One vote

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Calls for U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva to resign intensified on Wednesday after the 77-year-old lawmaker missed a critical vote on a House budget resolution on Tuesday.

The controversial legislation is the first step in a massive spending deal that the GOP in the House needed to pass to advance President Donald Trump’s economic agenda. One part of the economic plan includes $880 billion in proposed cuts that would largely come out of current Medicaid spending.

The “big, beautiful bill” as Trump calls it, squeaked by on a party-line vote Tuesday night. It passed by a two-vote margin, 217-215. There was one Republican defection, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.

While Grijalva’s vote would not have changed the outcome, it demonstrates how small the margins are in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and how crucial his vote is in Congress.

Democratic state Rep. Alma Hernandez, who has long been critical of the Congressman, took to Twitter on Tuesday to call for Grijalva to resign.

In an interview with the Tucson Agenda, Hernandez said she feels the district hasn’t been represented well for quite some time.

“I’ve been deeply disappointed that the 7th Congressional district has been without representation for nearly 2 years,” she said. “We of course want him to recuperate and we hope makes a full recovery. But we are also expecting that Democrats are doing what they can to stop horrendous GOP plans. It is clear that we cannot count on him.”

Hernandez is one of the first elected Democrats to say Grijalva should resign, although she has been critical of the Congressman for years, including last year when the Tucson Democrat called on then-President Joe Biden to step down.

“I know that I am saying something publicly the others are thinking, but not wanting to say. If this would be a republican, we would never hear the end of it. I don’t understand why other Democratic elected officials have been so quiet,” she said.

Hernandez, whose name has been discussed as a potential candidate for Grijalva’s seat, said her criticisms aren’t about her own political motivations, ruling out running for his seat in 2026.

“I will not run for congress but we need a leader capable of doing the job. I am focused on doing my work as a legislator,” she said.

A statement from Grijalva’s office says he was unable to make the trip to D.C.

“Congressman Grijalva’s ongoing recovery prevented his travel to DC, and though his vote would not have stopped this resolution from passing along party lines, his opposition is strong,” the statement read.

The calls for Grijalva to resign pose a problem for Democrats in Congress, who are already dealing with razor-thin margins, as Tuesday’s night vote demonstrated.

At one point, two Democrats hid in a cloakroom to give Republicans a false sense of the number of Democrats that would be voting.

One of the most liberal members of Congress, Grijalva is strongly opposed to the budget resolution.

“The House Republicans passed the beginning of their plan for a historic transfer of wealth, which will slash our nation’s essential services to cut taxes for the wealthy. Our country needs funding for more housing, more teachers, and affordable healthcare, but instead, this resolution directs committees to rob these vital funds to pay for a staggering $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy,” the statement continued.

Grijalva’s Congressional District 7, which covers a large swath of Southwest Arizona, from Tucson’s west side to Yuma, includes roughly 324,000 people on Medicaid who could be at risk of losing their health care under Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Grijalva started missing votes roughly a year ago when he announced that he had lung cancer and would be undergoing chemotherapy treatments. In October, he stated publicly that his next term in Congress would be his last.

The non-partisan GovTrack.us says Grijalva missed over 500 votes since his cancer diagnosis last year, although he did cast two votes so far this year. Prior to his cancer diagnosis, Grijalva missed about 900 out of 14,000 votes the House took between January 2003 and December 2023.

Hernandez also has missed her share of meetings at the state Legislature. For example, she took a trip to Israel with other state lawmakers in the middle of the legislative session last year (which she forgot to include in her financial disclosure statement).

This junket contributed to her attendance record last year, where she was absent 33 percent of the time, per attendance records maintained by the Arizona House of Representatives.

If Grijalva resigned tomorrow, it would not necessarily solve the missing vote issue. And in the near term, it would make it even harder for Congressional Democrats to be effective.

That’s because it would create a vacancy in CD7 for several months and trigger a special election.

Looking at the 2012 resignation of Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as a blueprint of what to expect next here in southern Arizona, it would probably take four to six months before someone could fill Grijalva’s seat.

Giffords resigned in late January, and five months later, Tucson voters gave the nod to Ron Barber in a special election.

