COMMENTARY: Political Wind Shifts In Arkansas

Since last November, when the Republican Party gained control of the Arkansas House and Senate, there’s been considerable gnashing of teeth over whether the General Assembly would start to look like Washington.

I’m pretty convinced there’s no governmental construction in Arkansas that can result in a mess like that happening under the dome of the U.S. Capitol, but several political observers worried the shift of power to the Republicans, at least as long as they stayed a cohesive group, would result in a partisan divide and gridlock at the state level.

It wasn’t partisanship some folks feared, even when they said it was.

Partisanship - the fi rm adherence to party, faction, cause or person - has been a part of any political effort for all of history.

It was easier for some to believe partisanship wasn’t a factor when the makeup of the governing body consisted of a majority aligned with their way of thinking.

For them, the path to partisanship was lined with elected Republicans. The path to good, responsible government was paved with Democrats, who have held majorities in both houses since after the Civil War.

The Legislature has no doubt shifted to the right. How else can oneexplain the 89th General Assembly’s fixation so far on guns and abortion. But consider last Thursday’s vote on House Bill 1037, which would ban most abortions beyond 20 weeks after conception.

This is a stark change to Arkansas’ abortion law, so stark many legal eagles say it will be proven unconstitutional.

The fi nal vote was 80-10, with 10 members not voting. To get that total required the votes of 29 Democrats. Does that sound like a blind adherence to party or just Arkansas lawmakers voting along the lines of their constituents’ wishes?

Granted, even if all Democrats and a Green Party representative had voted as a bloc, it would have amounted only to 49 votes, short of the number necessary to block the Republican majority. But if this was about ideological or party warfare, why would those 29 Democrats go with their Republican opponents?

Even a more restrictive abortion bill, one that would outlaw abortion beyond 12 weeks, got the votes of 18 Democrats.

The shift of power to Republicans isn’t the recipe for partisanship many lamented as a likely result. It is a shift in the ability of Republicans to get more legislation passed that aligns with their way of thinking. That’s not partisanship. It’s just a change in who ends up on the losing end of the votes.

One has to assume that’s exactly what Arkansans wanted when they sent more Republicans than Democrats to the state Capitol last November.

Republican lawmakers didn’t take that as an assignment to shut down government, but they did accept the challenge to operate state government under a dift erent philosophy.

Democrats certainly haven’t given up all their power. All one must examine to show that is the process by which Republican Davy Carter became speaker of the House. He earned the seat mostly by convincing Democrats he was a better choice for their involvement in a Republican-controlled House than a more conservative speaker.

Without Democrats, he wouldn’t have been elected speaker. Does that really resemble partisanship?

There is, of course, an ever-present danger of any government slipping into such partisanship that nothing can get accomplished, but that’s overplayed among those who lament the demiseof Democratic control in Little Rock. In Washington, perhaps the biggest culprit in the standstill nature of federal government is a loss of any sense of commonality. There, they’ve given up on governing by any other means than by the R or the D next to their names.

Arkansas is a small state with diverse regions, but still a sense that we’re all Arkansans. Lawmakers have to keep in mind how interconnected all the parts of the state really are.

They cannot divide themselves up into caucuses or parties strong enough to overcome the sense of state identity.

The cries of partisanship were rooted in fear of an agenda. That’s fair enough for concern as far as what kind of policies might be adopted, but it falls short of supporting the claim of partisanship.

The news out of Little Rock clearly refl ects the wind is blowing from a dift erent direction.

That’s the wind of democracy infl uencing the governing body to reflect the changing nature of Arkansas voters. If Arkansas voters don’t like what they see, that wind will shift directions again and perhaps the Democrats will regain control of the process.

If that happens, I doubt I’ll see commentators suggest the change will result in more partisanship. GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR FOR NWA MEDIA.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/25/2013

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