Who can stop the cage match between Gov. Katie Hobbs and Senate Republicans?

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs certainly has the right to complain about the Republican Senate’s nasty treatment of her director nominees.

The Republicans put an idealogue in charge of the Committee on Director Nominations, a Turning Point putz named Jake Hoffman, who has done everything he can to sabotage the governor’s office.

He has slow-walked and land-mined the confirmation process turning “advise and consent” into “search and destroy.”

This is not how state government is supposed to work. Governors are entitled to select their agency heads, and the Senate is obligated to extend, but not free license, deference to that principle.

Otherwise, the gears of government jam. And the stalemate goes on the next time the parties switch power, only inversed.

Senate Republicans go for scorched earth

Hobbs has been in office now nine months and the Senate has confirmed just six of her agency nominees, The Arizona Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports.

“There are nearly three times as many nominees waiting for your review than have been considered to date,” Hobbs wrote in a letter to Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert. “At this rate, I will be well into my second term before your political circus completes its job.”

This is extreme behavior in the Arizona Senate and violates its tradition and decorum.

The play here is scorched earth, and it melts the authority and legitimacy of all state government.

Hobbs yanked her last nominees: What happens next?

For her part, Katie Hobbs has decided to match scorched earth with scorched earth, and announced she will circumvent the confirmation process by reappointing her agency picks as “deputy directors,” who will not have to run the GOP gauntlet.

Our attorney general, a Democrat who continues Republican Mark Brnovich’s tradition of politicizing the office, has blessed Hobbs’ tactic because it was preordained she would.

Hobbs, Mayes also helped set the tone

Republican vandalism of the confirmation process did not come from nowhere.

GOP senators are using their leverage against the governor — the confirmation process — to strike back against the excesses of the ninth floor.

In particular, they’re reacting childishly to Katie Hobbs’ insistence that she spike the football every time she vetoes one of their bills — now at a record number for an Arizona governor.

Further, the confirmation process isn’t the only abuse of authority in Arizona.

Hobbs and Mayes ran as extremists on abortion and are now acting like extremists in office by usurping the authority of Arizona’s 15 county attorneys to enforce abortion law.

Why GOP hardliners on abortion: Are about to hit a boulder

Hobbs used an executive order to center authority on abortion law in Mayes’ office. That may be legal, but it’s not without consequence.

The American people overwhelming support safe and legal abortion with some restrictions. Hobbs and Mayes occupy the furthest left position that abortion should be unrestricted, even and up to the time of delivery.

Who else will turn down the temperature?

Now they’ve laid the track of their ideology toward a constitutional crisis.

“This is an extremely dangerous precedent,” Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said. “I am going to follow the law. The executive order doesn’t have the authority of overcoming the law.”

Scorched earth begets scorched earth.

Someone needs to turn down the temperature on West Washington.

We don’t know if anyone can or will do that. We do know who won’t.

It won’t be the Republican Senate. It won’t be the governor. And it won’t be the attorney general.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Katie Hobbs and Senate Republicans keep fighting. Who can stop them?