The Senate moves on

The state Senate voted last week to move out of the Hutchinson-Hendren household, if perhaps only up the street.

By secret balloting that I’m reliably informed turned out 19-16, the Senate chose Republican Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana to be its president pro tempore beginning next year.

That will change things, maybe only in terms of procedural underthe-dome insularity, but conceivably more broadly.

That’s because it is fair to say the Senate has been, for the last couple of years, a family affair and an extension of Asa Hutchinson’s gubernatorial staff.

The metaphor of The Godfather applies not in terms of criminality, of course, but in familial chain of command. Asa would be Vito Corleone. Sen. Jim Hendren, Asa’s nephew and the president pro tempore of the Senate, would be a little of Sonny and a little of Michael, which is to say hot-headed but smart.

Hickey tells me he has no great philosophical difference with his fellow conservative in the governor’s office, nor any personal criticism to make of Hendren. But he believes the Senate needs to become more distanced from the governor’s office than it’s been.

This was a mild upset. Hickey outpolled Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs, a strange mixture of extreme Republican conservatism and personally amiable pliability. It was the latter that had him favored in the Hutchinson-Hendren household.

I can best describe Hester’s extreme conservativism as blended with amiable pliability by this example: A few years ago, with Medicaid expansion typically hinged on a vote or two, Hester insisted by his conservatism on voting against Medicaid expansion. But he went along with a scheme to vote for the appropriation bill containing money for expansion based on the addition of a phrase forbidding use of the money for expansion. He knew full well — because it was openly declared — that Hutchinson would use his line-item veto to strike that phase, thus freeing the money. And, by agreement, there would be no attempt to override.

That’s how you can function as a back-benching extremist and pragmatic team player at the same time. You do the governor a favor like that and you expect his support when you want to be president pro tempore. And a governor beholding a go-along like that feels comfortable extending that support.

By extending the metaphor, Hester is a little like Fredo, personally likable but not the person you put in charge.

I’m told Hickey won all nine votes of Democratic senators, some, at least, on the simple basis that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the rightwing extremist even if the pragmatic governor could better work with him.

It’s understandable that Democrats wouldn’t want to give a leadership platform to a man who said the Arkansas Supreme Court was a “friend of the child rapist” for applying the law in remanding a case for retrial.

Then Hickey picked up 10 votes from the 26-senator Republican caucus from members who defied the unwritten rule to stick together on leadership choices so that the Democrats couldn’t leverage the outcome.

Geography played a part, since Asa, Hendren and Hester come from Benton County in the thriving northwest corner of the state and Hickey comes from the struggling southern half.

Mainly, though, it seems the Hutchinson-Hendren dominance of the Senate had grown tiresome. There were views that Hendren could be heavy-handed.

Asked about that, Hendren, a moderately self-aware former fighter pilot with the ego and focus befitting the stereotype, quipped, “Hard to imagine … just mission-oriented.”

When the mission was to take care of Uncle Asa’s interest, Hendren could be a little intolerant of Hickey, said by some to be a “nitpicker” when he pored over the governor’s bills and raised questions about details.

So this is complex political math by which Democratic liberals, Republican pragmatists and right-wingers got all mixed up. Hickey will ascend to the president pro tempore’s position next year on a weirdestbedfellows coalition.

Hickey’s majority spans the liberal lion, Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, and, or so I’m told, Sen. Trent Garner of El Dorado, a Tom Cotton wannabe who was not pleased that the everreasonable governor squashed his proposal to stop the state from doing business with China because the virus came from there.

There is some thought that Hickey thus is the dog who caught the car. He now has to figure out how and what to do with such an untenable alliance.

Hickey told me he made no promise for a vote other than fairness. He said skeptics will have to wait and see that the Senate will be stronger and more deeply coalesced under the new regime.

At this point it’s an inside story that may not make a dime’s worth of difference in the enactment of Hutchinson’s agenda or in anyone’s life.

But it might.

I do find myself wondering about Hendren’s possible run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2022 if he’s managed to miff 10 Republican state senators.