We will confront an interesting sideshow at the fiscal legislative session. It will center on whether to appropriate money to sustain the staff for no one.
I refer to the four people who worked for Republican Mark Darr until he quit in ethical disgrace as lieutenant governor.
The staff now loiters on the second floor of the state Capitol, running up a quarter-million-dollar taxpayer tab in supposed service to a constitutional office that hasn’t any constitutional officer.
Republican legislators want to keep the office vacant for nearly a year but keep the four employees on the gravy train. Their reasoning is that there always have been a lot of deadwood Democrats in state jobs and it’s high time Republicans got away with at least four.
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It’s one thing, and a bad thing, to be a lazy political hack propped up by party politics in some state agency job. But it’s a different matter altogether to have four people doing nothing by design in a nonexistent office.
To those who argue that there remains a lieutenant governor’s office notwithstanding Darr’s vacating it, I would make this request: Walk into the lieutenant governor’s office and point out the person elected by the people.
State Sen. Michael Lamoureux, a good guy gone rogue on this issue, is now the state’s top-ranking Republican office-holder. He has emerged to champion the staff for nobody by presuming, unconstitutionally, to make it a staff for him.
He is president pro tempore of the Senate, normally second-in-line to succeed the governor.
But he is first-in-line now that we have no lieutenant governor and apparently no desire to fill the vacancy until the general election.
So Lam, as some call him, has said he now ascends, kind of, to the office of lieutenant governor.
Therefore, he says, he will boss those four folks himself.
The attorney general has told him there is no basis for what he is saying.
While the Constitution provides that a lieutenant governor becomes governor in event of vacancy, and that the Senate president pro tem comes after that, it does not provide that the Senate president pro tem becomes lieutenant governor in the event of that vacancy.
If that were so, and if there was a tied vote in the Senate, then Lamoureux presumably could vote twice-his own vote as a senator and the lieutenant governor’s tie-breaking one.
Lamoureux says he’d like to have two votes on this private option, which is he working heroically to try to pass. So at least he is good-humored about trying to execute a mild coup d’état to save four Republican hangers-on.
So here’s the situation: The fiscal session is for re-upping appropriations effective July 1.
Two Democrats-Sens. Keith Ingram of West Memphis and Bruce Maloch of Magnolia-put a hold on the lieutenant governor’s appropriation in pre-session budget hearings. House Minority Leader Greg Leding of Fayetteville says his caucus is disinclined to pass the appropriation, at least for four jobs.
There will be a general appropriation for constitutional and fiscal agencies, but the specific budget for the nonexistent lieutenant governor will flow through the Legislature separately and require the very bugaboo besetting the private option-a requisite three-fourths vote. There are plenty of Democrats to deny that super-majority.
Democrats may try to attach “special language” to the existing lieutenant governor’s appropriation, providing that none of the budget can be funded if there is no lieutenant governor.
There’s one other remote possibility. The Legislature intends to vote by a two-thirds majority early in the fiscal session to suspend the rules to take up a nonfiscal bill providing that no special election need be called for lieutenant governor if the vacancy arises in the calendar year of the general election.
If Republicans insist on paying for a staff, Democrats could always vote against suspending the rules, thus requiring an election to fill the vacancy.
But an election would cost maybe $3 million, which is an even bigger waste than the staff for nobody.
There is one other issue: In 2006, Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller died in July and his staff stayed in place through the end of the year.
So what’s different?
July and February, for one thing. That Rockefeller died and Darr got run out of office on ethics violations, for another.
That timing presents an opportunity in this case-whereas it didn’t then-to address the matter in a fiscal session.
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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 11 on 02/11/2014