Asa Hutchinson gathered the media last week to announce that he had performed very effectively as governor during the legislative session.
A respectfully dissenting view might be useful to those who will write history.
To begin, Hutchinson's advantage is that, in a narrow context, and with everything relative, he seems to have performed better than he actually did. That's because he consistently sounded so nice. And it's because he could have been so much worse.
Considered in the context of a right flank in his own party made up of Jason Rapert and Bob Ballinger and such, he seemed by comparison and contrast to be almost Mike Beebe-ish.
But he wasn't.
In two decades as a leader of the state Senate, and then in eight years as governor, Beebe believed above all else in control and tidiness. He was the master of loading committees with like-minded majorities and then banishing to a fate certain to him any legislation he found untidy.
In Beebe's heyday, the House would pass some constitutionally dubious legislation and I'd walk down to the Senate and Beebe would say not to quote him--though I'm doing that now, aren't I?--but that the bill was going to Judiciary or Public Health or some such committee where it would spend the duration of the session in glorious dormancy.
That's good government. I didn't say it was democratic. I only said it was good government. It pre-empts folderol.
Asa didn't pre-empt folderol. He fomented folderol.
Consider in the rearview mirror the essence of Governor Hutchinson's legislative session:
• He killed health insurance, effective in 2017, for a quarter-million poor people, but did so very nicely.
• He cut taxes for everyone but poor people, but again did so very nicely.
• He brought on himself that last-minute nonsense about religion and gays, but he repaired cosmetically his own mess by seeming so nice and insisting that a mean-spirited bill get replaced with one that didn't seem as mean-spirited although it actually didn't change anything.
Now that the session has ended, we can assess more fully that deft maneuver by which Hutchinson saved the cosmically successful private option, but only for two years. In so doing, we must confront the fact that--for no good reason other than yielding to his zany right flank--Hutchinson will end the program by 2017 and replace it with something woefully uncertain.
Thus Asa insists on fixing something unbroken, indeed something smashing only in its utter success--coming in under cost estimates, saving the state budget, saving hospitals, helping poor working people pay their medical bills and stay healthier, getting imitated by other states.
We also can assess more fully the counterintuitive policy by Asa to trim taxes as Republicans always choose, but by his insistence only for the middle class.
In so doing, we must confront the fact that, from the full activity of this session and by Asa's acquiescence, tax breaks went not only to the middle class, but also to people realizing capital gains. That was especially so for those reaping more than $10 million from a single gain, considering that the amount in excess of $10 million is now scandalously exempted from taxation altogether.
At the same time, a simple expansion of the earned-income tax credit for working poor people making less than $21,000 a year was rudely voted down.
In other words, Asa took health care from poor people and denied them any proportional semblance of the tax favors extended to middle class and wealthy people.
Finally, on that religion-gay nonsense, Hutchinson said the oddest thing to reporters last week.
You see, the offending House Bill 1228 was blissfully blocked in the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 4-to-4 vote. But Asa made a call to Sen. David Burnett of Osceola to encourage him to do what he eventually did, which was flip his vote to get the bill out of committee and to the Senate floor.
So Asa was asked if he regretted lobbying essentially to bring a last-minute imbroglio on himself.
He said he did not. He said HB1228 was the kind of bill you don't want stuck in committee, but voted on by the full Legislature.
How very strange. HB1228 was the very kind of bill you want stuck in committee.
After 35 years of legislative coverage, let me define for you good government in Arkansas: It's locking up in legislative committees bad bills that would pass if they got out of committee.
Legislators are like my beagle Roscoe, to whom I must apologize for the reference. They can be cute but only if fenced in tightly. Let loose, they'd have followed their noses through dangerous terrain to distant borders before you knew they were gone.
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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 on 04/16/2015