SignalsAZ.com Prescott News Podcast - Quang Nguyen and Selina Bliss Reflect on the Arizona 2026 Legislative Session

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Send us a text and chime in!Arizona Representatives Quang Nguyen and Selina Bliss shared an inside look at the latest developments at the State Capitol during a candid legislative update. With the Arizona Legislature now more than 140 days into the session, both lawmakers discussed ongoing budget negotiations, the governor's vetoes, and what remains to be completed before lawmakers adjourn for the year.The discussion highlighted the challenges of governing in a divided government. Nguyen and Bliss explained that passing legislation often requires bipartisan support, extensive stakeholder meetings, and months of negotiation. They also addressed criticism surrounding bipartisan bills, emphasizing that effective legislation requires collaboration while maintaining support from the Republican majority.#ArizonaLegislature #AZPolitics #ArizonaNews #LegislativeUpdate #QuangNguyen #SelinaBliss #ArizonaGovernment #StateLegislature #PublicPolicy #ArizonaLeadership #BudgetNegotiations #BipartisanLeadership #HealthcarePolicy #PublicSafety #FentanylAwareness #LongTermCare #HealthcareReform #CommunityLeadership #YavapaiCounty #PrescottAZ #ChinoValley #ConstituentServices #GovernmentTransparency #ArizonaRepublicans #LegislativeSession #PolicyMatters #CivicEngagement #ArizonaUpdates #LocalGovernment #MakingADifference #Prescott #PrescottValley #DeweyHumboldt #YavapaiCountyAZ #NorthernArizona #FoundingFathersCollective #LD1 #LegislativeDistrict1 #ArizonaCommunity #ArizonaEventsCheck out the CAST11.com Website at: https://CAST11.com Follow the CAST11 Podcast Network on Facebook at: https://Facebook.com/CAST11AZFollow Cast11 Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/cast11_podcast_network

All right, let's get started. As of today, it's June 5th. Welcome back for legislative updates. The day before the day anniversary. So we need to remember that. And my name is Huang Wen, legislative district one, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. And Selena Bliss, I chair Health and Human Services. And someone let us in the studio and we just sat down and started talking. Exactly. So tell me about what you've been doing lately. I know we work together, but sometimes you have a lot of things on your side of health and human services, and I have my own thing. Yeah, so this is an interesting period of time. We're past our 100 days of the legislature. In fact, we're at 145 days. But the governor stopped signing bills, so it put us on a moratorium. As a result, leadership went into negotiations over time with the budget,

and there were not enough bills for us to be going down every day for. So to save time and money, we went on a three-week adjournment. Now, we are citizens' legislature, so we're supposed to have jobs in addition to what we do down at the legislature, although I know you and I were pretty much at it 100% of the time. But I have for 18 years have served on incident management teams that support wildland firefighters. I do the first aid, the medical evacuations. We staff the divisions with paramedics EMTs, as well as just taking care of ill and injured wildland firefighters. And sure enough, we got our first assignment during the break. So I was blessed to go with my team. In the Southwest, we have four teams, critical incident management teams.

And we're all hazard teams. Not only do we support wildland firefighters, but also all hazard incidences such as flooding. Katrina was an example. The space shuttle crash was an example where pieces and parts had to be picked up. So, yeah, I had two weeks in New Mexico, was able to keep up with our legislative tasks. And I heard you did some amazing things with the victory. You know, this is what teamwork's all about, and I'm on the serious side of things. I cover for her when she's not in the state or when she's not available.

I go to all the meetings and cover for her, and vice versa. I'm about to head off to Washington, D.C., to the White House, and she's going to cover for me. But, you know, there are a lot of things going on. The budget negotiation is important, and the only reason the governor comes back to the table is that she veto all three bills. Well, at some point in time, when you don't like our ideas, you might want to show up to tell us what your ideas are. And the way I look at it is through multiple conversations,

the Republicans are playing offensive, and the Democrats are being defensive, meaning they're defending what they might lose. We are advancing the Republican agenda by what? $1.45 billion a tax cut, conformity to the big beautiful bill, and we're going to push ahead. And I think the budget is really close, but like anything, you run the first 25 miles is really easy, and then the last mile you're just breathing really hard. And I see that is what's happening with the budget.

Yeah, we did get some good news. The April revenues came in. They seem to be behind by a month or two, and the numbers are up. So there's a little more leeway with the budget. Now, that's new as of just two or three days ago. Leadership told us to come back next Wednesday, so we'll be doing that. Whether the budget's ready or not, we're going to start pushing that last number of bills through. So I don't know about you.

This is just me talking. I'm predicting we'll power through next week, Wednesday through, say, Friday or Saturday. And then we're going to sign E die. That's the optimistic look. Yeah. Supposedly we get to go home. But the way that we work is that we already align new bills, or possibilities and ideas on the table already, getting ready for the next session,

if we're lucky enough to be re-elected. And so, yeah, that's so. Tell me about, okay, I have this question. I want to hear your view. And by the way, we're just playing here. We're not, we don't have any notes, or at least for me anyway. How do you get a Democrat? We have a divided government.

