequivocal: the Department of Water Resources cannot impose a policy with such dire consequences for all Arizonans through executive action alone. If the agency wants to implement a rule of this magnitude, it must go through formal rulemaking — and there is a serious question as to whether such a rule would even be lawful if properly enacted.
The Human Cost
Riches was measured in his language, but the numbers underneath the ruling are not. Property owners in affected areas in Maricopa County have been sitting on stranded land for two to three years — land they own, land they planned to develop, land that could have become homes for young families. The financial impact is not in the millions. It is in the hundreds of millions, approaching billions, when the full opportunity cost is accounted for.
The housing supply constraint the policy created had a predictable effect on prices. "Never ceases to surprise me how our friends on the left are so ignorant of basic economic principles," Riches said. "If there's constrained supply and a lot of demand, the result is prices are going to increase. Whereas if additional supply comes on to the market, the effect is that prices go down. What Hobbs did was artificially constrain supply."
The department has indicated it intends to appeal. Riches was not concerned.
"They're so phenomenally wrong on the law on this one that I don't see an appeal having a high probability of success for them."
The ruling has potential implications beyond Maricopa County. Anywhere the Department of Water Resources has applied the unmet demand rule within an Active Management Area — including Pinal County and potentially parts of Southern Arizona — the legal precedent established in this case applies.
What the Goldwater Institute Is and Why It Exists
Founded in 1988 with the blessing of Senator Barry Goldwater, the Institute operates on a principle the senator himself articulated: before asking whether legislation is needed, first determine whether it is constitutionally permissible.
"The purpose of government is to protect individual liberty," Riches said. "It's not to impose some central plan based on some designer's idea of what they think they should impose on other people, but to allow free people to make free decisions within the contours of our constitutional republic."
The organization has two divisions that work in tandem: a policy team that develops solutions to problems in Arizona and across all 50 states, and a litigation team that goes to court when government oversteps. The water case is one of several active matters. The Institute is also challenging the Department of Agriculture's cage-free egg rule — imposed without legislative authorization, in the same pattern as the water rule — and fighting back against the attorney general's attempts to create obstacles for parents trying to access educational savings accounts for basic school supplies.
The Goldwater Institute's work — including all filings — is available at GoldwaterInstitute.org. Donations can be made through the same site.
Walt Blackman: Arizona's Historic Tax Relief Budget and the Governor Who Has to Choose
Representative Walt Blackman of Legislative District 7 joined straight from the Capitol, where the Arizona Republican caucus had just advanced what he called the most consequential fiscal package in the state's recent history.
A Budget Built for Real People
The Republican-authored budget spends $800 million less than the governor's proposal. It cuts taxes. It funds core services. It contains no pet projects. And it makes Arizona the first state in the nation to achieve full conformity with the federal Trump tax cuts — going beyond mere conformity to incorporate the relief into state law in a way that provides additional benefit to Arizona families.
The $1.45 billion tax relief package targets every Arizonan, with particular focus on those struggling with inflation and cost of living pressures. No tax on tips. Overtime relief. Breaks for families, seniors, and small businesses. Taxpayers will not need to refile 2025 returns.
"We want to be able to help Arizonans and align with the federal policies that the Trump administration put out," Blackman said. "It's a great budget. It's structurally sound. It's conservative. We've taken out the fat, and we're spawning capitalism."
The arithmetic he laid out for Arizonans was not abstract. He recalled filling his tank recently and paying $127 — a bill that normally runs around $87. In his district, which carries high poverty and unemployment rates, that extra $40 at the gas pump is not a line item in a spreadsheet. It is someone choosing between gas to get to work and food for the week.
"When we have a tax package that will actually help Arizonans, I would hope that Katie Hobbs sees that," he said. "And if she doesn't — get on the ground and start talking to some of these folks that are having to go through this."
The Veto Calculation
Governor Hobbs rejected two earlier budget proposals. When asked whether she would ultimately sign or veto this one, Blackman's assessment was pointed.
"If she vetoes this, she is actually sending a message to not only Republicans, but the people of Arizona, that she doesn't care about high gas prices. She doesn't care that Arizonans are having to choose whether to put food on their plate or buy medicine."
Senate President Warren Peterson's statement put a finer point on it: Hobbs had told the legislature for months that full conformity with federal tax relief was impossible. The Republican caucus proved her wrong. The budget exists. The conformity is achieved. The relief is real and documented.
If she vetoes it, she owns the contrast.
