Sarah on the offense

Gov. Sarah Sanders has opted to engage her real opponent, which is the people’s constitutional authority to make their own laws.

You take your eyes off the unpredictable voters of Arkansas and you’re apt to find abortion rights restored in Arkansas, medical marijuana availability on the rise, and private and parochial schools that Sanders favors with big taxpayer subsidies having to meet the same standards as public schools. Good. Good. And good.

Or as she would put it—bad, bad and bad. Or woke radical-left indoctrination.

It would harm her national brand as the next-best thing to Donald Trump if her subjects at home wandered beyond the boundaries of the cookie-cutter conservatism she relies on.

So, Sanders has announced that she is dispatching her campaign manager, Chris Caldwell, to head up an outside political firm to which she will delegate the execution of her resistance to three proposed constitutional amendments.

One would legalize abortion broadly for 18 weeks and to some extent after. Another would allow pharmacists and nurse practitioners to issue medical marijuana cards that would not have to be renewed annually and would authorize holders to grow their own. The third would require private schools that receive public money for voucher enrollees to meet all the requirements of traditional public schools.

None is on the ballot yet—with petition efforts just gearing up—and Sanders mentioned in her announcement that the new political firm would try to beat the proposals at the ballot box or disqualify them therefrom. The latter would be quicker and cheaper, and the Arkansas Supreme Court might be friendlier to her on one or two of these proposals than the people.

Let’s examine those three issues and then devote space to a fourth proposed constitutional amendment that the governor conspicuously left off her opposition agenda, though her over-reach on the subject was the impetus for the proposal in the first place. I refer to the proposal to install the people’s right to government disclosures in the state Constitution. The abortion proposal comes along during a pro-choice winning streak even in red states to relax state anti-abortion laws taking effect or proposed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of

Roe v. Wade.

Voters in those states generally oppose abortion but generally support compassionate exceptions in cases of rape, incest and threat to life of the mother. The Arkansas proposal generally bestows abortion rights up to 18 weeks, disallows them after that but with the rape, incest, fatal fetal anomaly and mother’s life exceptions, but then adds a narrow health-of-the-mother exception.

So, the advantage will go the side with more money and greater ability in defining the issue and spreading the message.

Sanders’ group will raise the money it wants and needs. It is unknown if national pro-choice groups will choose to invest fully in Arkansas to protect the momentum of their national winning streak. They might stay out because the issue in Arkansas is, at best, iffy, and, at worst, a long shot.

They could always explain defeat in Arkansas by saying ours is a lost cause of a state so hopeless it would elect Donald Trump’s apologist as governor.

The medical marijuana proposal polls as a winner that not even Sanders’ muscle and money could overcome. But she apparently feels obliged to try or to appear to try.

The education proposal would probably gut her vaunted LEARNS program. Private and parochial schools will not accept vouchers if they must put up with all the requirements that public schools must put up with.

So, Sanders goes to the mat on that one. She could handle a judge—a liberal activist one, of course—killing her school plan. The conservative populist people of her state? Not nearly so easily.

As to the conspicuous exclusion of the Freedom of Information Act and open government disclosure from the governor’s hit list: Sanders no doubt has seen polling that shows the government-distrusting people of Arkansas overwhelmingly in favor of public information and distrusting of anyone hiding information.

Sanders has made two tactical blunders so far as governor. One was that lectern. The other was calling a special session to try to get the state FOI law weakened to protect agency information from public review. She apparently knows better than to keep digging that hole.

The enshrining of freedom of information in the state Constitution seems likely, blending right and left … if, that is, it gets the signatures to make the ballot. A fellow told me last week that newspaper people would coordinate raising the money needed for that. I hadn’t been worried until then.