How do you get a bill sign? How hard do you have to work? Yeah, you know, with the Democrats. in the governor's office and a Republican majority, as you shared, it takes twice as much work. You have to have a bipartisanship vote in order for a Democrat governor to sign off on your bill. So so far, I've had two bills signed and two mirror bills, and then the moratorium started. But I had to show bipartisanship, and that means writing good legislation, holding stakeholder meetings, getting input, whipping your votes, getting your count, before that.

that bill goes to be important. You've had some luck to you. Right. Yeah, I had some, but what do you say to the people that are criticizing us for having bills that are bipartisan and supported by Democrats? I say, what you say is spend a day in our shoes. I know you have people come down in shadow so they can see that legislative process. We call it how the sausage is made. I think people would be amazed and somewhat astounded that this is how laws come into effect. And what I don't think people realize is the laws we live under created at the state level affect you in your everyday lives more than any other level of government, more than what the federal government's doing, more than the county, more than your city council if you live in an incorporated area.

But you know, the simple thing, I remember I was in Chino Valley and somebody asked a question about, you know, what do you do or what's the most critical point in your career and how do you help us. And I remember somebody said, fix the potholes on the 89. It's that simple. People wake up in the morning. They're driving to work. In my case, sometimes a motorcycle, I should hate to hit a pothole. But those are the little things that we work really hard on. But this I will say, though, the criticism that we work with Democrats to get things done, I don't know how to get around that. So the latest criticism for me is that how dare I work with Democrats to pass the threshold for the fentanyl threshold to allow law enforcement and prosecutor better tools to go after the

mid-level. But there's always a criticism. So like you said, hey, come to the office, sit with us for 10, 12 hours. I know a couple of people, probably five or six already done that in my office, and I just had one last Tuesday. And it's amazing to hear the conversations and what we have to do to get things done. But like Selena Blue said, it takes twice as much work to get a Democrat to sign your bill. You know, I really appreciated your strategy. I was a freshman when you were working on the fentanyl limits for trafficking, giving law enforcement the tools they needed to go after the bad guys. And I watched how you strategize to get your toe in that door to open it up, to get Democrat votes because anything that enhances sentencing does not correspond to the Democrat

platform. So you really have to work hard on convincing people, hey, if we just look at the laws that address this type of behavior and the death rate of fentanyl, you get attention. So you got that bill through. You got your foot through the door, open the door, and then the very next year, and you were already thinking about this, is how to change that 200 grams to 100 grams. And you succeed it. Right. And with the right. governor, hopefully a Republican governor, then we can actually push it down to 10 or 9 grams. In my opinion, it should be one gram. But you know, you have to work with the current divided government and you have to find a way to get consensus. But the most important thing,

and I believe you will agree with me, it's not how many Democrats are on your bill. It actually is how many Republicans support your bill. So, for example, most of the most of the Democrats, of my bills received the support of the other 49 Republicans. That's critical. I don't care about how many Democrats are on the bill. It's how many Republicans will support the ideas. Yeah, it's that having the majority of the majority, since right now we're on the Republican majority, and it's slim, but you have to have that 17 on the House side to get your bill hurt in the Senate. You know, my example of negotiating on a bill trying to get Republicans and Democrats to agree is the work I've done on short-term rentals. From my freshman

year, I took on the work the previous representative had that was Representative Brenda Barton. I ran her bill just as it was thinking, oh, this is low-hanging fruit. We've got this industry out there, not really regulated, violating private property rights of the people that live in these neighborhoods. These hotelers and investment firms are coming in from out of state and investing in these properties, displacing residents and reducing our housing stock. So come to find out, it was a little more challenging than I realized. the bill never even got assigned a committee the first year. So second year comes along. I broaden the stakeholder group. It gets a little farther. This year, even though I didn't get it signed off,

I got it as far as it has ever come through stakeholder meetings. And this is where some people got mad at me, but I had to go in and strike everything in that bill, rewrite it based on stakeholder meetings, and how I could get that balance of Republicans and Democrats to agree, we've got a problem. And you know you've got a problem in short-term rentals when the Airbnb industry comes to you and says, help us clean up our industry. So it really did help get those votes. Absolutely. And there's a lot of challenge. And the other thing that I want to mention since we're both chairs is that when a bill is approved by one chamber, that doesn't mean that it should be automatically approved by the other chamber.

