Dear Rep. Thorpe:
An
email that you sent out was forwarded to us. We have copied it with our
response below. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact
us for further clarification.
From: <Bob Thorpe>
Date: Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: Pachyderm Coalition AZ legislative ratings
Date: Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: Pachyderm Coalition AZ legislative ratings
Greetings:
As a new state
legislator, I attended one of the Pachyderm meetings, and haven’t gone back. I
am totally unimpressed with the biased, arbitrary way they score our
legislators and their bills.
For example:
Rep. David Livingston
works in insurance. He authored a bill so that AZ insurance brokers would be in
compliance with the rest of the nation regarding continuing education credits.
This is important because many brokers sell policies over state lines, and
without the CE credits, AZ brokers would no longer be in compliance with the
rest of the industry. This bill had absolutely no fiscal impact on the state
and our taxpayers, and was requested / wanted by the AZ insurance agents and
associations. Livingston was applauded by his industry for this and several
other insurance related bills.
For authoring and for
voting for his own bill, Pachyderm gave Livingston something like –100 points.
Just like me, Livingston is a good, solid fiscal conservative, and Pachyderm’s
treatment really shook him up, and angered me.
Pachyderm mistreated
Livingston, and has done so to other fiscal conservatives for years, including
our Speaker of the House Andy Tobin and Rep. Karen Fann, both from LD-1. I’ve
decided not to even care about Pachyderm and their biased rating system, and I
hope you’ll do the same.
If you are ever
concerned about any of our legislator’s bills or votes, then please take the
time to first read the bills, then contact the legislator if you still have
questions or concerns about the bill’s purpose.
Please feel free to
forward this email.
Warmest regards,
AZ State
Representative Bob Thorpe, LD-6
Arizona Conservative Coalition Response:
We generally welcome feedback from all
Republicans – particularly legislators – regarding how we weight the bills in
our legislative rating. That is always true when the feedback is provided to us
directly rather than sent out to other people in a broadcast email replete with
misinformation. We don’t normally respond to such an inaccurate invective, but
you have gone out of your way to make a capricious and arbitrary attack with
little or no background knowledge.
With respect to Rep.
Livingston’s bill, HB2358, we reviewed our negative weight as he had earlier
requested. Our research unearthed the following:
1) Currently there is no
continuing education requirement for those insurance agents who have decided to
market their services solely within Arizona.
2) Agents who choose to sell in another
state have every opportunity under current law to acquire reciprocity by
meeting that state’s continuing education requirements – and each state sets
its own standards.
3) Even if HB2358
were to become law, Arizona agents would not meet the requirements for all
states, and, conversely, Arizona agents already meet the requirements in many
states.
4) The current continuing
education requirements were established in 1998 for the convenience of Arizona
insurance agents wishing to do business outside Arizona, not to protect Arizona
insurance buyers.
5) HB 2358 imposes a substantial extra cost of doing
business on the Arizona agents who do not sell insurance outside the state because
of the additional mandatory government regulation. As is the case with most
regulations, HB2358 was designed to serve the interests of those who would
benefit by this across-the-board regulation at the expense of their smaller,
low-cost competitors. These extra
requirements significantly increase the overhead of Arizona agents who choose
to market their services solely within our state. This bill, should it become
law, will create either lost profits or higher premiums for Arizona residents.
While there is no fiscal impact to the state government, there is a fiscal
impact to people in the state. We told Rep. Livingston that if those insurance
agents not licensed in other states continued to be exempt from an increased
burden of continuing education requirements that they do not need or want, we
would take the bill out of our evaluation. He would not do that. So, we kept
our (-5) weight on the bill.
As to your other
assertions, you never attended a regular PAChyderm/AZConservative Coalition meeting. You did attend a complimentary lunch we finance
for Republican legislators to allow for feedback on our report. In your case,
it appears that our outreach to legislators was a vain attempt to prevent an email like you sent. It is
important to note that you did not inform us of your concerns about HB2358 at that
complimentary lunch or at any other time prior to this self-serving open letter,
and now you have decided “not to care” about our evaluations. We are responding
in the hope that you will do a 180ยบ turn and decide to act based on facts and genuinely
respect the concerns of conservative Republicans.
The Arizona Conservative Coalition (formerly
Pachyderm Coalition) expends much time and energy to solicit feedback from
legislators through emails and meetings prior to the public release of our
reports as well as continuing communication after each updated weekly report.
Many legislators have availed themselves of this opportunity which benefits both them
and the citizens of Arizona. We always appreciate their feedback whether we
agree with it or not. If we disagree, we offer an explanation and usually offer
suggestions for amendments that would make a bill either less negative, removed
from our evaluation, or even positive. We also give prime-prime bill sponsors
the option of eliminating the negative sponsor weight of a bill by pulling the
bill while it is still moving forward in the process to become law.
You are right about one thing, though. Our
rating system IS biased. It is biased in favor of limited government, civil rights
(ALL civil rights in the Bill of Rights), lower taxes, lower government
spending, reduced economic regulation, effective pro-life policies, traditional
family values, secure borders, and universal parental choice in education. If
any Republican legislator is not biased in favor of these things, shouldn’t
Republican voters be informed?
While this certainly qualifies as a
disagreement, we did not treat Rep. Livingston in a biased or arbitrary manner.
We explained our disagreement with the bill, told him how he could amend it to
get it taken off our evaluation, and offered to zero out the sponsor weight if
he would pull the bill. He had multiple legitimate choices available to him to
avoid a lower score. He chose to continue doing the bidding of a select group
of power brokers within his industry. His bill increases regulatory burdens on
insurance agents and will ultimately raise costs for Arizonans.
Regarding our alleged mistreatment of other
“fiscal conservatives” you mention, we don’t think they need you to speak up
for them. Some of those you listed have used our scores in their campaigns.
When they have issues with our bill weights, they have brought their concerns
to us directly. They can and do take care of themselves and talk to us in a
sincere attempt to do the best job possible for their constituents. For the most part people will recognize your
letter for what it is.
We also take issue with the supposition that a
bill must be good if “good” conservatives are supporting it. While that may be
an indication that a bill is probably good, once the bill is analyzed it stands
on its own. If it is not a conservative bill, then those supporting it, whether
“conservative” or not, are not acting as conservatives in that particular case.
The support by you and many of your “conservative” peers of HB2047 – a bill
that will lead to a Washington, DC Obama Administration takeover of our K-12
system curriculum and testing – is a case in point.
The Arizona Conservative Coalition gives
legislators the ability to affect their scores by their behavior and
communication with us. We go out of our way to avoid blind-siding legislators.
To that end, we are the only organization that routinely informs legislators of
our scoring in advance of public publication. We are also the only organization
that clearly identifies a complete list of the bills we are rating and how we
are rating those bills in advance of votes. We are the only organization with a
complimentary lunch bi-weekly during session for the sole purpose of providing
an opportunity for each legislator to have input into the process. If you don’t
like your score, you should explain why the bills we rate negatively should be
weighted differently. Alternatively, you should try to amend the bills or vote
differently. The legislator scores are based strictly on the bill weights we
assign which are then applied to legislator votes.
As to your last statement, we usually expect
nothing less from elected officials who market themselves as conservatives when
they do not have the core values to live up to their own rhetoric. It has
always been easier to attack those who put the light of truth on shortcomings
than to walk the talk. We sincerely hope
that your ranking will improve as the session continues, because your
constituents deserve consistent conservative representation.
For the Arizona Conservative Coalition
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