Principled petulance

The subject today will be state Rep. Nate Bell of Mena, which requires me to begin with disclosure and disclaimer and context.

Approximately the strongest criticism I ever leveled against anyone in this space was that Bell was a “primitive life force.”

I said it in 2011 when Bell compared legislation to ban texting in school zones to Nazism. I wrote in 2013 that I had been proven correct by Bell’s infamous posting on Twitter chortling about liberal Bostonians cowering gun-less in their homes with the terrorist bomber on the loose.

Then last year Bell and his wife brought me fresh-cut basil from their farm and I told them I’d give them some of the pesto sauce I would make. But the pesto was so tasty that I accidentally ate all of it before I saw them again.

—————— Over these months—for reasons exceeding the gift of a mess of basil—I’ve come to see Bell as one who can indeed commit an occasional act worthy of a primitive life force, but who can also take an occasionally principled position and pursue it competently.

There was his decision to support continuing the private option. There was his seeking to separate our state’s observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the celebration of a Confederate general.

And there was, in the special session last week, his opposing the Republican Party’s nonsense of our state’s participating in, and getting swallowed up by, a Southern-wide presidential primary March 1.

So all of that brings us to today’s topic.

It was common a decade or more ago, when the rest of the South was tumbling into near-one-party Republicanism, that scaredy-cat Democrats would announce they were switching parties to the GOP. But now that Arkansas has plunged off that cliff, we’ve seen little of that. It’s because our Republicanism happened so fast and thoroughly—once the Democrats gave us this particularly offensive president—that about the only elected Democrats left in Arkansas were from Democratic regions such as Pulaski County, Fayetteville and the minority-concentrated Delta.

But we did have a switch of official party affiliation by an elected official last week.

The aforementioned Nate Bell went straightway from the special legislation session last week to his county registrar back home and officially switched his designation from Republican to independent.

In the grand scheme it means nothing. Bell was not planning to run again anyway. And he will remain the same nuanced conservative being he’s always been—primitive over here and principled with competence over there.

And petulant sometimes.

That’s what we seem to have here in this labeling switch—principle puréed with petulance.

Bell was absolutely right in his principled view last week that the move to the entire March 1 primary was precipitous—having all sorts of immediate and inconvenient consequences for state and local candidates and voters and donors—and not adequately studied.

But he lost the argument mainly because the state Republican Party leaned on its members. It wanted to oblige the national party by switching the date. And it wanted to reap a bonanza from big filing fees from a potentially large GOP field still competing March 1.

Bell came to personalize the debate as one between himself and Doyle Webb, the not-altogether-charming state Republican chairman.

Bell took particular offense when Senate Republicans chose what he called the “nuclear option.” They defied the Legislature’s widely honored committee system to use the GOP’s large Senate floor majority to pull the primary-date bill out of committee, where half the members were Democrats opposing it.

I’m advised that Sen. Jonathan Dismang, the president pro tem of the Senate, made the decision to pull the bill from committee. He felt he’d cooperated well with his Democratic minority and didn’t think it was fair that four of them could block in a special session a bill overwhelmingly favored on the floor.

Bell went home and put on Twitter that Saline County is beginning to look like Cook County, Ill. GOP chairman Webb is from Saline County. And Cook County is Chicago, where, Republicans widely believe, a Democratic machine is corrupt.

The effect of all of that is negligible except, that is, on our state politics. Filing for office will begin in November, a year before the election. All our primaries, and the first rounds of judicial elections, will take place in what could well be intense winter weather. And Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton will win our pointless presidential event.

And the Mena area will probably send us a new state representative who will positively pale against the principled petulance of the occasionally primitive life force. And I’ll have to make pesto some other way.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.