The Impact of Closed Borders on Arizona's Budget
Blackman also addressed what he sees as one of the quieter fiscal victories of the Trump administration's border policies: the direct reduction in Arizona's access costs.
"A lot of our access costs have been driven down because we've had people on access that shouldn't be in the country," he said. "We're talking like 600 people we were able to find that shouldn't have been on the rolls. Those are taxpayer dollars that can go back into infrastructure, back into schools."
He noted that 34,000 ballots in Pima County have been going out and returning in each of the last six elections — to addresses where residency is unverified, to homeless individuals who use the recorder's office as a mailing address, to people who may have died or moved. The SAVE Act, now stalled in the Senate, would begin addressing that directly.
Veterans, ESAs, and the Top-Heavy School Problem
Blackman — who served in the U.S. Army from 1995 to 2016, including combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and received the Bronze Star Medal and the Meritorious Service Medal — described his legislation for a Veterans Claims Pilot Program, designed to accelerate and streamline the benefits process for veterans returning from service.
Arizona has just over one million veterans. The VA system struggles to process claims in a timely manner, and the state's veteran service counselors — the people who sit with veterans and walk them through the paperwork — are chronically understaffed. Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day nationally. The link between delayed benefits, untreated PTSD, and that statistic is not hypothetical.
"Veterans voted a blank check to this country, to our state, to defend us," he said. "We have a responsibility when they come back to ensure they can stay on their feet."
On educational savings accounts, Blackman was direct: parents have a fundamental right to choose an education that mirrors their family's values and gives their child the tools to succeed. The governor's resistance to ESAs is a resistance to parental authority, not a defense of public school quality.
"If public schools are having issues, maybe we should take a look at the programs that are not helping," he said. "We have three layers of administration and not enough teachers. Everyone wants to be an administrator and no one wants to be a teacher — and it's costing us in our education."
His campaign website is walt4ld7.com.
Jay Tolkoff: The Ballot Language Trap and the Fight to Stop the Spending Cap Explosion
Jay Tolkoff of Legislative District 21 has been tracking the Pima County Board of Supervisors' spending limit maneuver since before it went to a vote, and he returned to Winn Tucson with a crucial piece of intelligence the public has not yet absorbed: the battle over this measure will largely be won or lost in the language of the ballot question itself.
What the Vote Actually Does — In Plain Numbers
The board voted to refer a spending limit expansion to the November ballot. The measure proposes adding $70 million to the 1980 baseline figure used to calculate the county's expenditure cap. That sounds modest when framed against a current budget of $752 million. It is not.
"That $70 million baseline increase will actually increase today's budget by $581 million," Tolkoff said. "So almost doubling. And they're saying the reason they want to do it is they have more money than they can spend."
The current cap sits around $762 million. The new cap, after the baseline adjustment compounds through the formula, reaches approximately $1.333 billion. The board's assurance that no new taxes will result is technically accurate — in the immediate term. What it omits is that once they are spending at the new level and find themselves short, they have full authority to raise taxes without returning to voters.
"This will not increase the taxes immediately," Tolkoff said. "But when they start spending all that money and don't have enough, that's when they'll increase taxes — and they don't need your permission to do that."
The Ballot Language as Weapon
Tolkoff's central warning was procedural, but it has decisive practical implications. The language that will appear on the November ballot has not yet been finalized. That language will be drafted by lawyers — and depending on how it is written, voters may or may not understand what they are approving.
"If the language is so poorly written — many of these measures have gotten passed and then set aside because they were misleading," he said. "They'll make it sound like this is the best thing since sliced bread and it'll help them spend more money on services. The part about what those services actually are — that part gets left out."
He instructed voters to apply a simple heuristic when the ballot hits their mailbox: look at who is supporting and opposing the measure. The alignment of interests will tell the story more clearly than any ballot description.
The board's stated justification — that they have surplus revenue they are legally unable to spend under the current cap — is itself a damning admission. The cap is working exactly as designed, restraining a government that has been taxing beyond its needs from a declining population base. The response to that situation, in any household or honest organization, is to return the surplus and reduce the collection rate. Instead, they want to expand the ceiling.
"The normal way of thinking is — if you're a child in college and you need more money, you go to your parents and say, 'Books got more expensive.' The board of supervisors isn't telling us why they need more money. They're actually saying they have too much money and they can't spend it. I've got an idea. How about giving it back to the taxpayers?"
