LITTLE ROCK — There probably is a book to be written on the perilous ongoing adventures of 38-year-old Davy Carter, speaker of the state House of Representatives.
The book would be regional by direct implication, but of potential national scope as a human and political drama. You could title it The Last Sane Man: Trying to Swim Logically Against the Illogical Tide in 2013 Arkansas.
Carter is a bright lawyer and banker, son of a Lee County farm family. He was a pure and bona fide conservative by the prevailing political definitions of long-ago 2009. That’s when he came to the Arkansas General Assembly as a new Republican state representative from Cabot.
Now, by the newly prevailing political definitions of 2013, he gets assailed by apocalyptic extremists of his own party as a dirty liberal for:
◊Being friendly with Democrats.
◊Acknowledging a certain in-state logic in Medicaid expansion.
◊Saying he doesn’t want to live in a state where everyone struts around with an open weapon.
◊Feeling a tad beleaguered by all this abortion and gun legislation when there are budgetary and policy debates that interest him more.
The prevailing apocalyptic conservative of Arkansas in 2013 believes a man has a right to keep secret that he has a permit for the gun he insists on having the right to carry openly. He’s an exhibitionist who treasures his privacy, in other words. And this prevailing apocalyptic conservative believes the best way to address health care is to deny Medicaid to women who are forced to have babies.
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By standing in the same place philosophically for four years, Carter has been transported involuntarily to the vulnerable center by this rightward earthquake.
He got elected speaker at the last minute by running against his own Republican caucus and winning votes of Democrats. He did so on the premise that a 51-49 chamber needed coalition-building-this in a era in which partisan polarization is faux virtue.
He kept around a partisan Democrat, Bill Stovall, as a leading staff member. He brought in his good friend, Gabe Holmstrom, as his aide-de-camp. Holmstrom happens to be a Marion Berry-East Arkansas Democrat.
It was Carter, I am told, who slowed down the abortion bill of Sen. Jason Rapert. The speaker used his leverage to get the transvaginal probe taken out of it, at least.
Still, if you were to ask Carter to cite his most natural philosophical soul mates in the Legislature, he probably would name two of the most staunchly conservative Republican House members. Those would be John Burris of Harrison, the bulldog who seems to want to slug the next moderate he sees, and Charlie Collins of Fayetteville, whose aims are to arm folks on college campuses and cut income taxes inordinately for rich people and, in effect, take money from these newly armed college campuses.
Typically, I predict Carter will do one thing wrong and one thing right on the two actually important policy and budgetary issues still to emerge in this session.
He’s a sure-enough conservative Republican on taxes. So he will join Collins in trying to rearrange state income-tax rates in a way that, while adding fairness for the middle class, will give needless breaks to rich people and erode the state treasury in a way that will prove harmful to higher education.
But on Medicaid expansion … While his party mates have been obsessing on guns and fetuses, Carter has been obsessing on his own spreadsheets, trying to figure out the angles on Medicaid expansion.
He believes Arkansas probably ought to take advantage of three years of full federal funding of expansion, especially with rural hospitals in great need.
But he thinks the state ought to limit its long-term liability by protecting against its own costs once federal funding gets reduced. He was about ready to unveil his own proposal when Gov. Mike Beebe told him last week that he was going to Washington to try to get definitive word whether Arkansas would be permitted flexibility to design some lesser increment of full Medicaid expansion.
It appears Arkansas will only enact, if anything, an increment of Medicaid expansion, one that limits state exposure. That happens to be the very objective that puts Carter’s neo-centrism and spreadsheets at the center of the negotiating table.
If we get 75 votes in the House for some form of Medicaid expansion, it will mean that Carter found 26 in his own party to go along with 49 Democrats.
His interest in seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination probably would be ruined in the short term, owing to reflexive resentment on the intolerant right. So he ought to go make a lot of money and wait for his state to get in such a mess that people will come looking for him.
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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 15 on 02/26/2013