Voices

Grady Gammage and Sean Krieg

August 18, 2026 5 min read

Land-use and water attorneys Grady Gammage Jr. and Sean F. Krieg trace how Arizona's 1980 Groundwater Management Act tied the right to build to the right to water, and why that gate is straining under wildcat subdivisions, falling aquifers, and a shrinking Colorado River. The question was never whether Arizona grows, they write, but whether water gets priced honestly into the math.

Blake Sacha

August 10, 2026 2 min read

Blake Sacha, president of Voter Choice Arizona, looks at a July primary where fewer than 27 percent of registered voters turned out and concludes the problem is structural. He makes the case for equal signature requirements, open primaries, and a top-five instant runoff.

Andrew Simek

August 4, 2026 5 min read

Andrew Simek, district community manager for Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, argues that voters who blamed government failure in 2024 diagnosed the wrong problem. After hundreds of community events and dozens of town halls, he writes, the pattern is capacity: constituents who qualify for help but cannot reach it. The real choice is not a big government or a small one, but one that can deliver.

John Kavanagh

July 17, 2026 4 min read

Arizona state Senator John Kavanagh argues that U.S. immigration laws are both necessary and fair. His case rests on how those laws were made, through a democratic process, and on fairness to the immigrants who follow the rules and wait their turn.

Clint Bolick

July 10, 2026 6 min read

On the country's 250th anniversary, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick argues that four constitutional principles hold tyranny back: due process, federalism, free speech, and separation of powers. They only do their job, he writes, when we defend them even against the side we agree with.

Zachary Milne

July 3, 2026 3 min read

Short-term rentals get blamed for Arizona's high home prices. A Common Sense Institute economist walked through a decade of data and lands somewhere else: the squeeze comes from a fractured permitting system and millions of acres of undeveloped state land.

Joe Pitts

June 22, 2026 5 min read

American cities stopped building up and started building out. Joe Pitts argues that the Sun Belt's suburban boom doesn't have to mean the end of great cities, and lays out what it would take for Phoenix to become the proving ground for a new kind of American city.

Rudy Cota III

June 16, 2026 6 min read

Rudy Cota III argues that ranked choice voting and jungle primaries are a seductive but false fix for Arizona's political frustration, and that the real work of better politics happens inside the parties, not by rewriting the rules of the ballot.