Tolkoff called for ballot education sessions to begin as early as August or September, once the full ballot is known. He noted that the sheer volume of items placed before voters — legislative referrals, citizen initiatives, bond measures, contested races — is itself a form of disenfranchisement. Voters who cannot digest a four-to-five-page ballot will default to whatever the first heading says or skip the item entirely.
The board's new meeting schedule: beginning May 12th, the supervisors shift to the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month at 5 p.m. Morning attendance at county building is no longer the relevant time.
Cheryl Caswell: Federal-Only Voters, Green Valley Polling Centers, and the Race for LD-19
Cheryl Caswell has been a voter registrar, an election poll observer since 2020, and a former Pima County Election Integrity Commissioner — appointed by Steve Christie for District 4. She joined the show fresh from hosting Scott Pressler at La Paloma for the SAVE Act event, and she arrived with numbers that should alarm anyone who thinks Pima County's election administration is operating transparently.
8,381 Federal-Only Voters — Then 5,772 — And No Explanation
Arizona law requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in state and local elections. Federal law does not impose the same requirement for federal elections. The result is a legally distinct category: "federal-only voters" — people who have registered without providing citizenship documentation and are therefore eligible to vote only in federal races.
In 2020, Pima County had approximately 1,900 federal-only voters. By January 2026, that number had grown to 8,381. Of those, 1,575 cast ballots in the 2024 election in Pima County alone.
"8,000 votes would make a difference in almost any election in the state," Winn observed. Caswell confirmed it.
Then, in a few months' time, the Pima County Recorder's office reported a purge. As of April 2026, the federal-only voter list stands at 5,772 — a reduction of roughly 2,600 voters with no public accounting of how they were removed, why, or what process was used to verify their status.
"I would like an explanation as to how we lost that many in just a few months' time and what they did to purge those people from the records," Caswell said. "We, as citizens — we the people — should know this. This should be transparent to us."
The Pima County Recorder, Gabriella Cesaris Kelly, maintains these statistics publicly on the county website. The methodology for maintaining, adding to, and removing voters from the federal-only list is not publicly disclosed in a way that satisfies either basic accountability or the legitimate curiosity of informed citizens.
Green Valley and the Disappearing Poll Centers
Caswell flagged a developing situation in Green Valley that has received almost no attention: Green Valley Rec has announced it will no longer make its facilities available as polling locations. No replacement venues have been secured.
The discussion underway is about mobile voting centers — which would likely be positioned further from the community they serve, requiring seniors who have voted at familiar neighborhood locations for years to travel to unfamiliar sites. This is not a minor inconvenience. For the elderly, disabled, and car-dependent segments of the Green Valley population, it is a direct reduction in accessible franchise.
"They will be likely further from the community because Green Valley Rec has decided they won't be utilizing their facilities as they have in the past for polling locations in our midterm."
Caswell connected this to the broader principle she emphasized throughout her segment: appointed positions — election integrity commissioners, planning and zoning board members, library commissioners — derive their authority entirely from the elected officials who appoint them. When those elected officials are not accountable to conservative voters, the appointments that flow from them are not either.
"Policy funnels up through the system, not coming from the top down, but funneling from the bottom up in these appointed unaccountable positions. They are unaccountable to you — only accountable to their elected official."
The Pima County Election Integrity Commission has relocated its meetings to the Abrams Center. There is a public call-to-comment before every meeting. Caswell encouraged voters who care about election administration to show up in person.
Scott Pressler, Observers, and the Democrats Who Said Thank You
On Scott Pressler's visit, Caswell was warm without being sentimental. She described him as someone who brings elections literacy and civic participation down to street level — walking precincts, reporting potholes through SeeClickFix, having conversations no one else wants to have with voters no one else is reaching.
"Nothing is beneath Scott to get down and dirty with the work. He's very gritty and that's what we need to do."
On the observer fight — a battle Winn and Caswell fought to win the right for Republican observers to be present in Pima County's early vote centers — she noted that the victory was not partisan in its reception.
"I had Democrats text me and say, 'Hey, I'm a Democrat, but I really appreciate that you brought transparency to the elections.'"
Caswell is running for the Arizona State House in Legislative District 19. She has a meet-and-greet this Saturday at the United Republicans for Arizona, where she will have yard signs available and be meeting voters ahead of the primary. Her campaign site is caswellforarizona19.com.
Lisa Von Geldern: The John Birch Society Conference, the Freedom Index, and Why the 17th Amendment Needs to Go
Lisa Von Geldern is the Arizona-based coordinator for the John Birch Society — precinct committeeman, longtime education-focused political activist, and the organizer of a major two-day conference in Salt Lake City on June 6th and 7th.
