Power play at the Ledge

Arkansas seems not to require much of a Legislature in the Era of Sarah. The state Senate in particular seems of no independent relevance.

Once the legislative maxim was “the governor proposes and the Legislature disposes.” Now it’s “Sarah says jump and scores of legislators seek treatment for groin injuries.”

Last week the Senate passed Gov. Sarah Sanders’ bill to privatize education in Arkansas—or try hard to do so—even as a few Republican members complained that the 144-page bill needed cleanup, clarification and improvement. But the Senate accepted the assurances of Sen. Bart Hester, the president pro tem and amiable pawn who has pre-emptively declared himself in full alliance with whatever she wants, that the House would fix the bill when it got down there, then send it back for another Senate rubber-stamping.

Sanders wanted the bill out of the Senate last week as a show of strength. Bogging down in debate on the floor might signal to the national right-wing media that she is less than emperor down here. Fluid floor debate with amendments might delay the bill and cause co-sponsors to start falling off it.

This week the House is certain to advance the bill, but likely, along the way, to add an amendment affixed Friday by the House sponsor, Rep. Keith Brooks. It corrects errors, adds clarifying language, provides for accountability by administrators of coming voucher accounts and assures the right of a schoolteacher otherwise losing the fair-dismissal process at least to get a hearing before the school board after getting dumped.

Otherwise, a teacher would have no recourse if a principal or superintendent sent him or her packing because a prominent set of local parents had erupted over a bad grade.

Yes, the Senate had sent the bill over in that slipshod condition. The vote was 26-to-7, which surprised me.

There are only six Democrats in the Senate. Obviously, one Republican senator had voted more than “present,” which was the abdication of two in the 35-member chamber, but against.

The honorable distinction went to Sen. Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana, who is an interesting case.

He came to the Senate as a garden-variety conservative Republican political novice. But over the years he won notice for reading and gaining command of complex legislation. He also came to be quite the Senate institutionalist, standing up for the Senate’s constitutional role to take independent responsibility in spending and other matters.

It was on that basis that Hickey succeeded former Sen. Jim Hendren, cousin of thenGov. Asa Hutchinson, as president pro tem. He felt the Senate under Hendren might have operated too much as an extension of the governor’s office. He defeated the aforementioned affable and hyperpartisan Hester, in part by winning minority Democratic votes to supplement his split of Republicans with Hester.

Then Hester came back and beat him for president pro tem and re-installed the Senate as an extension of the governor, now Sanders.

Hickey cast the seventh and lone Republican vote against the education bill Thursday, not because he opposed any of the broad concepts, but because he recoiled at the idea that the Senate would be in such a rush to serve the governor that it would pass a bill needing work on the premise that the House, not the Senate, would do that work.

The House will now behave only marginally more independently and responsibly. The House sponsor put in the fix-up amendment late Friday, presuming to send the message that this sponsor-approved and governor-permitted amendment would be the only one put on the bill.

Because of that amendment and plans to permit two days of committee hearings, the House may not get the bill into final passed form and sent to Sanders for signature until the first of next week.

That’s still a closed process, a power play, and it’s still an uncommonly rapid trip through the legislative process for such a complex bill.

But at least an unfairly fired teacher might get from it a day before the school board.

There likely also will be more than one Republican defector in the House—and on the substance of the bill, mainly on the voucher section, not simply the process.

House Democrats seem to be preparing to vote against the measure, just as Senate Democrats did. That’s despite the fact that the bill sets minimum teacher salaries at $50,000, which the Democrats proposed last year.

In recent days Democrats have worked hard on the message that they were the originators of the $50,000 pay proposal and that, if they vote against it, it will be only because of the offensiveness of the voucher program and the cynical Republican tactic of snookering them with this “omnibus bill” doing what until recently was against the rules—combining matters not germane to each other in the same bill.

But nothing is much like it even recently was at the Capitol.