Gov. Dark Money Ducey goes a-courtin' the Kochs (again)

Gov. Doug Ducey is hotfooting it to California today to meet with the kings of dark money.

He's headed to an exclusive California resort, to a summit hosted by the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce – an annual Koch gathering that'll draw some of the deepest political pockets in the nation.

"Gov. Ducey is looking forward to this event," his spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told The Republic's Yvonne Wingett Sanchez. "It's an excellent opportunity to engage with other advocates of limited government and free enterprise."

It's also an excellent opportunity not only to pay homage to the billionaires who cleared a path for Ducey to the Arizona governor's office, but to ensure that he's in their pock…I mean, in their hearts and minds for his future political aspirations.

It's worth noting that Ducey always seems to have a sizable, perhaps even inexhaustible, amount of dark money muscle behind him.

His defeat of the 2012 sales tax for schools – the campaign that transformed an obscure state treasurer into a political force -- came with the help of Americans for Responsible Leadership, a dark-money group that sunk $925,000 into Ducey's $1.8 million campaign to kill Prop. 204. Thanks to Internal Revenue Service records, we know that ARL, which spent an additional $575,000 to kill the top-two primary initiative, was funded almost wholly by the conservative network run by billionaire conservatives David and Charles Koch.

Ducey's 2014 path to the governor's office was lined with millions of dollars in Koch-connected dark money, which curiously always seemed to target whichever opponent appeared to stand in Ducey's way.

Earlier this year, when Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan spoke out about the damage being done to K-12 schools by Ducey's proposed budget, he encountered the wrath of American Encore, a Koch-connected dark-money group that invested $1.5 million into getting Ducey elected and then into enforcing Ducey's agenda.

So it's no surprise to see Ducey kissing up to the Kochs and their pals at a secret southern Cal locale this weekend. No doubt, they will extol the virtues of private prisons, publicly funded private schools and tax cuts.

Sound familiar, Arizona?

This is not Ducey's first Koch summit. Secretly recorded tapes released last fall by The Nation showed then gubernatorial candidate Ducey courting the Koch network at their annual secret California summit last summer — and not for the first time.

"I have been coming to this conference for years," he said at the time. "It's been very inspirational."

Inspirational, no doubt, and highly profitable for a guy with political aspirations.

As Ducey told his secret pals last summer, the ones who are in the market to install their guys in positions of power across the country:

"I can't emphasize enough the power of organizations like this."