Arrows have proven uncommonly useful and popular in this ongoing tragicomedy at the state Capitol.
So let’s fire a few in the weekly online-only installment. Let’s see if we can lure a few legislators over to the Internets to see how they’re faring. Legislators take these arrows as gospel, you know.
Gov. Mike Beebe—He hates losing. But there’s no shame, only honor, in being overridden by law-defying extremist legislators on kook bills that blatantly violate Roe v. Wade.
Another thing: It’s pretty impressive to drop in on the federal secretary of Health and Human Services and walk out with a special Medicaid expansion deal for Arkansas. That’s especially so when the deal runs up the federal government’s tab exclusively for our little state.
People keep asking me how history will record Mike Beebe’s governorship. So now we know. He will be remembered as the last pragmatic progressive in Arkansas.
State Sen. David Sanders—A columnist apprentice a short time ago, he appears to have been the first member of a Republican working group on Medicaid expansion to suggest that maybe Beebe could talk to the federal folks about “premium support.”
That’s conservative-speak for spending taxpayer money for health-insurance companies instead of directly for poor people—on the right-wing theory that government stinks but private business is righteous—and it is the deal that Beebe went to Washington and got.
It is supply-side health care: Give the money to those already with money, meaning middle-men, and wellness will trickle down to the poor folks. It might work better than supply-side economics, which doesn’t work at all, since supply-side health care actually passes through more than a laughable theory, but a tangible benefit—subsidized health insurance—to poor people.
State Rep. John Burris—The young Republican pit bull from Harrison seems especially enamored of running poor people off public health insurance and into private insurance. And that’s fine except for a question that keeps nagging me: So why has he been on the state employee public health plan instead of in a private one?
State Rep. Bob Ballinger—He is Jason Rapert without the charm.
An evangelical lawyer from Hindsville, he misquotes Thomas Jefferson and puts in that little gem of a bill saying Arkansas will simply disregard the U.S. Constitution and not abide by any new federal gun laws or regulations that mean old Barack Obama might get passed.
There was an armed conflict about this kind of states’ rights insurrection from 1861 to 1865. Then, in 1957, Arkansas first demonstrated its unwillingness to accept the outcome of that war. So President Eisenhower sent in some fellows from the military to show us who was boss.
Ballinger’s bill says a local policeman would be guilty of an Arkansas misdemeanor should he attempt to enforce federal laws on guns.
He ought to be booted to Oklahoma where he belongs instead of awarded, as he is, with nearly three dozen know-nothing co-sponsors.
Sen. Bryan King—He performs a magic trick by which Ballinger turns center-right. On Monday, the last day to file bills, King put one in to make it a felony, not a misdemeanor, for anyone in Arkansas to enforce a gun law, any gun law, not merely new ones. Pure madness.
Jason Rapert—I will do a lot of brazen things. But one thing I dare not do is give a downward arrow to the man through whom God Almighty declares truth and gives orders.
Jason Rapert—Yeah, upon reconsideration, I’ll be happy to do that. God just told me to go ahead.
Sen. Jonathan Dismang—He distinguished himself among Republicans by speaking in a generally supportive way at a rally for Medicaid expansion last week at the Capitol.
Here’s the deal on that: Most of these Republicans who have taken over Arkansas represent prosperous Northwest Arkansas or white-flight bedroom communities of Little Rock. Dismang represents the real world, one with lots of poor people, over on the Grand Prairie along the White River, from Beebe southeastward. So he has to do some real politics in the real world, you see.
Tom Cotton—Already he has those national Ayn Randers who underwrite him, the Club for Growth, running defining assault ads against Mark Pryor, against whom he apparently intends to run in 2014.
The charge against Pryor? It’s devastating. It is that he has voted for a few Obama proposals. Can you imagine?
Mark Pryor—See above. He may soon need to answer Cotton’s rich national puppeteers.
John Burkhalter—Yes, an upward arrow, and here’s why: He’s running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2014 and he is not Mike Ross or Bill Halter, the former probably running and not trusted by progressives, and the latter definitely running and not liked by many of them.
Other—There is a strong base of support for this candidate in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
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.