Local Opinion: GOP rule changes in Legislature should worry everyone

Arizona Republicans just gave themselves permission to destroy email and text messages. Their choice to hide conversations about new laws — or ill-conceived election audits — should concern everyone.

Two weeks ago, Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives and the Arizona Senate unilaterally voted to change their operating procedures. Under their new rules, lawmakers are allowed to delete public records including text messages, chat messages and calendar entries whenever they want. They can even delete email 90 days after the email is sent or received. The destruction of important public records will have a devastating impact on transparency, accountability, and stopping out-of-state influence on Arizona laws.

Arizona’s public records statutes give insight into the lawmaking process by opening up government activity to public review and public scrutiny. The statutes give people a direct mechanism to monitor the behavior and activities of elected officials. While broadly defining public records, our statutes create a presumption that those public documents will be available upon request. Closely aligned to the definition of public records are requirements that documents and communications be preserved and maintained. All of these statutory safeguards are in place for good reason.

Recently, Arizona State Rep. Justin Heap’s email revealed he was evaluating legislative meeting requests based on whether donations were made to his campaign, the Washington Post reported Jan. 27. Regarding the 2020 election audit, Republican leaders in the Arizona Senate publicly denied Trump was involved. A public records request helped uncover email and text messages confirming that $1 million of the audit money from outside Arizona actually came from Trump.

The communications lawmakers have in furtherance of legislative duties are critically important to an accurate historical understanding of both how and why a law came about. For example, when out-of-state groups hand legislators a bill in final form, the public should know what group drafted the bill. Similarly, when a legislator changes a bill to favor one industry, the public should know which group asked for the change. Knowing these details gives the public a necessary window into who elected officials talk with, listen to, or take direction from.

The new rule permitting destruction of email after 90 days is highly concerning because new laws go into effect 90 days after the legislative session ends. By the time a new Arizona law takes effect, all records about legislative communications will have been destroyed. In most cases, meetings and discussions about a bill happen many months before the text of a proposed law becomes public. As a practical matter, if a group sends a public records request to a legislator, the legislator can simply delete all text, chat, and calendar entries.

During the legislative session, a little-known trick lawmakers use to pass surprise legislation is called a non-germane striker. This political maneuver allows them to insert a completely new bill after the opportunity for public comment has expired. Quite often, these bills are drafted five to six months before introduction and secretly kept in a legislator’s “back pocket.” Records destruction after 90 days would encourage the use of this trick and there would be no evidence trail left for anyone to follow or investigate.

House Speaker Ben Toma claimed the 90-day rule was made to balance disclosure and privacy. When it comes to the public trust, transparency trumps privacy. Elected officials know their legislative activities are presumptively open to public scrutiny and their conversations about non-legislative matters are private. So whose privacy are the Republicans trying to protect? Under this dangerous rule, valuable historical information about the drafting decisions and influences on lawmakers will be permanently lost. Republicans don’t want the public to know what they are doing or who they are working with, and that should worry us all.