He’s gone Full Asa

Asa Hutchinson is a patient man. He waited through three losing statewide races over three decades before becoming governor. Then he waited through his entire first gubernatorial term before unleashing his raging Tom Cotton within.

There’s something surely liberating about being in the first year of your final term, with another regular legislative session coming in two years. You have liberation plus leverage. You can just let loose with the Full Asa.

In his first term, Hutchinson declined to take a position on a tort reform amendment eventually thrown off the ballot that would have had the Legislature taking over rules of evidence from the state Supreme Court.

This year he was an originator of the scaled-back tort reform amendment near-certain to be on the ballot in November 2020 that simply would establish the Legislature’s authority to set lawsuit damage caps.

In his first term, Hutchinson found that a bill granting a religious right to discriminate against gays went too far. He asked the Legislature to take it back and weaken it.

This year he hastily signed a pure grandstand stunt by which the Legislature passed an anti-abortion bill with no exception for rape or incest or even a doctor’s prognosis of a stillborn child—and only to take effect if the Trump-infested U.S. Supreme Court repeals Roe v. Wade.

The logical policy path for a serious non-grandstanding anti-choice legislator would be to wait for such a Supreme Court ruling, study that ruling, determine any likely nuance, and design at that point as much of an abortion-restrictive measure as the ruling would permit.

Passing a blanket “trigger” bill now without practical exception is purely for show, and Asa played his Rapertian role.

In his first term, Hutchinson cautiously lowered state income-tax rates for low-income and middle-income Arkansans. Last week, he signed a bill sending tens of millions of dollars in tax cuts to the state’s richest taxpayers.

And that’s not the half of it, as Rich Huddleston, head of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, blogged last week.

For full and fair context, Huddleston combined the tax cut for the rich with the increase in motor fuel taxes on the working man, a likely expansion of sales taxes on Internet purchases and the state’s kicking thousands of people off Medicaid expansion for not completing an obstacle course of reporting to meet a supposed work requirement.

Altogether, it’s a “perfect storm” for poor people, Huddleston wrote.

Three weeks ago, a reporter for The Economist, the prestigious international weekly based in London, came to Arkansas to explore our state’s first-in-the-nation work requirement for Medicaid expansion under new latitude granted states by the Trump administration. “You’ll never guess what happened next,” the subhead said, sarcastically.

What happened—as we locals know—is that thousands of people were kicked off health insurance for not meeting reporting requirements that, for a time, had to be done through a complex online portal to which poor people may not have access.

In addition to the article, The Economist produced a small piece of choice and incisive commentary on the Arkansas experience, saying, “Tying health care to work is a mistake… . Safety-net programmes [British spelling] work best when they are simple, well-understood and governed by rules that are easy to administer. The Arkansas experiment fails this test.”

The editorial went on: “Worse, Arkansas made it unnecessarily hard for people to register their work effort. In a state with one of the lowest rates of Internet usage, Medicaid recipients had to log their working hours on a website that shut down between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.”

The editorial concluded: “Supposing these problems can be overcome, tying access to health care to work is still wrong, because it is based on a misconception … . People do not work in order to be healthy; they can work because they are healthy already.”

In other words, The Economist found that Arkansas was bass-ackward, burdening its poor people with a Medicaid work requirement that is administratively unworkable and conceptually invalid.

You help people who are sick and then steer their physically improved selves toward work. You don’t tell people who aren’t working that, for punishment, they can’t be insured against illness.

That’s if you’re logical and compassionate.

The Economist has more than a million high-demographic subscribers around the world. The publicity might be harmful for Arkansas except for last week’s tax cut for rich people, which Asa says will lure the high demographic here.

Meantime, a federal judge in Washington soon will likely throw out the state’s work requirement for violating the underlying federal legal tenet of Medicaid, which is to expand health care to the poor, not play games with the poor’s health care for conservative political window-dressing.

But so what? A liberal judge in Washington and a news weekly based in England pale in our Trumpian province against the liberation of the Full Asa.