The Arkansas House has been deadlocked for two weeks while supporters of funding the state’s private-option Medicaid expansion struggle to secure the supermajority of votes to move the measure forward.
The requirement of three-fourths of the House - 75 of 100 members - and three-fourths of the Senate - 27 of 35 - to approve most appropriation bills has some people frustrated and others perplexed about why the bar is set so high for passing this type of funding legislation.
Historians and politicians have said the requirement has caused skirmishes at the Capitol from time to time, but they could remember only a handful of deadlocks like the current one.
Only Arkansas and Alaska require three-fourths majorities to pass appropriation bills, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“There have been occasional episodes [of deadlock] in the Legislature’s history, but it was so rare,” said Jay Barth, a Hendrix College political science professor. “On occasion, there would be an agency that some members were mad at, and there would be an attempt to punish them a little bit by holding them up in the appropriation process.”
There have been a few attempts to change the law, Barth said, including a proposal in 1970 that would have required all appropriations measures to be passed by a simple majority. A 1980 proposal would have changed the rules so that all appropriations except education required three-fifths - or 60 votes in the House - to pass. Neither proposal went very far.
Gov. Mike Beebe, who served for 20 years in the Arkansas Senate, said he’s seen plenty of other impasses that arose from the supermajority requirement.
“This issue [the private option] is more high-profile,because the press has drawn a lot of attention to it,” he said. “But it’s not uncommon to have some holdup in getting to the 27 [in the Senate] or especially to the 75 votes in the House.”
He cited an instance in 2009 when a lawmaker threatened to hold up a funding bill for the Arkansas School for the Deaf over an unrelated budget matter. The logjam eventually broke, and the school got its money, he said.
During this year’s private-option-funding debate, so far three bills - two to fund portions of the secretary of state’s office and one to pay for an inspector general to monitor Medicaid expansion - have been held up by the Democratic caucus. Democrats are in the minority in the House and in the Senate, but they hold 48 of the 100 House seats, making them numerous enough to block appropriations bills if they want to.
The lawmakers who oppose funding the private option are all Republicans.
Supporters of the private-option program have said that ending funding for it would strip health insurance from program participants. Opponents argue that the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will add to the national debt and that the state won’t be able to afford the program, once the state has to pay 10 percent of its cost beginning in 2020.
The expanded Medicaid program extends eligibility to adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level - for example, $16,105 for an individual and $32,913 for a family of four.
Beebe, a Democrat, estimated that ending the private-option program will put an $89 million hole in the state’s proposed $5 billion budget for fiscal 2015 because the state would lose out on hundreds of millions of federal Medicaid dollars. But critics say they doubt that eliminating the private option would affect the budget that dramatically.
A spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Human Services said Wednesday that 127,051 Arkansans had been approved for coverage under the expanded Medicaid program as of Feb. 22 - just over half of the 250,000 who are estimated to be eligible. Of those approved, 93,966 had completed the private-option enrollment process as of Feb. 23.
Barth said the current legislative battle isn’t the worst fight over the three-fourths rule, which went into effect in 1934, not even the worst in recent history.
In 1989, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature had to hold a special session because all of the votes they had taken during their legislative session on appropriation bills were invalid.
During that session, a few House members - upset about a proposed increase in legislators’ allowable “home office” expenses - held up the appropriation bill that would pay expenses for the constitutional officers, legislators and judges. State law says that appropriations for those offices must be passed before any other appropriation bills can be considered.The vote consistently failed to reach 75, so the House speaker at the time declared that the appropriations were “just debts,” pointing to an obscure provision in a 1934 constitutional amendment.
The amendment exempted education, highways, pensions for Confederate soldiers, expenses to “repel invasions” and money to pay “just debts” from the supermajority rule. These appropriations did and still do require only a simple majority of votes to pass.
Opponents sued to challenge the speaker’s ruling. Eventually the Supreme Court overturned the speaker’s decision and said the entire budget was invalid. The Legislature met in a special session and passed the appropriation bills with more cooperation the second time.
“It started being used more when Republicans got more than 25 votes in the House, to send signals that they would hold any increase in government up,” Barth said. “So, really it’s been the last decade or so when things have shifted, the 2007, 2009, 2011 and then the 2013 sessions.”
But how did a law that has caused so much haggling in a state historically dominated by one political party get into the law books? Art English, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, pinpointed former Gov. Junius Futrell as the source.
English said Futrell, who took office in 1933, did not subscribe to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal ideas of expanding government during the Great Depression. In fact, he wanted to make it harder to tax citizens and expand the size of government.
The state faced heavy debts as the economy collapsed and cotton prices plummeted below what it cost to produce the crops. He promised to fix the state’s finances and to cut spending.
“He was an odd type of governor from what I understand,” English said. “He had some idea that he didn’t want to put any burden on people even to pay for basic services. So he made it harder, really hard, to raise taxes or appropriate money.”
The constitutional amendment to institute the three fourths rule for votes concerning taxes, revenue bills and most appropriations went to voters in 1933 with Futrell’s support and passed with a simple majority.
Many other states require supermajorities of various percentages for spending or revenue bills.
Connecticut and Illinois require three-fifths, or 60 percent, of their legislators to pass appropriations bills. California, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Hawaii require two-thirds of their legislators to approve spending bills.
Only Arkansas, Michigan and Oklahoma require the steep three-fourths majority for bills that increase taxes or approve revenue, according to the conference’s 2012 research.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/02/2014