The case for Asa 2.0
Gov. Asa Hutchinson put out a statement the other day that he will seek re-election in 2018. As a stunner, it was as if Attorney General Leslie Rutledge had put out a statement that she’d be happy to go on cable news networks and defend Donald Trump on anything anytime with talking points provided by her pal Sarah Huckabee but contradicted by Trump himself.
Here are a couple of easy predictions: Hutchinson will rout any clown challenging him from his right in a Republican primary, then dispatch with ease any pitiable candidate the Democrats will feel obliged to run.
Hutchinson has governed as a pragmatic moderate, at least by definitions operative to today’s rightward Arkansas plunge to retro-confederate depths.
He saved Medicaid expansion while lathering a Republican brand on it. He resisted a bathroom bill. He had a religious bigotry bill rewritten to be mildly less bigoted. He separated the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday from that of the general leading the South’s war against its own great nation over its desire to keep enslaving black people. He cut income taxes mostly on low and middle incomes. He resisted the National Rifle Association by wondering if maybe we shouldn’t forbid guns at Razorback football games.
To assuage his mean and primitive base, Hutchinson killed four death row inmates in little more than a week and wanted to kill four others but the danged courts wouldn’t let him. He put in motion a plan to kick up to 60,000 poor people off Medicaid expansion for the sin of being only horribly poor and not tragically so. He previously had kicked people off by sending them letters giving them 10 days to prove they were still poor—letters many didn’t get until the seventh or eighth day of the 10-day deadline.
To assert his bona fides as a small-government conservative even as he has governed as Mike Beebe’s near-twin, Asa has declared himself in the process of a “transformative” movement to make state government more efficient. So far, that has existed substantively, if that’s the word, only in the transfer of a few small offices, a reduced expenditure for an antique football stadium and the announcement of an online suggestion box.
(A suggestion that I used social media to encourage people to offer: Get Leslie Rutledge off national television.)
Through all of that, there’s been a tacit understanding among informed people on the extreme right that Asa will unleash his true inner right-wingness and go all Brownbacky and Jindally in the second term.
I refer to right-wing Kansas governor Sam Brownback and right-wing former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, two spectacularly failed presidential candidates. Both cut taxes so deeply—on the comically failed premise that cutting income taxes causes income-tax receipts magically to increase, not decrease—that essential services were impaired.
Jindal managed to threaten LSU’s solvency so severely that there were worries even about the school’s central mission, which is to produce Alabama-competitive college football.
By the way: Jindal’s budget crisis was eased when a new Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, had the good sense to expand Medicaid and enjoy the Arkansas experience of a revenue boon to the state treasury.
The thinking in Arkansas Republican circles is that—by having governed pragmatically in the first term, limiting his tax cutting to low and middle incomes and his “transformation” to a suggestion box—Hutchinson has put everything in place for serious income-tax cuts for high incomes and a sure-enough constriction in state government’s role and expense.
Alot of this has to do with the unfortunately effective and tenacious Charlie Collins, the tax-cutting, gun-spreading Republican state representative from Fayetteville. Collins advocates deep across-the-board tax cuts for what he calls a “good jobs magnet.”
Hutchinson keeps talking about a swell state economy under his leadership, with an unemployment rate down to 3.5 percent, and Collins keeps talking about how the economy won’t really be swell until we cut high income taxes.
What happened was that Collins balked at Hutchinson’s plan for the last session to cut income taxes only at the poverty levels. To oblige him, as was believed necessary, Hutchinson caved to most of Collins’ campus-gun madness and created a tax reform commission.
Surprisingly, House Speaker Jeremy Gillam did not put Collins on the task force. But he will shadow its work as Gillam’s appointee to a concurrent Joint Interim Committee on Economic and Tax Policy.
That task force will almost assuredly propose deep income-tax cuts that won’t be enacted until January 2019, after Hutchinson’s re-election, and won’t inflict pain until later in Asa’s lame-duck term.
Democrats like Sen. Joyce Elliott and Rep. Warwick Sabin, both appointed to the task force, will object, to no avail.
That is to say Hutchinson’s firstterm performance supports election to a second term that portends peril.