Janae Shamp got axed from Arizona Senate GOP leadership. Now she's hitting back

USA Today

14-07-2025

Sen. Janae Shamp blames Senate President Warren Petersen for her dramatic demotion last month, saying he disrespected her and her conservative ideas.
Last November, Shamp's fellow Republicans elected her as Senate majority leader, the No. 2 position in the Arizona Senate. A majority of the same group voted her out of the job last month.
A second-term senator from Surprise, Shamp said the ouster followed months of poor treatment, like excluding her from budget meetings, ignoring her input and slighting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during his visit in April.
"I was completely and totally boxed out from the very beginning," Shamp said in a July 9 phone interview with The Arizona Republic about her experience this year in Senate leadership, adding she could not explain Petersen's behavior toward her.
Petersen, R-Gilbert, denied Shamp's allegations and said her actions alone caused most Republican senators to turn against her.
"It wasn't me versus her," he said. "If it was, she wouldn't have been removed by a two-thirds vote."
The hostile relationship between the two highlights the divisions among Republicans who are already looking to next year's elections.
Shamp was booted from her leadership role on June 27 by the vote of her colleagues, just minutes after the Legislature adjourned sine die for the year following a chaotic budget process. The Republican senators replaced her with veteran lawmaker Sen. John Kavanagh, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who had taken a lead role in budget negotiations with Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Who is Sen. Janae Shamp?
Shamp, a surgery nurse often seen at the state Capitol wearing a cowboy hat, is a self-described constitutional conservative endorsed by now-President Donald Trump during her 2022 legislative campaign. After being reelected last year, she won the job of Senate majority leader by a vote of the 16 other Republican senators.
She's used her time in office to push forward conservative legislation that often received public attention, sponsoring bills to charge doctors with a crime if they fail to try to save the life of a fetus in a botched abortion and to make doctors pay for reversing gender transition procedures. Hobbs vetoed both of those bills.
Last year, Shamp sponsored the Senate version of the Arizona Border Invasion Act that Hobbs ultimately vetoed, a bill to make crossing the international border a state offense. Republicans passed a second version of the vetoed bill, referring it to the ballot.
Voters approved the measure, Proposition 314, by a vote of nearly two-to-one. But its main provisions have not gone into effect, pending court approval to go into effect.
Health care is one of Shamp's biggest priorities, and she sees the issue through a sharp, right-wing lens. She has remarked repeatedly on the campaign trail how she was fired from a nursing job for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. In 2023, she chaired the Arizona Senate's Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee, a two-day event criticized for providing unscientific information.
Shamp said she's connected to Kennedy through two people she met in her first term, Dr. Peter McCullough and Kennedy's general counsel, Aaron Siri, who lives in Arizona.
Both are well-known vaccine skeptics: McCullough had two of his certifications revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine after he spread misinformation, including alleged dangers about COVID-19 vaccines, and Siri petitioned the federal Food and Drug Administration last year to revoke approval for the Hepatitis B and polio vaccines.
"I'm not going to say I'm really very close, but I'm pretty close with HHS and with the Trump administration," she said. "I get invited to be in meetings, I get invited to be involved and I get requests for my input."
Petersen: Shamp lacked experience
Republican House and Senate members elected their leaders in November after maintaining their majority in each chamber in November's election.
Rep. Steve Montenegro of Goodyear, an ally and seatmate of Shamp who also represents Legislative District 29 in the northwest Valley, became the new House speaker. Shamp said she heard from other senators that Petersen had been urging them to vote for Kavanagh as majority leader.
Petersen acknowledged he had preferred Kavanagh for the majority leader position and that his choice wasn't personal.
"It was literally just a matter of experience," he said. "She's never been a chairman. It was just her second term."
Shamp has several allies in the Senate and reportedly won by one vote in the closed leadership meeting in November.
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Shamp says she was made to look 'stupid'
Shamp said she and Petersen hadn't gotten along even before she won the majority leader position. They never talked privately, she said, and she had never been a fan of his budget plans, which involved divvying up any surplus left over in budgets after all the basic requirements had been fulfilled and giving millions to each Republican lawmaker to spend as they saw fit.
She would have favored pooling surplus funds for "tons of infrastructure projects that haven't been funded" and tackling public health problems, she said.
She began writing a majority plan before the 2025 legislative session began, she said, but Petersen told her it was already being done by someone else and she'd get to proofread the document when it was finished. He relented, she said, "and that was probably the only part of my job of majority leader that I was truly allowed to do."
She said she "never felt like I was part of the team" and sometimes wasn't given information she needed to run the Senate floor.
"All I do is I get a script and I'm told like a monkey to read it," she said. She made occasional procedural mistakes, she believes made the whole Senate look bad because she was "never allowed to know" what was going on, she said.
"Staff would belittle me when I would ask," she said, adding she once told a Senate secretary: "I feel like I keep getting set up to look stupid."
Petersen roundly denied Shamp's claims of being ostracized from leadership talks or that he or Senate staff withheld information she needed.
"Not accurate," he said. "She would come in late, or missed leadership meetings. But she was always invited to every meeting."
Sen. T.J. Shope, a Coolidge Republican who has been in the Legislature since 2012 and serves as Senate president pro tempore, backed up Petersen's statement that Shamp was invited to leadership meetings but often came in late.
However, Sen. David Gowan, R-Sierra Vista, said Shamp has always been "rocksteady" with other Senate members.
"Majority Leader Shamp interacted with the Senators on and off the floor with great attention to their needs, no matter what the issues were," Gowan told the Republic in a text message. "And, it was a sad day for the Great State of Arizona when those members decided to move on from this great fighter!"
Kennedy appearance didn't go as Shamp wanted
