Senators loaded for bear

Isuspect it’s the kind of thing that causes some people to despair of our political process. Or, like most things, it might depend on which side you’re on.

Voters send a clear message in an election for a broadly conservative agenda to be imposed by Republicans. But then four Democratic state senators—three from Little Rock and one from the Delta, representing the only places Democrats exist anymore in Arkansas—conspire by savvy maneuvering under legislative rules to keep a major element of that conservative agenda from getting enacted.

Doesn’t seem democratic, does it? But it does seem like a republic, which is actually what we have.

Either way, you have to admire the chess play, don’t you? Isn’t it permissible to forge a stalemate with the other guy even though you have fewer pieces on the board? Don’t you call that “well-played?”

This epic election installed 24 Republicans and left only 11 Democrats in the state Senate. So the new group got together the other day to choose committee assignments for the session beginning in January.

The process would be based, as always, on seniority—meaning more veteran members would go first in each round of selection.

There may not be many Democrats left, but the few that remain tend to be more senior than all these new Republicans flooding in from the new-alignment elections of 2010, 2012 and 2014.

So to make a long story less long: Four Democrats with senior status got together to figure out which eight-member committee they could most advantageously load up. In other words, the question for them was as follows: On what committee could these four seek to consolidate themselves in early-round selections— fashioning a 4-4 tie on a key committee—and pack the most punch?

In earlier days, senior legislators used their early picks to choose personal policy preferences or seek individual chairmanships or vice chairmanships. The game wasn’t for consolidated punch on a policy or partisan basis. But this, after all, is a new era. The answer came clearly. The State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee considers proposals for constitutional amendments to be referred to voters at the next election.

There are two policies that conservatives covet and liberals abhor. Well, there are many more than two. But in this case we’re talking about these two—restricting damages that juries may impose in lawsuits and otherwise changing rules of judicial procedure to limit jury power, which some call tort reform, and requiring photo identification by voters.

Both would require constitutional amendments approved by the voters.

Tort reform would mean changing, either a little or a lot, the judicial article of the state Constitution. Past incarnations have called for shifting some existing independence of the judiciary to legislative decision-making, which is a horrible, indeed dangerous, idea.

As for voter ID, the state Supreme Court declared only weeks ago that a simple bill requiring as much was unconstitutional under the prescribed and prevailing definition of voter eligibility in the state Constitution. So restoring voter ID would require amending it directly into the Constitution.

By loading up the State Agencies Committee, these four Democratic senators—Joyce Elliott, David Johnson and Linda Chesterfield, all of Little Rock, and David Burnett of Osceola—put themselves in a position to deny a majority committee vote and thus kill both those initiatives.

For this cause, Elliott gave up a long-held and treasured seat on the Education Committee.

It is true that the full Senate could pull those proposals, if stalled, out of the committee. But the threshold for that is higher for a joint resolution— which is the form a proposed constitutional amendment must take —than a simple bill. A two-thirds majority is required, and while 24 is two-thirds of 35, at least two Republicans—Jeremy Hutchinson and Bryan King—are said to be opposed.

So a leading Republican told me firmly the other day that tort reform and voter ID are dead, at least as legislative matters in the forthcoming session.

Voter ID indeed seems rather clearly to be dead for this next session. And for that you can blame or thank four people.

But there is preliminary talk that the debating parties on tort reform— the business community and trial lawyers, primarily—might despair of having to engage this legislative fight every two years, not to mention the challenge and expense of going to the people with their own petition drives and campaigns.

It is conceivable the issue could be pared to a simple capping of non-economic damages, meaning non-compensatory ones such as punitive damages, in which case the sides would simply be haggling over price.

And a postscript: These same four Democrats looked up in the second round of committee selections and found they could do the same thing on the Judiciary Committee. And they did.