The one weird idea billionaires hate

Steal this policy … Fact-checking CD7 fliers … And Tucson Norte-Sur is not about immigration.

What if we’ve been thinking about Democratic Congressional District 7 candidate Patrick Harris’ platform, “Cap the Cap,” the wrong way?

Maybe we should start calling it what the political newcomer hopes it will eventually become: the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Harris, a retired healthcare executive who holds 43 patents from decades in the industry, said he began working on what would become his signature policy on the campaign trail, “Capitated Capitalism” back in 2022. At the time, he had recently remarried and was thinking about the future for his children.

Put simply, Harris has written draft legislation that would cap personal wealth at $1 billion, requiring the wealthiest Americans to reinvest their excess wealth into the U.S. economy.

“We're sitting here at $36 trillion in debt and the forecast is terrible. It leaves like no future for our kids. So I just can't stand by and watch it happen,” he said.

If you're curious about the finer points of his proposal, Harris has made it easy to dig in — he even trained ChatGPT to answer questions about it.

While he's running as a Democrat in CD7, Harris believes his idea could appeal to voters across the political spectrum.

He argues members of Congress should be accountable to the 180 million registered voters across the country — not the roughly 3,000 billionaires worldwide.

“My personal belief is if there's a member of Congress that says, no, we don't want to do this, they're really representing the minor few, maybe the one or two billionaires in their district or their donors,” he told us.

Harris isn’t running a traditional campaign. He’s operating on a shoestring budget, isn’t chasing endorsements, and is betting everything on his platform. In fact, he hopes other candidates borrow his idea. While he isn’t considered a front-runner, Harris hopes the conversation he’s started will outlast the special election.

“I've encouraged all Democrats around the nation to step up and run on this platform. The midterms are right around the corner. Again, I'm giving this freely. There does need to be a face and a leader that can have the wisdom, the creativity, the courage, the coalition building to lead it, which is why I'm running for office,” he said.

And while “Cap the Cap” is his headline issue, Harris insists he’s not a single-issue candidate.

“During the first debate I had proposed creating a tax credit for anybody who votes. You could write in Mickey Mouse, but just get out and vote and you'll get a tax credit. And that does two things. It'll get people to start voting, which we need, and it'll get them to start filing their taxes, which we need,” he said.

Ballots for the CD7 special election are already out. The Pima County Recorder’s Office recommends mailing yours back no later than July 9.

Welcome to the mud-slinging phase of the Congressional District 7 special election.

This mailer started hitting CD7 mailboxes over the weekend, courtesy of the official-sounding political action committee “Tucson Families Fed Up,” which is taking credit for the attack ad against Democratic candidate Adelita Grijalva.

The glossy flyer accuses Grijalva of “silencing” her critics and calls out decisions she made during her time as the chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors.

On Sunday, Grijalva responded on social media, denouncing the mailer as “Trump-style smear tactics.”

But are the accusations true? Mostly no.

We're giving this mailer a three out of five on our Chupacabra scale of lies.¹

The “silencing” claim appears to refer to a 2023 decision by the Pima County Attorney’s Office to temporarily ban local resident Shirley Requard from attending Board of Supervisors meetings.

Requard had used her public comment time to call Supervisor Matt Heinz — a gay man — a “pedophile” during meetings in January and February. Grijalva defended Heinz, argued with Requard, and asked the County Attorney’s Office to investigate.

That led to a three-month ban. And the Supervisors voted to cap the call to the audience to an hour.

Supervisor Steve Christy later funded his own legal review, which contradicted the County Attorney’s opinion. In April, the Board voted unanimously to allow Requard to return.

So was it illegal? The conflicting legal memos never made it to court, so the "illegal” action is still just one lawyer’s opinion.

But more importantly, the mailer is pointing to one incident involving one person during Grijalva’s 22 years of being a public official — not quite the pattern it suggests.

Back in September, Grijalva didn’t silence the dozen MAGA-supporting speakers who berated her at a Board of Supervisors meeting, after she reposted a photo of a sign that read “Chinga tu MAGA.” She sat quietly and listened to a parade of critics before it was her turn to speak.

“I find it completely hypocritical that you would demand of me what you don’t of your candidate for president,” Grijalva said. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll acknowledge wrongdoing when Trump apologizes for the racist, misogynistic, sexist, inflammatory comments he’s made about women, people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants and frankly anyone who disagrees with him or isn’t one of his fans.”

Grijalva doesn’t shy away from her decision in 2023, saying she couldn’t allow hate speech against her colleague.

As for the other claims in the mailer: Yes, TUSD closed some schools during her tenure on the board. But that trend is not unique to TUSD — enrollment has been steadily dropping at many public schools, largely due to the massive shift in funding from public schools to private schools under the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, AKA school vouchers.

