The rhythm of legislative life

For all the lamentation among the enlightened about setting the state back decades, this legislative session turned out like all the others.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

It abided by a well-worn template. It looked bad. It sounded bad. It was bad.

But then, in spite of itself, it did the big thing right. All was well-enough that ended well-enough.

We endured a couple of constitutionally dubious anti-abortion laws that probably will get overturned.

We experienced a spate of pro-gun laws that were diluted for passage.

We confronted a new requirement that voters present identification, a policy that actually has stirred higher electoral participation in other states.

Is any of that notably worse than creating a bogus program to provide lawyers for children in custody cases by which legislators run off with the money and get indicted and convicted? Or heavy-handedly killing a simple lobbyist-disclosure bill?

Or letting a telecommunications giant write its own deregulation measure and pass it pre-emptively by the overwhelming number of co-sponsors secured ahead of time, absent a syllable of public dialogue, by a golf-buddy lobbyist?

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This legislative session unfolded by a familiar rhythm and pattern.

As the train started slowly, there was the typical early obsession with vacuum-filling bad laws. There were the usual legislative pronouncements ranging from regrettable to inane and offensive.

There was an outrageous utterance or two that percolated all the way to the national news.

There was the predictable irony of legislators’ preaching of fiscal conservatism while clawing to get to the trough of surplus money for pet projects back home.

There was trickery, such as referring a constitutional amendment for stronger ethical guidelines that, by the way, and though not mentioned in the ballot title, also would relax term limits and make it easier for legislators to get pay raises.

As ever, the biggest assignment somehow got done responsibly and acceptably.

It happened in Dale Bumpers’ time on income-tax increases and government reorganization. It happened in Bill Clinton’s time on the Little Rock school settlement. It happened in Mike Huckabee’s time on the Lake View school funding case.

Seeming buffoons become … well, let us not say statesmen. They become persons who can be reasoned with.

There were many elements of that reasoning on the seminal issue of using federal Medicaid billions for an innovative plan to buy private health insurance for poor people.

But one element, perhaps, was less attractive than others.

It went this way: If we take all this federal money and put everybody now on Medicaid into the federal expansion through this private option, then the state will save money; then, but only then, would there be balances in the surplus account for tax cuts and local projects from the General Improvement Fund.

Some novice legislators thought they could reject the private option and still get the tax cuts and the GIF projects for check-passing photos back home. But they couldn’t.

Gov. Mike Beebe, still apparently smarter than everyone else in the Capitol, which has been the case since the early 1980s, had managed to forge a deal with the Republican legislative leadership.

If we didn’t create the Medicaid savings, we’d have to use the surplus to plug the status-quo drain of Medicaid costs. Thus we would not be able to afford tax cuts or higher education capital projects or local earmarks.

Want to drink from the trough? Vote for the private option.

It came down to a simple transaction.

One enduring phenomenon of Arkansas is that we have better governors than legislatures; that, in the end, our governors, limited though they be in prescribed constitutional powers, save legislatures from their worst instincts.

That remains so today.

So one capital project that went unfunded last week was an appropriation for a chiseling specialist to begin working on carving Beebe’s face on Mount Magazine.

You might recall that I pronounced before the session that, if Beebe could get Medicaid expansion enacted in this political environment with this band of legislators, we’d need to Rushmore-ize him on our state’s highest peak.

I’m thinking about one of those striking overlooks from the walking paths near the lodge.

The hair will pose a challenge.

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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.

Editorial, Pages 77 on 04/28/2013

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