Doug Ducey is identified in these excerpts as the governor of Arizona. He appears in two episodes of the show, at moments roughly four years apart, and in both he acts rather than argues: he appoints, he signs, he sets a priority. The first appearance concerns a judicial appointment and the second a statewide education program.
Appointment of Clint Bolick
In the September 2018 episode on grassroots tyranny, Bob Zadek introduced Clint Bolick as a judge on the Arizona State Supreme Court, appointed in 2016 by Governor Doug Ducey. In the same introduction Zadek described Bolick as a founder of the Institute for Justice and as someone who had argued and won cases in the US Supreme Court, Arizona Supreme Court, and many state and federal courts, and as the author of Grassroots Tyranny, a book about the limits of federalism. The appointment is the only fact the excerpt states about Ducey in that episode; the guest’s substantive argument is Bolick’s own, delivered under his own label, that the potential abuse of government power at the local level goes back to Madison, and that while a national government makes it more difficult for special interest groups — which Madison called factions — to execute what he called schemes of oppression, at the local level small groups with outsized influence can operate the machinery of government and turn the power of government toward their own ends rather than toward good government and equal opportunity Local Leviathan: Clint Bolick on Grassroots Tyranny (2018).
Zadek’s framing, offered as his own words rather than the guest’s, was that democracy is often taken to mean majority rule, that democracy has its shortcomings, and that moving power down to the county, the town or the locality does not mean the fight has been won, because there can be as much tyranny at the local level as at the federal level: once power over you is ceded to someone else, it is the ultimate intoxicant and hard to control. Bolick agreed that there was a lot to recount, and added the Madisonian point above. Nothing in the excerpt connects Ducey to that argument beyond the appointment itself.
Universal Education Savings Accounts
Ducey’s second appearance is in the August 2022 episode on Arizona’s education legislation, where the guest was Matt Beienburg. Zadek opened by describing the prior condition of Arizona education: choice was not legally restricted, but a citizen who sent a child to a private or non-governmental school would pay school taxes — that is, pay for public school tuition — and then pay private school tuition out of pocket, paying twice for one product. He asked what the condition of public education funding had been in Arizona before the legislation and what the legislation would do Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Beienburg, under his own label, described the legislation as transformative, and set out the position before it took effect. Arizona, he said, had been one of the best leaders across the country for school choice and educational freedom. The default elsewhere, he said, is that a family must go to the school district that serves the area, so that a student attends a school based upon their zip code, which he called arbitrary and a tying of a family’s educational opportunity to that area. Arizona, like a lot of states, had open enrollment, letting public school students opt out of their local public school for a different public school, in some cases in a different school district, so that the principle that a student’s zip code should not decide educational opportunity had been in place for years. Arizona also had public charter schools, independently operated, still public schools but not run by the teachers’ unions and the school districts in the same way as the traditional system, tuition-free and government-funded but existing only in certain areas. During the pandemic, Beienburg said, as traditional public schools disrupted in-person learning and imposed mandates, families desperate for options in many cases had none; even where a charter school was nearby, those had waitlists out the door.
The new legislation, Beienburg said, had just passed the Arizona legislature and been signed by Governor Doug Ducey, who had called for it in his State of the State address at the start of the year. Beienburg described the mechanism: the state’s ESA program, Education Savings Accounts, which Arizona calls Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, lets a family take some of what taxpayers were going to spend on that child, place it in an account operated and managed by the parents, and use it for any educational purpose for that child — private school, at-home education, learning pods, micro-schools, tutors or textbooks. On Beienburg’s account this breaks the link that forced students through the public school system or forced families to pay twice, once as property tax and other state taxes and again for their own child’s education, and prioritizes the education and funding of students rather than of a bureaucracy or a particular brick-and-mortar building.
The episode returns to the passage of the bill later, in a segment on leadership and the post-COVID environment. Asked by Zadek what happened this time to get over the finish line, Beienburg named multiple factors. One was very strong leadership from Governor Doug Ducey, who in his State of the State address that year had been explicit — Beienburg quoted him as saying, “Send me the bills and I will sign them” — and adamant that this was a priority. Another was a lawmaker, Ben Toma, who sponsored the legislation and worked very tirelessly to bring together a coalition of members. Beienburg noted that in Arizona the majority party has only a one-vote majority in both the Senate and the House, so every member had to be on board, with some members more moderate and some more conservative. He attributed the opening to the post-COVID environment, when families in Arizona and around the country were, in his words, made an afterthought by public health officials and by the unions, with schools closed and what he called draconian mask mandates on young children, and parents scrambling for options, many suddenly working from home and juggling childcare, education and their own work. Many of those families turned to micro-schools or pods and recognized how necessary choice is. Beienburg also said the state budget at the same time added over $600 million of ongoing public school funding each year, so that Arizona invested additional funds in its public school system while providing families full flexibility to go elsewhere — which, he said, built the coalition, and he characterized the left as preferring neither to both if it came down to it Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Across episodes
The two episodes touch Doug Ducey at different points and on unrelated subjects: a 2016 judicial appointment discussed in the 2018 episode on local power, and the 2022 signing of universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Ducey himself between them — in each he is an officeholder whose act is reported by someone else, Clint Bolick’s appointment in the first and the signing of the education legislation in the second — and the arguments in both episodes are advanced by the guests, not by Ducey.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts give no account of Ducey’s background, his tenure or his other policies, and no words of his own beyond Beienburg’s quotation from a State of the State address. They do not state the name or number of the education bill, the details of its legislative votes, or the date of its passage beyond the episode’s context. They say nothing about Bolick’s appointment beyond the year and the appointing governor. Nothing in the excerpts describes Ducey’s own views on federalism, local government or the limits of power, the themes the 2018 episode was built around.