Odd way to make law

Gov. Asa Hutchinson came out to his conference room Wednesday morning and said he had just signed the bill for guns on college campuses and Lord knows where all.

That he’d already signed the bill was interesting.

This was not a ceremony. The governor had eschewed that. He wasn’t making a show of his signature, as on bills he’s proud of, like the one the day before separating the holiday observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from a joined observance of Robert E. Lee.

I sensed, and it’s just my reading, that his heart wasn’t altogether in it.

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The fact—and this is an established fact—is that he’d just signed a bill he thought needed to be fixed.

How do I know that to be established fact? I know it because Hutchinson had called on Sen. Jonathan Dismang, president pro tem of the Senate, to come forward and announce that he would personally sponsor a bill to change at least a couple of things, and maybe more, in the bill the governor just made into law.

One of them is to exempt the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences from the full-carry privileges otherwise existing on public college campuses for persons with concealedcarry permits who take eight hours of additional training.

Another may be to change this new law’s apparent permission—wooo pig, sooie—to carry guns at college sporting events.

I also know that because, after the news conference, I eased over to ask Hutchinson if he had signed the bill only with a concurrent insistence that those fixes be undertaken. He answered that he signed the bill as is, and thus supports it, and that one can never be certain of a legislative outcome.

But … yeah, he said, before he signed the bill he made clear that he wanted those fixes and will be supporting them.

That’s an odd way to make law about something as consequential as potential shootouts on campus lawns.

But let me give you a little something to think about: If Hutchinson had vetoed the bill, the NRA lobbyists would have traipsed right back out into the Capitol corridors and cowed legislators into overriding the veto by the same simple majority vote by which they passed it.

The NRA reigns in Arkansas. A bad grade from the NRA could get an old boy beaten for re-election.

And now get a load of this little tidbit: The NRA’s chief national lobbyist, Chris W. Cox, was on hand for the non-ceremony, and I took the opportunity to sidle over to ask him if his group would accept or oppose the fixes Dismang had talked about.

“This is the first I’ve heard of them,” Cox said before launching into an impassioned soliloquy about the offense he takes at the very idea that law-abiding people who take enhanced training courses so that they may carry a firearm for protection ought to be the ones we should worry about wandering through the corridors and tunnels of the UAMS campus, or anywhere.

But here was my question, and it was a process question: Will the NRA now actively oppose—by which I mean kill—the Dismang fixes that Hutchinson insisted be offered at the time he went into a closet and signed the bill?

NRA crushing of the Dismang measure would have the effect of burdening the state with a law the governor wanted repaired when he signed it.

Cox wouldn’t say. But I’ll tell you what he did say: He thought the bill Hutchinson had just signed was too restrictive on carrying privileges.

I would remind everyone that Hutchinson told me weeks ago that, on a trip to Washington, he had dropped in on his old NRA pals—he once worked for them as a guns-for-schools spokesman—and told them the campus-carry debate was an Arkansas issue, not an NRA issue.

That obviously wasn’t how it turned out. And that it’s an NRA issue may be about to be demonstrated to us further.

One other factor that needs developing on this issue: The chief legislative sponsor, Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville, is a key legislative figure who champions across-the-board income-tax cuts, but who compromised on that at the outset of the session to go along with Hutchinson’s incremental proposal for this session for low-income tax cuts only.

I think that the governor, in exchange, obligated himself to go along with Collins’ college-carry obsession so long as there was some nominal enhanced-training requirement in it.

Time perhaps will tell whether we’d have been better off simply eroding the state’s revenue stream to let Charlie cut everyone’s income taxes now, since he’ll probably get it done in two years anyway.