The residential-home company gave a hundred thousand dollars to Governor Katie Hobbs’s inaugural fund. The state gave the company back a thirty-percent rate increase — one of only two such raises in that contracting cycle. The Arizona Attorney General, a fellow Democrat, has declined to file charges.
That’s the whole case, end to end. A vendor gives a governor’s inaugural committee six figures; the governor’s agency gives the vendor a raise that almost no one else got; the state’s top prosecutor decides there’s nothing to charge. The numbers are tidy because the arrangement was.
The contributing company is called Sunshine Residential Homes. It cares for some of Arizona’s most vulnerable children — foster children placed by the state. The state pays the per-resident rate. The state raises that rate when it chooses, to whom it chooses, and the agency that does the choosing reports to the governor whose inaugural committee just received a hundred thousand dollars from the company whose rate was raised. This is what a sunshine policy looks like when the sun doesn’t reach it. Only Sunshine and one other company received a raise in the 2022-2023 contracting cycle. Two. The state contracts with dozens of such providers. Two got a raise. The other one — you’d like to know. I’d like to tell you, dear. I won’t.
The mechanism does not change. I have watched this movie since Nixon, and the cast is always three: the contributor, the officeholder, the prosecutor. In 2016 the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the bribery conviction of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell — who had accepted more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in loans, gifts, and other benefits from the CEO of Star Scientific, and then hosted a reception, made phone calls, and arranged a launch event for that company’s product at the Governor’s Mansion. The Court said it was not an “official act.” The Court was wrong about the smell and right about the law, and that is the trouble. When the law cannot catch a man who took more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars and gave the giver what he wanted, the law is not a barrier to this behavior. The law is the lane it runs in.
Senator Chuck Grassley watched HSBC launder money for Mexican drug cartels and a roster of sanctioned regimes, and said the bank “has quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card for its employees for the price of $1.92 billion dollars.” No individual was prosecuted. Wells Fargo opened millions of unauthorized accounts under sales-quota pressure; it settled for three billion dollars in a deferred-prosecution agreement reached with the bank itself, not with any executives who signed off on the quotas. The donor class buys the access; the donor class buys the prosecution; the donor class keeps the money. The law protects and does not bind.
Kris Mayes, the Attorney General of Declination, is a Democrat. Andy Biggs, the Republican challenger who wrapped up his primary this summer and is now running ads about the very investigation her office declined, would be happy to tell you this is a one-party scandal. He would do the same. They all would. He would be wrong in the precise way that lets scandals like this keep happening. The carried-interest loophole — one of the most expensive tax preferences in the federal code — has been on the verge of closing for twenty years. Both parties have raised money from the fund managers it benefits. Both parties have left it intact. Pay-to-play does not ask about your registration card.
This is what an in-group that the law binds but does not protect looks like, watching an in-group that the law protects and does not bind. A foster-care worker in Phoenix who steals ten thousand dollars from the state will be charged, tried, and made an example of. A residential-home company that gives a hundred thousand dollars to a governor and receives a thirty-percent raise back will be told, by the governor’s fellow party member and the state’s top cop, that there is nothing there. The blindfold slipped a long time ago.
Citizens United opened the door in January 2010 and the door has not closed. The pharmaceutical lobby held off Medicare drug-price negotiation for twenty years. When you build a system that cannot be embarrassed and cannot be prosecuted, you do not get less of this. You get more of this.
Don’t change the subject, dear. The Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Thank-You Note sits in the record, dated, signed, and waiting to be read by anyone who cares to. Sunshine Residential Homes gave a hundred thousand dollars to an inaugural committee. The governor’s agency gave back a thirty-percent raise. The Attorney General closed the case on a Friday. The arrangement paid for itself in a single rate cycle, and they did not even have the decency to hide it.