Critics distort stance on vouchers

The Goldwater Institute recently put out an e-mail that lied about me. It said “Tom Horne halts scholarships” and that I am telling children “that their hopes are coming to an end.”

The fact is that I vigorously defended the scholarship programs before the Arizona Court of Appeals, and have instructed the state attorney general to file a further appeal with the Supreme Court. The Goldwater Institute knew this.

Imagine how frustrating it is to fight for something, and then be accused of being its adversary.

I was instructed by the attorney general to fund the remainder of the scholarships for this year, to take applications for next year, but not to grant applications for next year until we have heard from the Supreme Court. As a public official, I have a fiduciary duty not to pay out public funds when instructed not to do so by the attorney general, unless the courts say otherwise.

In a column in the Tribune (“School choice foes stack deck against disabled students,” June 22), Tom Patterson argued that I went against the attorney general on the Flores case, and therefore should be willing to do so here. Because of a conflict between the governor and me on that case, the attorney general represented the governor and assigned private counsel to represent me in my position, which was directly opposed to hers.

That is entirely different than the obligation of department officials to not pay out taxpayer funds in defiance of an attorney general’s legal opinion. In one case, the attorney general acts as a representative in court. In the other case, he acts as the state’s chief legal officer, and his rulings on whether to distribute taxpayer’s funds are binding on department chiefs, unless a court rules otherwise. I distribute $5 billion a year of taxpayer funds, and I believe the citizens expect me to follow the legal rulings of the attorney general unless instructed otherwise by a court.

Patterson’s call for me to defy the attorney general’s legal ruling on payment of funds was a repetition of what appeared in the Goldwater Institute e-mail. Writing about that e-mail, columnist Robert Robb wrote in his blog: “That’s nuts. The last thing believers in the rule of law and limited government should want is for government officials to ignore what the state’s lawyers say is unlawful spending. And it’s the last thing state officials are going to do, since there might be personal liability attached to so doing.”

On June 27, the Arizona Supreme Court placed a stay on the court of appeals ruling so that we could grant applications for next year, pending a final decision by the Supreme Court.

The Goldwater Institute put out an e-mail saying that I had unilaterally halted these programs. That is a lie. Don’t believe anything that you hear from them.

Finally, four Republicans in the state Senate and four Republicans in the House combined with the Democrats to give the governor the budget she wanted. It was opposed by all of the other Republicans. The governor’s budget eliminated funding for this program. So while the Goldwater Institute was shooting sideways at me — who was fighting for the same thing that they were — the real enemy, the governor, walked in and destroyed our program.