The not-as-embarrassing 10

To seek feedback, I put on Twitter the other day that I would presume in a forthcoming column to declare the top 10 legislators of the just-completed session. I threw out nominees, mostly Republican, and got feedback, believe me.

“Stinks,” said one liberal woman of my list of nominees. Nearly everyone I was extolling had voted for an unconstitutional bill to restrict a woman’s right to choose an abortion, she said. Surely I was kidding.

I wasn’t. I mainly blame the sponsor, Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway, for the most blatantly unconstitutional anti-abortion bill. That’s especially the case considering that his original version would have subjected women to transvaginal probes at six weeks of pregnancy.

The way to keep politicians from casting bad votes is to keep them from confronting bad bills that they fear they can’t afford politically to oppose. The only way for Democrats to stop an anti-abortion bill in the Arkansas Legislature is to win back a majority in one chamber or the other, then load up a relevant committee with pro-choice members, or at least a bullying chairman. It’s just politics.

So these rankings are based not on ideology, or single issues, or cosmic consequence, but on general competence and efficiency and bipartisan problem-solving. Yes, the top six are Republicans. I’ve rethought the list a dozen times. I can find no justification for changing it.

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1.) House Speaker Davy Carter, who confronted and surmounted circus-worthy challenges of high-wire balancing and juggling. He got the speaker’s job by offending his Republican caucus and running at the last minute with the support of the Democratic caucus. So he had to rehabilitate himself with his own party while keeping the opposing party satisfied. He had to do all of that in a 51-49 House that forced him a couple of times to cast untenable tie-breaking votes.

Halfway through the session, he made the grand bargain with Gov. Mike Beebe-passing a version of Medicaid expansion, thus pleasing Democrats, but doing so with a private-option plan designed by Republicans and, in return, getting the governor’s acquiescence to $100 million in tax cuts.

2.) Rep. John Burris, Republican of Harrison, all of 27, who availed himself of full-time legislating to develop uncommon command of health-care issues. He was not the primary architect of the private option on Medicaid, but he was its most articulate and effective communicator. He squared off in Benton one evening against a supposed health-care expert from the Romney campaign brought in by a Koch brothers outfit, and bested the guy rather decisively.

3.) Sen. Jonathan Dismang, Republican of Beebe, who was one of the primary architects. When I was bragging one day on my former column-writing colleague, David Sanders, for his fine work on the private option, a well-wired lobbyist replied that, yes, Sanders had done well. But the mild-mannered, quietly efficient Dismang, the insider said, was the main whiz.

4.) Sen. David Sanders, Republican of Little Rock, who, main whiz or no, was the member whom Senate President Pro Tem Michael Lamoureux called in that fateful day to work out last-minute amendments to assuage Sen. Missy Irvin and get the private option passed. I suspect Sanders will now head an interim oversight committee on expansion and Medicaid issues generally.

5.) Senate Pro Tem Michael Lamoureux, Republican of Russellville, pragmatic and patient, who held the Senate together, keeping the 14 minority Democrats reasonably content. One day he assembled his 34 colleagues in the Senate quiet room and talked to them like a parent about behaving in less petulant ways so that compromise might reap benefits for all.

6.) Rep. Duncan Baird, Republican of Lowell, who entered the session noted for uncommon quiet, good hair and unassailable personal ethics. A securities salesman, Baird was respected by Republican colleagues for his command on finance and numbers. Carter made him House chairman of the Joint Budget Committee, where he performed ably. Now Republicans want to run him for state treasurer.

7.) Sen. John Edwards of Little Rock, our first Democrat to make it into the Top Ten. He does so for being a trusted bipartisan ally of Carter, for uncommon influence with conservative Republicans because of his easy style and military record, and for leading the way to get substantial funding for a new veterans home. He is a center-left Democrat who relates well to people on the right.

8.) Rep. Warwick Sabin, freshman Democrat from Little Rock, who, though mired in a necessarily anemic minority, managed amid arduous challenges to get ethics reforms referred to the voters in a proposed constitutional amendment. And he got Carter to agree that the tax-cut package ought at least to do a little something for non-rich people by raising the standard deduction, if only a smidgen.

9.) Rep. Greg Leding of Fayetteville, who led the House Democratic Caucus, which picked its fights wisely-mostly-and did the right and cooperative thing on the big issues such as health-care expansion and the steel mill.

10.) Sen. Bryan King of Green Forest, a combative cowboy Republican, who passed the voter-ID law and other election-related bills while single handedly blocking the state’s elite business community from getting a tort-reform amendment with damage caps referred to the general election ballot. His lone-ranger, noncooperative and unpredictable style doesn’t always work, but it served his purposes well in this session.

So there. I could have chosen instead to rank the top 10 liberals. But there weren’t that many.

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