Even "bringing" Kennedy to the state Legislature failed to win her "any kind of inclusion in the conversations about what we needed to do with budget and policy," she said. "All that did was literally get me called a b----."
Kennedy had embarked on a tour of three Southwest states in April to tout his Make America Healthy Again program and support a bill in Arizona to remove certain ultra-processed foods and dyes from school meals. Hobbs ultimately signed the bill.
"It was an incredible day," Shamp said of Kennedy's April 8 visit. "It should have been better."
She was "very disappointed" that earlier in the day, Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, addressed senators and House members in a joint meeting on the floor of the state House. But she said she was denied a request to have Kennedy introduced on the floor of the state Senate.
The meeting was instead held in a hearing room. She suspected the reason was the personality problem between her and Petersen.
Later, she was told a senate staffer whom she would not identify called her a "b----" because she wouldn't allow anyone in her office during a private meeting that day with Kennedy.
"I was given strict instructions that no one — no one — would be involved in this meeting, and that if the Secretary decided he wanted to take pictures with folks, that he would do that."
Instead of insults, she said, she should have been praised for "elevating the health of our state."
Asked whether he had denied Shamp's request to host Kennedy on the Senate floor, Petersen said he hadn't and checked with his staff to see what happened, later saying Shamp apparently had never put in a request. Perhaps she had asked to host a press conference on the Senate floor, he said.
But he added that he had no evidence of that, and even if so, press conferences are never allowed on the Senate floor.
Shamp exposed rift with budget votes
Under Montenegro's leadership, the House ultimately passed two doomed budget plans for the state's fiscal year 2025-2026 strictly on GOP party lines.
The House speaker played the role of antagonist to Petersen during the final budget negotiations, claiming the House plans were more conservative than the Senate plan. Shamp sided with him instead of the Senate president.
The proposed House budgets spent less money and included conservative measures pushed by the Arizona Freedom Caucus, like a ban on in-state tuition at public universities for undocumented residents in spite of a voter-approved, 2022 law legalizing the lower tuition when students live in the state, regardless of immigration status.
Petersen and Kavanagh negotiated their budget with Hobbs, other Senate Republicans, and Democrats in the Senate and House. They sought to please the Republican majority but crucially, present Hobbs with something she would sign before the June 30 deadline for a spending plan.
Shamp declined to allocate her share of the surplus money and was denied information about what was in the bills needed to enact the budget and the fiscal spreadsheets, she said.
She retweeted a post on X.com by House Appropriations Chair Rep. David Livingston stating "the Governor, with the help of a RINO Senate President, is pushing a Democrat Budget."
Shamp voted against the Senate plan with several other senators who didn't like the plan or the process, including Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Queen Creek Republican who is the Freedom Caucus chair. Like Livingston, a major hang-up for Shamp was the lack of preparation for the likely impact on Arizona's budget because of federal Medicaid cuts.
"It's called fiscal responsibility," she said.
Sen. Frank Carroll, a Sun City West Republican who was elected majority whip in November, was also one of the five GOP senators who voted against the first Senate budget plan with Shamp. He kept his leadership job.
Shamp and all but two Republican senators voted for the final, $17.6 billion Senate budget plan on June 27, which was similar to its first plan but included additions by the House, like construction projects on State Route 347 south of metro Phoenix. Hoffman voted against the final plan, and Shope — who voted for the first plan — was out of town.
Hobbs signed the budget in a July 1 ceremony, noting that the plan wouldn't cover the federal cuts in Arizona.
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Shope: Leadership means 'you kind of serve two masters'
Shope, the Senate president pro tempore, believed most Republican senators voted to remove her from leadership not because of her resistance to the overall Senate budget, but because she had seconded motions to include conservative provisions from the House budget plans.
Hobbs was sure to reject a plan with those provisions. But even worse, some members felt voting against the provisions would make them "look bad" to some conservatives, meaning they could be targeted for replacement in next year's primary election, Shope said.
Her fundraising efforts for the Arizona Conservative Policy Alliance PAC have also been a source of contention for Petersen because it helps fund campaigns for Republican legislative candidates in primary elections. The Arizona Senate Victory Fund PAC, which Petersen helps manage, only funds candidates in the general election to avoid appearing biased toward any Republicans in the primaries.
"I think that the president was probably kind of almost personally offended" by her work on the Arizona Conservative Policy Alliance PAC, Shope said.
"I think that what people don't realize is the amount of free agency that you lose whenever you decide that you're going to become part of leadership," Shope said. "You kind of serve two masters. You have obviously your constituents, but you also have a caucus of members."
What's next for Shamp?
Petersen said that after she was stripped of her leadership role, he offered her the chair of the Senate Education Committee, saying he would relocate the current chair, Sen. David Farnsworth.
Shamp declined, believing she should be the chair of the Health and Human Services Committee instead of its current chair, Sen. Carine Werner, R-Scottsdale.
Shamp said she would vote the same way on the budget again, despite the "retribution," and said she would not have to worry about the same "restraints" now that she's not in leadership.
She'll keep working on the issues she believes are important and continue to fundraise for the PAC to ensure quality Republican candidates for the Legislature next year, she said.
An "activist arm" in the GOP has supported "some pretty bad candidates" in the past, she said.
"Poor, good, solid conservatives were left to fend for themselves in these bloody, ugly primaries because you've got Freedom Caucus and Turning Point money coming and helping. How is that fair?" she asked.
People have told her "you need to be the next Senate president" if Petersen resigns as expected to focus on his run for state attorney general next year, she said. But she said she has no higher political aspirations.
"I just want to do what's best and what's right for my beloved state," she said.
Reach the reporter at [e-mail] or 480-276-3237. Follow him on X @raystern.