In February 1988, Carl Kunasek walked onto the floor of the Arizona Senate to open a proceeding the chamber had never run before: the impeachment trial of a sitting governor. Kunasek, then the Senate's president, died on July 20, 2026. He was 94, the pharmacist turned lawmaker who steered that trial and helped build Arizona's Medicaid program from the ground up.

Kunasek was born May 23, 1932, in Omaha, Nebraska, and earned a bachelor's degree from Creighton University in 1955, according to his 1990 federal nomination record filed with The American Presidency Project. He then served in the U.S. Air Force as a Medical Service Corps officer until 1958. He and his family settled in Mesa, Arizona, in 1959, and by 1961 he had opened the first of three pharmacies he would own and run there over the next two decades. Pharmacy work led him into politics: Mesa voters sent him to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1973, and a decade later to the state Senate, where colleagues elected him president in 1987.

Kunasek was Senate president when the Arizona House impeached Governor Evan Mecham in February 1988 on charges of obstructing justice and misusing state funds. Arizona's constitution placed Chief Justice Frank X. Gordon Jr. in the presiding chair for the trial itself, but it was Kunasek, as Senate president, who ran the chamber through a proceeding the state had no modern precedent for, working out its rules alongside Gordon and the Senate's Democratic leadership. The Harvard Crimson reported that the Senate convicted Mecham on two counts in April 1988, removing him from office. Kunasek later said he took no satisfaction in the outcome. "I didn't want to conduct a trial. I just felt that it was unneeded," he told the Arizona Capitol Times in a 2025 interview, adding that Mecham's supporters in Mesa never forgave him for it: "I had no ability to stop the trial." He lost his own Senate seat in the Republican primary later that year.

Kunasek's more lasting mark on Arizona predated the trial. While still in the House, he helped write the legislation that created the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the managed-care model the state built instead of a conventional Medicaid program; the Arizona Republic credited him as a co-founder of the system when it reported his death. Kunasek recalled that a conservative Legislature initially left the program unfunded, so that it "languished for 15 or 20 years" before it took hold. He told the Arizona Capitol Times that a turning point came when an out-of-state visitor's motorcycle accident left a rural Arizona county with a hospital bill it could not absorb, a case that made the need for a funded system "very apparent."

Kunasek's public service continued after he left the Senate. President George H.W. Bush nominated him in March 1990 to be commissioner of the federal Navajo and Hopi Relocation program, a post he held for four years. Arizona voters later put him on the Arizona Corporation Commission, where he served as chairman from 1995 to 2000, regulating the state's utilities. Colleagues from his House years also remembered a lighter side: Kunasek was one of four legislators who flew over flooded river crossings in a colleague's small plane to reach the Capitol during a stretch of high water, an arrangement that drew newspaper criticism at the time but helped build support for the flood-plain legislation he championed, requiring Arizona communities to map their flood zones and restrict building within them.

He was married to Kathryn Frances Kunasek and raised four children, two of whom built political careers of their own. His son, Andy Kunasek, served as a Maricopa County supervisor from 1997 to 2016, and his daughter, Karrin Taylor Robson, ran for Arizona governor in 2022 and mounted a second campaign for the 2026 race before suspending it in February 2026. "He was such a good dad," Andy Kunasek said. "I got to work with him over the years. Over the last 20 years, he was my best friend." Karrin Taylor Robson said her father "lived by example," adding, "He got along with everybody. He lived civility and he enjoyed it." Art Hamilton, a Phoenix Democrat who served alongside him in the Legislature, offered a tribute across the aisle, calling Kunasek "always an even-handed person" and saying simply, "If you lived in the projects, he was a hero."

AHCCCS still runs Arizona's Medicaid program today on the managed-care model Kunasek helped design, a structure other states later studied and copied. The Corporation Commission he once chaired still regulates the utilities that power Arizona homes under rules his tenure helped shape. The pharmacy counters are long closed and the Senate he led through Mecham's trial has turned over many times since, but the program he helped fund and the two children who carried his name into new chapters of Arizona politics remain the plainest evidence of where his decades of work went.