Dawn of the new era
There’s a revolution in Wash- ington, but merely a new era in Little Rock, where state government will be now be more capital-R Republican and small-d democratic.
The legislative goings-on will be better than they once were procedur- ally, but worse as policy.
That’s because democracy is not always what it’s cracked up to be.
This new and more decidedly Republican state Legislature will operate more transparently and ethically than in the days of Max Howell and Knox Nelson and Nick Wilson and, yes, Mike Beebe. But bad and pointless legislation is more likely to flow through the General Assembly than before, because there’ll be no Democratic legislative autocrat to control the process and stop it.
For full and fair context, it is likely state Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Beebe, the second-term president pro tem of the Senate, could stop pointless or legally dubious right-wing legislation if he wanted to stop it. He’s capable. But he’s a right-wing Republican himself, so the issue is less that he can’t but that he probably won’t.
Circumstances put me at lunch the other day with a table occupied mostly by Republicans including a couple of legislators. They got to talking about how Democratic legislators who came before them had told them about the old days when lobbyist-legislator relations were much cozier and the legislative power centers much more controlling.
These Republican legislators said they couldn’t get away with such behavior now even if they wanted—which, to be clear, they didn’t say they did. They cited social media and smartphones and YouTube and the new constitutional amendment on ethics.
That amendment has holes but still puts a significant quietus on a lot of the bar-hopping by pluggedin legislators on lobbyists’ tabs that took place nightly up to and including Beebe’s time through the 1990s.
Arkansas’ Legislature has always been dominated by rural representatives of strong cultural and religious conservatism. That’s nothing new.
Thus it’s always been prone to, or susceptible to, hollow self-serving legislation of dubious worth and constitutionality in the greater context of what is supposed to be our free and pluralistic society. These bills tended to be about abortion or prayer or guns or gays or evolution—whatever the back-in-time evangelical obsession of the moment.
In the ’90s it was customary for such legislation to fly early out of the less manageable House of Representatives, with its 100 members, and for a local columnist then to walk down to the infinitely more manageable Senate side of the state Capitol’s third floor to speak with the mostly benevolent despot there—Beebe.
The columnist would ask, “What’s going to happen to that bill over here?” And Beebe would say it was dead already because it was going to be assigned to the Judiciary Committee, or Education, or Public Health, and he’d seen to it at the “duck dinner,” where committee assignments were handed out, that those panels were loaded with majorities comprising his so-called “reform-minded young golfer” allies who would either never give the legislation a hearing or vote it down if necessary.
And you could bank that information.
In those days the Senate was half lawyers, good ones, who understood constitutional issues and how to take a bill apart technically. Now there’s hardly a lawyer in the Capitol. Some celebrate that. They’re misguided.
To be fair, Beebe’s way was more accountable than previousgeneration Senate leaders who put bills in the desk drawer and left them there until adjournment.
Not to speak ill of the departed, but I once saw a legislative staff member hand a bill to a Senate kingpin who was chairing a committee. The staff member got called down because the bill was, the kingpin said, “supposed to be in my private stash in that desk drawer.”
Then the kingpin glanced over at the cub reporter covering the meeting and grinned. “That’s off the record, John Bennett,” he said.
My name wasn’t John Bennett, which I am pretty sure the Senate kingpin knew.
Today a bad bill will fly out of both the House and Senate and the only hope of stopping it will be the decidedly conservative Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, who at least is a veteran lawyer keen to the big picture and able at times to apply adult supervision.
Bad bills are being pre-filed already for the January session. One presumes to ban second-term abortions, which are fully legal by federal law. Another presumes to let the attorney general, of all people, declare an Arkansas municipality a sanctuary city, in which case all state turnback to the people of that municipality would be withheld until the attorney general was satisfied the local police weren’t … well, letting an undocumented immigrant go free in exchange for information about a criminal case.
Both bills ought to be round-filed in a kingpin’s desk drawer, but, alas, they don’t do that anymore.