The real winner

I’m at the Bowen School of Law in Little Rock listening to a debate among the three Republican candidates for the vacating office of attorney general.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

And I’m thinking about three things.

One is my recent lunch conversation with Nate Steel. He’s the young state representative from Nashville and unopposed Democratic candidate for attorney general.

He had told me I ought to start paying attention to this race and get a load of what these Republican candidates were saying.

The second is that he was right.

These three Republican hopefuls-David Sterling, Leslie Rutledge and Patricia Nation-want to make Arkansas into a place where open carry of firearms is commonplace; where the attorney general defies the case law of the land, and where the attorney general behaves as an open partisan.

Rutledge says she wakes up every morning thinking of ways as attorney general to sue the federal government for overreach.

Sterling, who marches in open-carry parades celebrating outwardly holstered firearms, wants to establish a “federalism commission” in the attorney general’s office to study where and how to push back against supposedly onerous federal laws.

You know-environmental protections and banking regulations and such.

Nation wants to give “personhood” status to zygotes by which the state would presume to disallow abortions any time after a man and a woman sense an attraction for each other.

The third thing I’m thinking about? That’s the big one.

Generally speaking, I’m sensing a basic and profound difference between conservative lawyers and liberal lawyers.

I’ll demonstrate by anecdote.

Here are three right-wingers wanting to be the chief lawyer of state government and saying they would be proud to advocate and defend that bill by Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway to outlaw abortions at 12 weeks.

That’s nearly three months before the standard of prevailing case law about viability. And that’s a new state law that stands declared unconstitutional already by a Republican-nominated federal district judge.

On the other hand, I’d inquired recently as to why the drafters of that proposed ethics amendment to appear on the ballot in November-drafters whom I consider left of center in their politics-seek to ban direct corporate contributions to political campaigns but not to restrict the number and scope of political action committees of the sort set up to get money to that Conway judge, Mike Maggio.

The answer was that these liberally inclined lawyers who drafted the ethics amendment were fearful of getting crossways with the Citizens United precedent.

Please understand that these drafters of the ethics amendment despise Citizens United as much as right-wingers despise Roe v. Wade.But these drafters of the ethics amendment yield in their lawmaking efforts to the realities of that regrettable federal precedent.

These right-wingers, on the other hand, promise to keep on keeping on making laws that blatantly violate the clear precedent of Roe v. Wade.

The difference is that the ethics drafters respect federal case law, no matter how egregious they find it, and seek to make real and effective state law that would not be thrown out by the courts.

Right-wingers of the type of these three aspirants for the Republican nomination for attorney general-and of the type of Jason Rapert-don’t respect the rule of federal law or seek to make workable state law.

Instead they play for cheers from their grandstand, to get a back-slap at church and to pad their poll numbers.

If they ever got Roe v. Wade actually struck down, they wouldn’t know what to do.

Well, actually, they might. They likely would grab a gun, holster up and walk down the street like a Wild West gunfighter.

You see, we have a new state law that seeks to make technical corrections and clarifications in our gun governance.

Gun-rights zealots argue that this new technically corrective law-by clarifying the long-existing right to carry a firearm openly on a journey and defining a journey as a cross-county trip-means that anybody headed practically anywhere in Arkansas can carry a weapon … and not in the glove box, but openly on his person.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel formally opined, quite reasonably-when asked in his official role-that the clarifying intent of the legislation was not to change the entirely separate provision of law that bans the open carrying of firearms.

But these three Republican aspirants disagree only on whether the law is clear enough on allowing open carry-as the open-carry public demonstrator, Sterling, insists-or needs to be made less ambiguous by a plainer new statute-as Rutledge contends.

Rutledge says the sheriff of Benton County, Kelley Cradduck, is confused.

I’m not. I’m certain the winner of this debate is the absent Steel, unopposed Democratic candidate.

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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 91 on 04/13/2014

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