Short bursts
HOLD ON, Dear Reader, for here come some capsule-sized comments on developments reported of late by Arkansas’ Newspaper.
United Airlines must have allowed common sense and patriotism to override its arbitrary weight limits, since it’s now refunded the $200 it dared charge a first lieutenant in the Texas National Guard who was returning from a couple of years fighting for his country in Afghanistan. Why? because his duffel bag weighed slightly more than the 70 pounds allowed under its rigid rules.
Our president, His Impetuosity Donald Trump, seems to have stopped huffing and puffing long enough to have second and better thoughts about the North American Free Trade Agreement that he used as a whipping boy during his overheated presidential campaign. Instead of just pulling out of the agreement point-blank, the president’s trade representative says this country is willing to just renegotiate it.
“We are going to give renegotiation a good strong shot,” he says now. Re-negotiating the deal turns out to be fine with our partners, Canada and Mexico, who are beginning to recognize that this country’s still inexperienced leader shouldn’t necessarily be taken at his word. They’d like to renegotiate the terms of the agreement, too. Commerce, it turns out, is just an extended form of friendship. Why not be good neighbors in this Pan-American union? It costs no more, and doubtless will cost considerably less than enmity.
Besides, this country can no more pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement easily than it can out of North America itself. At last Donald Trump has met an argument he can’t rebut, let alone refute: sheer, unavoidable physical proximity. Rhetoric, meet fact.
As every schoolboy knows or should know, the government of the United States has three branches: the legislative, executive and judicial, each counter-balanced by the others. As in a fine piece of clockwork. But get set to add another: the branch of independent counsel. Its domain would be investigation and prosecution, if not persecution. Perhaps the most serious disservice Donald Trump has rendered the country—as of now, for his administration is still young—is to drive his critics to the same excessive lengths he goes.
Arkansas’ senior senator but junior statesman, John Boozman, says he’s all for the idea of an independent prosecutor. Here’s what he and others who like the idea may overlook: the all too real possibility—probability, really—that, once the Office of Independent Prosecutor is set up, it will find something to prosecute. For that is the nature of prosecutors. And the longer and more exhaustively they can prosecute, the happier they may be. Why not? An open-ended gig like this is an opportunity to stay in business in perpetuity.
Anybody remember Kenneth Starr, the terror of the Clinton administration and anybody connected with it?
To quote Tom Cotton, the state’s junior statesman but senior thinker, “It’s important that Mr. Mueller [the independent prosecutor in this instance] completes his investigation thoroughly and quickly.” Good luck with that. Senator Cotton is being closed-lipped about the current brouhaha, which is prudent but uncharacteristic of him.
Looking for a way to avoid accountability in public office? Just appoint an independent counsel and refer all questions and doubts to him. For whom is he responsible to, really, except himself? Steve Womack, the Arkansas congressman, put it well: “We need to get past a lot of this noise because we’ve got a big agenda stacked up in front of us. We need to get to the business of the people.”
MEANWHILE, this state’s governor Asa Hutchinson is pushing a favorite distraction of his own: what he calls the transformation of state government. Only it sounds a lot like the same old same old. Because his first suggestion about how to transform the state’s bureaucracy is to add one more bureaucrat with a title on the door and a rug on the floor. Her name? Amy Fecher. And her title? Chief Transformation Officer. Her first job will be to ask just-plain citizens to express their opinions about state government. As if they couldn’t write, email or phone Arkansas’ Newspaper on their own. Besides, this state already has a chief transformation officer whose job used to be to keep state government responsive and set its agenda. His title is Governor.
Meanwhile, the state’s Supreme Court is doing some transforming of its own. It’s decided that local governments are more than just branches of their chambers of commerce, and thrown out a lawsuit that challenged cities making contracts with private entities however noble the intentions were supposed to be. Now that’s transformation.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.