With tens of millions in lost per-pupil revenue, the district had little choice. Some schools closed or combined, and some class sizes grew.

So we’d say the claim is misleading and exaggerates the facts — but it’s not an outright lie.

So who exactly is “Tucson Families Fed Up”?

According to FEC filings, the Super PAC has hired Washington D.C.-based Next Level Parents, a political consulting firm, to run the negative campaign.

The PAC is spending nearly $100,000 on mailers and robocalls targeting Grijalva — and so far, there’s no documented connection to any actual “Tucson families.”

Help us fact-check more campaign mail! Send your snail mail to Joe, via email, at Joe@TucsonAgenda.com

Stuck at a stalemate: State lawmakers are still at an impasse on budget talks, as you can see in today’s edition of our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda. House Republicans are meeting this morning to try to pass a trimmed-down budget, even though Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs already said she’d veto it, and Senate Republicans passed their own version of a budget, which they negotiated with Hobbs, last week. Meanwhile, a state government shutdown looms, kind of.

Setting it in motion: The Tucson City Council started the process of replacing City Attorney Mike Rankin last week, the Arizona Daily Star’s Charles Borla reports. Rankin has been the city attorney for more than two decades and he’s planning to retire in September. The first step toward replacing him will be to select a recruiting firm to find candidates, followed by appointing Rankin’s replacement, which could take several months.

Different way to look at it: As officials from the seven states that use Colorado River water work toward a compromise, Arizona’s chief water official says they should look to the water that’s actually in the river every year, instead of relying on outdated models and projections, the Star’s Tony Davis reports. Tom Buschatzke’s idea is to use fixed percentages of the natural flow of water in the River over the course of a three-year period.

We measure our budget in actual dollars in the bank. And, folks, it ain’t much. Help support local independent journalism by upgrading to a paid subscription today.

The tomato wars: Republicans and farm groups are urging the Trump administration to block a 20% duty on Mexican-grown tomatoes that is set to come into effect next month, since the Commerce Department announced it wouldn’t extend the “Tomato Suspension Agreement” with Mexico that has been holding the tariff at bay. And while Florida tomato growers are stoked, Arizona Republican members of Congress, including Eli Crane, Andy Biggs and Juan Ciscomani, are urging Trump to reconsider, saying ending the agreement would “abandon a key achievement and principle of President Trump’s America First agenda,” Politico reports. Also, Florida tomatoes are gross, tomato book author William Alexander writes in the opinion pages of the New York Times. And allowing the agreement to expire would mean that a bunch of Mexican tomato farmers will want H-2A visas to work in Florida.

Taking stock: The sight of masked federal agents arresting immigrants and asylum seekers at courthouses sparked a nationwide uproar in recent weeks. KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky broke down the Trump campaign’s promises and the trickery needed to follow through on those promises, while the libertarian Cato Institute’s David J. Bier found roughly two-thirds of the people taken into custody by ICE since October had no criminal convictions, and 93% had no violent convictions.

Legal roadmap: Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to a landmark lawsuit Mexican officials filed against U.S. gun manufacturers. Mexican officials want to rein in the thousands of firearms that are smuggled across the border to fuel violence in Mexico, but the justices said the lawsuit didn’t plausibly connect the manufacturers to Mexican traffickers, and manufacturers were largely immune to these types of claims under federal law. But Just Security’s León Castellanos-Jankiewicz analyzed the case and found the justices also laid out a roadmap that Mexican officials might have better luck with, primarily by focusing more on the relationship between manufacturers and reckless gun dealers (including several in Arizona) who knowingly sell to criminals.

Divvying it up: The Rio Nuevo board is meeting today to talk about which downtown businesses will get some of that sweet sales tax revenue. On their meeting agenda, they have the Moxy Hotel, Cal’s Bake Shop, the Welcome Diner, the Obon project and the Friedman Block project.

Republican Janet “JL” Wittenbraker, vying for the GOP nomination to run for the Ward 3 seat on the Tucson City Council, bravely confessed she had no idea what the Norte-Sur program was when asked about it over the weekend.

So naturally, at Saturday’s Ward 3 debate hosted by the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson, she went ahead and took a confident swing anyway.

“It sounds to me like it is an immigration policy, a process involving immigration policy,” she offered, launching into a completely unrelated monologue about crime, parks, and poverty — because when in doubt, pivot wildly.

One small hitch: Norte-Sur isn’t about immigration at all. It’s a 15-mile high-capacity transit corridor planned to connect Tucson Mall to the airport — right through the heart of Ward 3.

You know, the ward she’s running to represent.

Wittenbraker later apologized to the audience for not being familiar with the program.

But you gotta love the confidence of politicians.

1. This is our loving homage to the Washington Post’s Pinocchio Test, although we added a fifth Chupacabra compared to the Post’s four Pinocchios.