So to give you an example, you have a lot of great people coming to support a bad bill, and equally bad, you have a lot of bad people coming to oppose a great bill. As chairs, we have the responsibility of what? Veting every single bill. Now, this happened before I came onto office, right? So there are people that actually voted to pass national popular votes in one chamber. but it was killed in the other chamber. Or you have a group of Republicans,

not Republicans, but a group of people actually voted to support red flag. And guess what? It came over to the other chamber and got killed. Now, just imagine the concept of approving a bill because it was approved by the other chamber. It would take away our job, our responsibility of doing the homework, vetting the bill, talk to the victims, talk to the,

court officers, talk to prosecutors, talk to county attorneys, and trying to figure out what's the right things to do. And so this is our job. Absolutely. This just happened last week. We came back for a couple days voted on some bills earlier this week. A senator had a bill on mandatory reporters in the case of child abuse, and I'm a nurse. This is the world I live under working in the ER. if we see signs of abuse, we're mandatory reporters. Currently, we use a team-based approach. She wanted to take that away in her bill and require health care providers to literally abandon their patients

to go have to contact DCS rather than waiting to report off and take care of the patient load that you have. This included physicians as well. She got unanimous votes on the Senate, so she got a little overconfident, put that bill on the House side, and I told her, you're going to have problems. your criminalizing health care providers, sure enough, red lit up the board.

None of people on the house side didn't want to have anything to do with it. So very next day, we're meeting and we're stakeholdering and we're going to turn this thing around and get it to that legislative intent that she was looking for. It just wasn't quite there in the language. Yep. So tell me, what are you going to be doing this afternoon? Well, I'm pretty excited. This is my visual here.

We did pass out some bills. they, based on the moratorium, got backed up. But currently I have 10 bills sitting on the governor's office waiting for signatures. I was told she signed bills toward the end of the week. So this is my visual of what's sitting over there waiting to be signed. So I'm going to be staying close to email and text messages. I actually have a couple of bills that are extremely important. And both of these have been around for three years now.

The one bill is camera monitoring in long-term care facilities. It seems like every month, every week we've got a case of the vulnerable adults being abused by caregivers in these facilities. That bill is on its third year. It's sitting in the Senate right now. But, you know, it is what it is. And also, I have the meat transparency bill, meaning that if it's fake meat, you should put on the label so that we all know what we're buying. And so those are the two important bills for me. I have several other bills, but these are the two that I look forward to the possibility of getting a third read.

That would be great. But, you know, it is what it is. You have to respect leadership on the other side. You have to respect the chairs on the other side. And I hope they respect us just as much. Yeah, I was proud to be part of the Vulnerable Adult Study Committee where we championed the bill to allow cameras into the room for if the family chooses to do that. It's not a mandate.

Just to be clear, it is not a mandate on the industry. You just can't say no when somebody decided to put a camera in. As a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, a 89-year-old gentleman fell face down and was on the floor for 22 hours. So the industry came in and said that, hey, apparently cameras didn't work, but here's the problem. It was the cameras that noticed that he wasn't around for 22 hours. Yeah, it was actually the daughter that saw something wrong and then came in right away to rescue her father. So we need to do this because at some point in time, she and I both will need a bed somewhere in some facilities.

And I hope I don't get beaten up by, you know, caregivers. And I am six months older than you, so I'm just saying I might need it before you. Right. On my side, what I'm championing and I still have to get through the Senate is the midwives. Bill. This has been a labor of love. We had a mom pass away. And this is where midwives, these are not nurse midwives, but just lay midwives. They're not regulated currently in Arizona revised statute. It's interesting in Arizona. We brought in the midwives in the 50s, but we never regulated them under the Department of Health Services. So we had one bad actor out there.

She was finally allowed to commit this crime that resulted in the death of a mom and her infant. So Jordan and Terry, Jordan and Mack Terry Act. Mack was the infant, Jordan was the mom, who ironically is the labor and delivery nurse. But point being is we're going to tighten up the midwife industry to keep patients safe. And the midwives are all behind this. They understand that they want to do what's best for their patient population. So I'm currently working with Democrats and Republicans on the Senate side to have that bill heard. So yeah, I think we're down toward the end.

I don't know about you. Siney Dai means to adjourn for the year, and then we hit the campaign trail because, hey, the primary election is around the corner. Tomorrow, she and I will be hosting a legislative update at the founding fathers in Prescott, and we're going to have fun. But the reason I'm asking you what you're doing this afternoon is that we're both going to be on the panel in Tempe. So as soon as this is done, we're heading down to Tempe to do a panel to answer question, to update. people with what's happening in the House of Representatives. Yeah, we're very proud of the transparency. We try to get around not only to this district, which is pretty much Yavapai County,

but to the state. So, yeah, we're going to head down there right now. I'm not looking forward to the heat, but it's important that we shared our message and we hear from you. So, yes, if you're available tomorrow, June 6th, 1 to 3, founding fathers, it'll be very informal. We'll do our brief update. and then open to Q&A. And I'm more excited about the Q&A and what's on people's minds. Yep, we'll take 15, 20 minutes to pontificate.

And then after that, you get to ask questions. So this is kind of weird that we're hosting ourselves. I love it. We'll do this more often. We'll just sneak in the studio. All right. Have a great weekend. Bye.

Until next time.