PHOENIX — Editor's note: The Arizona Senate passed the budget early Wednesday morning. It now heads to the Arizona House of Representatives.
Arizona lawmakers are expected to work through the early morning Wednesday in a final, daylong push to pass a $17.8 billion budget for the next fiscal year.
The state Senate was expected to gavel in after midnight Tuesday, with the state House returning to work at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
The Legislature's Republican leadership believes it has enough votes - without any Democrats - to pass the bipartisan budget deal negotiated with first-term Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
If Republicans' one-vote majority in each chamber holds up, the budget could be passed and sent to Hobbs by late Wednesday.
"I don't know how many Democrats will come on, but the governor likes it," said GOP Sen. John Kavanagh of Fountain Hills, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and now working on his 17th state budget.
Hobbs does indeed like it.
"I knew from Day One that to get a budget over the finish line, it had to be bipartisan," Hobbs told reporters Monday.
But she's facing an embarrassing revolt by the Democratic caucus. Only one Democrat voted for the budget during two committee hearings Tuesday.
"Ultimately, the egg will be on our faces for not doing something in this moment, in this time," said State Rep. Athena Salman during a House committee hearing on the budget.
Democrats want a cap on the ballooning bill for the expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.
Last year, the Legislature allowed all Arizona students to obtain taxpayer-financed school vouchers for private or parochial school tuition.
Hobbs' proposed executive budget in January had called for a repeal of the expansion. The budget deal adds some accountability measures to the ESA program but sets no fiscal limits.
The program, run out of the Arizona Department of Education, has no budget.
The Joint Legislative Budget Committee, the Capitol's independent budget watchdog, projects that the universal expansion will total $1.5 billion in the program's first four years.
Tuesday's budget hearings had little public input, as has become a tradition at the Capitol.
Budget deals are typically unveiled the day before scheduled hearings, with details slowly spilling out.
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