LITTLE ROCK — The leaders of this historic new Republican-led Arkansas General Assembly-lawyers Michael Lamoureux or Russellville and Davy Carter of Cabot-are mildly torn young men.
That’s good. The main defect in contemporary American politics is that too many people are cocksure and not enough are torn.
We need a little angst around here.
Lamoureux and Carter are torn in that they want to celebrate and apply the long-awaited Republican majority that has come up behind them on the right flank; but, at the same time, they don’t want an overly ideological culture that turns Little Rock into Washington.
They were ahead of the Tea Party curve. They came to the Legislature as perfectly conservative young Republicans, but before the fateful election of 2010. That’s when irrational fear of Barack Obama produced the extreme right-wing insurgence.
By that point Lamoureux and Carter had already come to respect and embrace the lawmaking process. They had learned to deploy their conservatism toward practical governance, not intransigence.
They don’t want to demonize Democrats, many of whom, like Gov. Mike Beebe, they respect.
In fact, Carter told an assembly Friday at the Clinton School that Beebe probably would be recorded as the state’s best governor ever.
It was a reminder that Davy is young. He needs to study George Donaghey and Dale Bumpers.
Beebe is merely in the top three to five. He will go straight to the top only if we pass Medicaid expansion in this anti-government climate. We’d need to carve his face on Mount Magazine if that happened.
And if the state’s business community gets behind Medicaid expansion . . . well, I say that only because Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce president Randy Zook told me over the weekend that there were a lot of good business arguments for expansion.
So now we confront yet another Arkansas eccentricity: Our Legislature has been taken over by Republicans-the first such occasion since Reconstruction- and these insurgent Republicans lean heavily to the apocalyptic side.
Yet they will be led by young men-Lamoureux as president pro tem of the Senate and Carter as speaker of the House-who see ideology not as the end-all, or even the point.
Instead, they see it as a vital element of debate and a component of solution.
A prediction: At times, Lamoureux and Carter will get along better with Democrats than Republicans. (Carter ventured to Northwest Arkansas before Christmas and got eaten alive by “movement Republicans” angry that he was working so well with Democrats.)
Another prediction: At other times, Lamoureux and Carter will grease the skids for ultra-conservative legislation that will enrage the center and left.
Lamoureux was seated on the front row last summer in Conway at the roast-and-toast of his mentor, term-limited Sen. Gilbert Baker. I was a roaster-and-toaster and I told the group that ideological differences need not ruin compromise.
I said that Baker and I, over a cup of coffee, could have settled in 15 minutes the contentiousness that had taken place in the recent fiscal legislative session.
I happened to look down at that point at Lamoureux, and he was nodding.
I tell you that to say he’s a dealmaker. He sees and accepts, in part, the conservative resistance to Medicaid expansion.
He also sees and accepts, in part, the need of hospitals to reap expanded insurance and incur reduced uncompensated-care costs.
So Lamoureux is looking for a number in the middle and for the federal government to back off on its all-or-nothing edict on Medicaid expansion.
Carter is a banker as well as lawyer; as such, he brings calculations to the issue.
He sees that Medicaid expansion would help hospitals and erase some of our existing Medicaid budget problems. But he also has run his numbers out to the point at which federal government’s hundred-percent funding for Medicaid expansion drops to 90 percent.
He’s not sure it adds up at that point to a good deal for the state, especially if the federal government ever gets wise and saves money by reducing its 90 percent obligation.
At best, Carter and Lamoureux will settle on an incremental Medicaid compromise-probably in a special session later in the year-that might net the daunting three-fourths majorities required. But that would dictate that Beebe seek some sort of waiver from the federal government so that Arkansas, as always, could be different.
Citizens can have this assurance: When Beebe, Lamoureux and Carter sit down to hammer out these things, the conversation will embrace facts, logic, intelligence, experience, personal respect and solution-oriented pragmatism.
I am not sure what assurances citizens can have when Lamoureux and Carter go back and report to their righter-wing caucuses.
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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 13 on 01/15/2013