6 Arizona Bills to Watch for as a New Legislative Session Begins

PHOENIX — Pets, pronouns and taxes.

That’s just a small sample of the things Arizona lawmakers want to do something about in the nearly 600 bills they’ve introduced so far this session.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto stamp will be put into effect with many of those bills.

The relatively few bills passed by the Republican-controlled legislature will never become law.

But the bills tell you what problems our legislators think they need to fix.

Here are six bills to watch:

Let’s start with a bill (HB2061) that has bipartisan support: eliminating the sales tax that many consumers pay on groceries.

The idea is that this would ease the bite of high inflation. But consumers in the state’s largest cities don’t pay a tax on food. Smaller municipalities rely on the tax to finance basic services like police and firefighters.

Hobbs opposed a similar proposal from his Republican opponent for governor, Kari Lake.

Hobbs prefers to get rid of the so-called pink tax: local sales taxes on items like diapers and tampons (there’s a bill for that, too, SB1033).

The culture war is still raging on Capitol Hill. That’s the subject of three bills targeting drag performances.

The bills would limit when and where drag shows take place, ban minors from attending and give municipalities more power to regulate them. (The Senate bills are SB1026, 1028, and 1030.)

Transgender students are another target in a package of bills sponsored by the Republican Party. Under the banner of parental rights, one of the bills (SB1001) would require a teacher to obtain parental permission to refer to a student with a pronoun that differs from the student’s gender at birth.

After failing to persuade a federal judge to ban ballot counting machines, Republicans are pursuing their goal in the Legislature: a bill (HB2307) requiring a mandatory manual count of all electoral votes. Vote counting machines would be prohibited. And manually counting more than 3 million votes in a general election could take weeks.

They’re not old enough to drink, so would you give 18 year olds the power to make state laws?

Arizona voters could be asked to lower the age requirement for lawmakers to take office from the current 25. Both houses would have to pass the resolution (HCR2004) to place the question on the 2024 statewide ballot.

Here is an additional bipartisan bill that would affect cat owners.

Lawmakers and animal rights advocates want Arizona to ban routine declawing of cats. The bill (HB2335) would allow declawing for therapeutic reasons only.

This is where you can learn more about all of the bills in this session, as well as log in to talk about them or register your approval/disapproval.

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