Cover for the wimp caucus

If you are a garden-variety rightwing Republican state legislator avowed not to raise taxes, what does it make you if you agree to refer a tax increase for the voters’ decision?

Does it make you responsive to state needs and voter accountability while true to your word?

Or does it make you a fraud, vowing not to raise taxes and then permitting and tacitly endorsing a tax increase by passing on the prospect to the voters rather that stomping it flat when you have the chance?

Or does it make you a simple wimp, unwilling to step up to the responsibility of your office in a representative democracy, or to live by what you preach, or to do the right thing—however you see it—without fear or favor?

I’m not asking hard questions here. The answer is wimp, of course.

——————

The worst thing in the world for a legislative wimp, by which I repeat myself, is to risk getting beat at the polls for making a policy decision encompassing political peril. Then you might not be able to keep going down to Little Rock for per diem and to eat free at receptions.

So, yeah, the legislative wimp knows in his heart and mind that it’s time to come up with new tax revenue for highways. After all, he is a conservative Republican, and conservative Republicans like commerce and percolating markets, and the state’s commercial opportunities and market percolations are limited so long as our infrastructure becomes more substandard each passing year it goes unattended.

So he will step up to that buck, then pass it on to the voters.

After all, the voters surely wouldn’t beat you for giving them their say on whether to kill or embrace a tax on themselves. Would they?

Probably not, although there was the former state representative from Benton County, Tim Summers, who, in 2010, agreed to refer to the voters the highway sales tax they overwhelmingly passed.

But the Koch brothers’ outfit, Americans for Prosperity, took great offense and attacked him in his campaign for promotion to the Senate, causing him to lose a Republican primary to a babyfaced catcher for the Razorback baseball team named Bart Hester who keeps a Senate seat filled with his vacancy still.

Why, just on Tuesday, this newspaper did a piece about Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s plan to step up to the responsibility of highway needs by passing them on the voters, and, in that piece, quoted Hester as saying it was violative of his no-tax pledge to give the voters a chance to choose a tax increase themselves.

I felt sorry at the time for Summers, the kind of practical and reasonable Republican I can get along with. But I came in time to appreciate what the Koch brothers’ local minions were saying.

It was that conservative Northwest Arkansas does not send conservative legislators to Little Rock to punt back to them a highway tax increase proposal. It was that such a charade leaves voters vulnerable to the fear tactics of the vaunted highway lobby, warning as it does of unsafe roads and teetering bridges and lost job opportunities.

It was that conservative Northwest Arkansas sends conservative legislators to Little Rock to achieve command of the facts. It was that it sends conservative legislators to Little Rock to plow around among those billions down there and switch some money from all these no-account poor people, or from public schools that ought to be privatized or charter-ized, over to the highways, if highways are all that danged important.

In that same article, God’s own senator, Jason Rapert, was quoted as saying it is quite all right to pledge not to vote to raise taxes but to give one’s constituents the opportunity to raise their own. That’s because Jason, once you get him away from demagoguing for the primitive grandstand to impose his narrow religion on the rest of us, is pretty establishmentarian.

He’s an Asa guy, and what Asa wants is to do something for highways because he thinks it is time. And he knows the only way he might get it done is by relieving the robust wimp caucus of any risk.

So he will invite them to refer another highway tax increase just as they did in 2010, with most of them living to tell about it, poor old Tim Summers notwithstanding.

Here, then, is a possible scenario: The Legislature will refer a sales tax or an indexed motor fuel tax to the voters at the general election of November 2020. The voters will approve it by a significant margin. Then, Sen. Bob Ballinger will put in a bill to undo the tax because the people didn’t know what they were doing.

—–––––❖–––––—

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.