Those outgrown trousers

A smug political insider asked me the other day: “So are you proud of that puff piece you wrote on him a couple of weeks ago?”

That was the column saying that former state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway was a natural leader and can-do guy who had gotten too big for his britches.

I’ve written much puffier pieces. And, in specific answer to the question: Yes, that column holds up so far, based on what we know for sure. -

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The fancier word for outsizing one’s trousers is “hubris.” It means an exaggerated self-confidence and an overestimated assessment of one’s competence that can detach one from reality.

Through a consulting firm that he should have disbanded when he became the $132,000-a-year lobbyist for the University of Central Arkansas early last year, Baker kept raising money to advance moderate Republican legislative candidates and conservative judicial candidates who might limit damages in lawsuits.

He now has been forced to resign at UCA-quite properly, quite unavoidably.

He abused and tainted both his employment and the school, the latter of which needed anything but.

Revelations by the Blue Hog blog and in this newspaper place the fingerprints of Baker’s consulting firm all over those strange political action committees that sprang up as conduits for nursing-home magnate Michael Morton to make campaign contributions to Faulkner County Circuit Judge Michael Maggio.

It all happened about the time Maggio, otherwise misbehaving on the Internet, was reducing a jury award against one of Morton’s nursing homes from $5 million to about $1 million.

An employee of Baker’s consulting firm asked Morton to make contributions to Maggio’s now-abandoned bid for the state Court of Appeals. Later Morton received a list of political action committees suitable for contributions-a list prepared by a lawyer who had worked for Baker.

A couple of people named as organizers of some of those PACs are old associates of Baker who disavow any knowledge of these committees.

Baker pleads innocence, and appearances can deceive.

But appearances also can be devastating.

Baker was committed from way back to trying to limit jury damages on the conservative notion that economic development is harmed when businesses are vulnerable to costly damages for killing or maiming or neglecting people. And he wanted in that context to advance the right-wing hometown judge, Maggio, for the statewide appeals court.

You may legally establish an endless array of political action committees.

You may go legally to a rich guy with vested interests and ask him to ante up to each and every one of these PACs to the limit allowed.

Then you may expend the money legally as your myriad PACs choose, up to the maximum contributions the law allows.

What would be criminal-FBI-salivatingly criminal-would be a quid pro quo, meaning the formation of these PACs as launderers of bribes for a judge to reduce a jury settlement.

But that’s hard to prove.

Our entire system of lavishing unregulated wealth on politics amounts, in a way, to implied extortion. You can’t always say where political access and ingratiation end and a corrupt transaction begins.

At a minimum in the Baker-Morton-Maggio affair, detail work was sloppy and ethical appearances were disregarded.

Civil sanctions might be imposed by ethics regulators.

Meanwhile, the ethics amendment that we’ll have on the state ballot in November will provide, among other things, that direct corporate contributions to actual campaigns would be forbidden.

I fear that will mean only that PACs like these in the Baker-Morton-Maggio affair will go forth and multiply. Here’s what we really need:

  1. Democratic presidents to nominate Supreme Court justices who would undo Citizens United and last week’s McCutcheon ruling, which combine to remove any restriction on the lathering of corporate wealth on politics.

  2. To have the governor nominate, and the state Senate confirm after hearings, all state and district judges. At least then we’d know whom to hold accountable for corrupt judges. That would be the corrupt judges and the governor who nominated them. We could apply the Missouri Plan, having the appointed judges stand alone on the ballot periodically for voter endorsement.

  3. To trust our peers to set without arbitrary limit the damages we are due when we prove to them in courts of law that somebody behaved badly and did great harm to us.

  4. For Gilbert Baker to go back to the classroom in the UCA music department from whence he came about 15 years ago-if he can-and resume teaching percussion.

He should take comfort that making music is far nobler work than making political action committees. -

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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 04/08/2014

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