This year’s battle royale

The story of Arkansas politics in 2022 is an internal Republican battle between regular conservatives and more strident extreme conservatives.

At least that’s what I assert in the latest installment on the state of Arkansas politics that I write each January for Talk Business and Politics.

The dynamic is best illustrated by a legislative set-to occurring several days ago, after I’d written the article.

It occurred between state Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow, a strident and extreme conservative, most notably on the issue of abortion, and state Rep. Jeff Wardlaw of Hermitage, a regular if pugnacious conservative.

The issue was that Rapert, running for lieutenant governor, has been campaigning in part by telling pro-life audiences they need to elect real pro-life legislators rather than the Republicans who spurned his effort to extend the recent special legislative session on income-tax cuts to take up an Arkansas duplicate of the Texas anti-abortion law.

Perfectly conservative Republican legislators agreed with their leadership and Gov. Asa Hutchinson not to extend the session for this new and odd Texas law tied up in court. A more direct assault on Roe v. Wade is pending from Mississippi before the U.S. Supreme Court with a likely ruling this year.

There was some regular-conservative belief in the Legislature that Rapert was raising the issue to grandstand for his lieutenant governor’s race against Leslie Rutledge.

Wardlaw took Rapert aside the other day in front of several colleagues after a budget committee meeting and proceeded to give him a fiery piece of his mind. Wardlaw told me he was speaking for himself and many others in expressing deep resentment that Rapert would even intimate they aren’t pro-life because of a single procedural vote.

Wardlaw said the Texas law’s essence — paying taxpayer bounties, basically, for successful lawsuits against abortion cases — could be used in liberal jurisdictions to encourage and underwrite lawsuits against gun rights. He said it was a trial lawyer’s bill.

Rapert always has been unrelenting on “saving babies,” as he chooses to describe the woman’s-choice issue. He’s not stopping now. In fact, he promises to try to extend the forthcoming fiscal session to seek again consideration of the Texas law. He argues from the zealous right wing that it’s insufficiently pro-life to fail to take even an outside chance to stop just one abortion.

Rapert said in a text message Tuesday evening that, by his bringing the matter up again in the fiscal session, Hutchinson and other legislators “will get another chance to make the right decision. If they refuse, the blood of dead babies will be on their hands.”

To remind: That’s one Arkansas legislative Republican talking about other Arkansas legislative Republicans.

Who needs to fight Democrats when Arkansas Republican legislators have each other?

That’s the dramatic way Rapert tends to talk. He is a preacher. He can be sanctimonious. I have dubbed him Church Lady.

And it’s the kind of talk that regular conservative Republicans who uniformly oppose abortion don’t appreciate.

Wardlaw tells me everyone knows Rapert will try again in the fiscal session. He says nothing will come of it. He does say there might be a substitute anti-abortion bill that legislators would choose to pass instead. It probably would redefine fetal viability to conform to the Mississippi law in case the Supreme Court upholds it and undercuts or destroys Roe v. Wade.

That also sounds more like political cover than essential policy.

I asked Rapert directly: Does he believe that professed pro-life Republican legislative colleagues who voted against his motion seeking to extend the special session are, in fact, not pro-life?

He tempered his rhetoric a bit, saying, “I say they made a mistake and I hope they’ll correct it when they get the opportunity at the fiscal session.”

Wardlaw and Rapert tell vastly differing accounts of their set-to. That’s common in heated moments. And it’s not really the point. What’s significant is that the incident occurred and is a symptom.

What’s telling is the sometimes vicious tone taken by Republican legislators, particularly senators, when they talk about each other on this and other matters.

A close longtime observer of the current Republican-overrun state Senate tells me the place simply hasn’t had enough turnover in recent years and that members are sick of each other. That should soon change, with eight of 35 senators (including Rapert) leaving by personal choice or term limits, and at least two extremist conservative incumbents opposed by regular conservatives in Republican primaries.

For now, I feel comfortable telling you from broader not-for-attribution conversations that the state Senate is a conservative Republican nest of petty rivalry, clashing ego, resentment, backbiting and personal disdain.

Some of these people seem to think even less of each other personally than I think of the lot of them politically.