Officials with Grijalva’s office said while he isn’t able to regularly vote right now, his office remains fully staffed and is regularly meeting with constituents and groups. In the past few months, Grijalva has also co-sponsored new legislation, signed letters of support and continued to press the administration on behalf of the residents of his district.

And as we mentioned earlier, he has made some key votes in Washington since his cancer diagnosis.

Southern Arizona’s other member of Congress, Tucson Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani, voted with Republicans to back the budget resolution, despite signing a letter just a few days earlier saying he was concerned about proposed Medicaid spending cuts inside the legislation.

Ciscomani issued a mostly word-salad statement decrying the rising national debt, promising to reduce the size of the federal government and making a vague reference to protecting “vital programs.”

This statement does little to reconcile the $880 billion in proposed cuts that would largely come out of Medicaid spending – which Ciscomani said he’d protect last week – and it isn’t clear how $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would overwhelmingly benefit the rich included in the budget resolution would address deficit spending.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the House budget adopted Tuesday night could add at least $2.8 trillion to the federal deficit for the next decade.

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Those budget numbers are so huge they’re almost meaningless. But you know what has a lot of meaning? Subscribing to the Tucson Agenda. Smash that button today!

Watch this space. Starting next week, we will be doing a deep dive into the City of Tucson’s $2.4 billion budget.

This may seem like the journalistic equivalent of eating your vegetables, but we hope you’ll give our new bite-sized budget series – like we did with Proposition 414 – a chance.

We want to give subscribers a master class in municipal budgeting fundamentals, like how to understand the competing demands from various departments.

We’ll also include easter eggs in this series and keep it lively. This won’t be a dry, coma-inducing recitation of facts and explanations of state statutes.

Our goal is to help you understand where your dollars go, as well as answer the perennial questions we hear from readers:

• Why your street wasn’t paved this year (and maybe when it will be)

• What is going on with this long-ago announced project

• Why the cops don’t always show up when you call 911

We’ll ask you as our subscribers for suggestions as we go. Feel free to start today by leaving a question or comment!

Rocky road to rebates: When Arizona voters approved Proposition 312 last year, it looked like local governments could be on the hook for hefty payouts to property owners. The measure allows them to get a rebate on their property taxes if officials aren’t doing enough to deal with public nuisances, such as activities related to homelessness. But that’s probably not going to be the case in Tucson, where the city’s property tax rate is so low, writes Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller. So there won’t be much of a rebate for property owners who put up fences to keep out unsheltered people. Pima County might have to pay more than the city, but county officials believe they’ve enforced public nuisance laws well enough to avoid having to pay many rebates.

DEI disputes: University of Arizona students and faculty are pushing back on the UA’s removal of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access resources, the Star’s Prerana Sannappanavar reports. A petition asking for the UA to reinstate DEI policies already has more than 1,500 signatures, organizers say. UA officials took down DEI websites and removed language from their Land Acknowledgement statement after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding for schools that kept DEI policies in place.

Pushing pause: The Trump administration pulled back on a plan to hold migrants at Guantanamo Bay, CNN reports. The tents that officials put up in recent weeks don’t have air conditioning, or even electricity, which doesn’t meet detention standards. U.S. officials have housed migrants at Guantanamo Bay in the past, but only migrants who were picked up at sea. The Trump plan would have brought migrants from the interior of the U.S. to facilities there.

Poking around: For the first time since 1987, spelunking explorers have discovered new passages inside Colossal Cave, KGUN’s Claire Graham reports. They pushed the boundaries on the cave’s map by examining what were thought to be dead ends, some as small as an iPad. Now that they’ve found new features in the cave they get to name them, including “Noah’s Arch,” found by Noah Preuss.

We sent out a survey on Tuesday asking Agenda readers to talk about how elected officials are doing in the early days of the second Trump administration and what those officials should be doing better.

The responses have been great. And some were pretty funny, too. We’re getting comments that range from “Ugh, don’t get me started” to extremely candid critiques of elected officials like Sen. Ruben Gallego, as well as thoughtful suggestions for how the City of Tucson and Pima County can work together.

We’d like to hear from as many of you as possible, so we’re re-upping the survey today. Take a minute and tell us what you think!