The Conference: Why Fight City Hall When You Can Be City Hall
The event runs Friday evening through Saturday and has expanded in scope since it was first announced. Friday night will feature a panel discussion built around the theme "Why fight city hall when you can be city hall?" — featuring candidates and officeholders who will speak to the decision to run for elected office, including Peter Tickton, a close associate of President Trump who will address election integrity.
Saturday's formal program opens at 8 a.m. and runs through the evening. Lunch and dinner are included. The speaker lineup includes:
Robert Brown, who developed the Constitution Is the Solution series, speaking on James Madison's warnings against an Article V convention
Janine Hanson of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, on countering common objections to Article V and the national landscape
David Iverson from Cowboy Politics, on the strategy of electing constitutional legislators at the state level — drawing from his state's experience with lawmakers who consistently earn top ratings on the JBS Freedom Index
Phil Lyman, who nearly defeated the sitting governor of Utah in a primary and is now running for Congress, speaking on election integrity
Dan Hapel, who co-produced Red Pill with G. Edward Griffin, presenting on the Cloward-Piven plan — the academic strategy, developed by Columbia University professors, for crashing the U.S. economy through deliberate overextension of the welfare state
Patrick Wood of Technocracy News, on the UN's regional planning apparatus and its quiet penetration into local governance
Alex Newman, on America's biblical heritage in its 250th anniversary year
JP Cortez, Executive Director of the Sound Money Legal Defense Society, on precious metals legislation — including Arizona's status as a state where silver and gold are legally recognized as money
Catherine Austin Fitts, on how to fight back against central bank digital currencies
Three students from the Freedom Project Academy — the John Birch Society's online school for families who travel or homeschool — will also give testimony about their experience with the program.
The Freedom Index: A Scorecard Built on the Constitution, Not Party
The John Birch Society does not endorse candidates and is not a partisan organization. Its metric for evaluating legislators is the founding documents — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — not Republican or Democrat voting patterns.
"Our metric isn't Republican or Democrat or libertarian. It's our founding documents, the intent of the founding documents, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights," Von Geldern said.
The Freedom Index, available at freedomindex.us, allows anyone to enter their address and pull up the constitutional ratings for their federal and state legislators. Ratings are based solely on the constitutionality of votes cast, not on alignment with any political party or special interest.
Von Geldern noted that the scorecard produces results that can surprise people who assume the D or R after a legislator's name is a reliable guide to constitutional fidelity. Some Democrats score better than some Republicans. Some Republicans who win reelection on party loyalty are consistent violators of constitutional limits. The index strips away the party layer and shows the votes.
The 17th Amendment: The Senate's Original Betrayal
Von Geldern made a point that dovetailed directly with arguments Dave Smith had made earlier in the week — and that connects to the current dysfunction in the U.S. Senate.
The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, transferred the election of U.S. senators from state legislatures to direct popular vote. Before the amendment, senators represented the interests of their states through the deliberative bodies the states themselves elected. After it, senators became accountable to popular majorities shaped by media, population concentration, and party machinery — not to the sovereign states they nominally represent.
"The federal government is a creature of the states, not the other way around," Von Geldern said. "The state legislatures used to appoint senators. The point of the Senate was to represent the states and the states' rights to the federal government. And that's a travesty that really needs to be repealed."
Her critique extended to the three-letter federal agencies, whose career employees serve for decades — accumulating power, making de facto law, and using the resources of government to intimidate and bankrupt citizens who fight back — while elected officials come and go on two- and six-year terms.
"People so often forget the federal government is a creature of the states. And the three letter agencies have gotten involved to the degree that they're making legislation — and that's not the design of our country."
The conference registration and full speaker bios are available at jbs.org/conference/slc26/. There is no charge for Friday night's event, though ticketed attendees receive first priority for seating. Saturday registration opens at 8 a.m., and lunch and dinner are included. For families with children, Freedom Project Academy students are welcome — and the program specifically includes student testimony and family-friendly educational content.
Winn Tucson airs Monday through Friday, 9 to 11 a.m., on KVOI 1030 The Voice.
Goldwater Institute: GoldwaterInstitute.org | Walt Blackman for LD-7: walt4ld7.com | Caswell for Arizona LD-19: caswellforarizona19.com | JBS Salt Lake City Conference, June 6–7: jbs.org/conference/slc26/ | Freedom Index: freedomindex.us