Join me for a stalking of the state Capitol corridors as the historic new Legislature, about two-thirds Republican, gets sworn in:
I don’t recognize a lot of these people wearing House of Representatives name tags. But that’s not unusual. I haven’t recognized many House members since term limits set in late in the 1990s.
Jeremy Gillam, for example. I only met him a few weeks ago. The context was to talk about the Judsonia blackberry farmer’s imminent service as speaker of the House for this session. I always try to make the acquaintance of the third-termer who will be the speaker, since that helps me in my work.
So I bump into Gillam outside the House chamber where he is posing with his parents for a photograph. I compliment his proud parents on producing what I have quickly taken to calling the world’s nicest guy.
I’m telling you as a matter of relevant political analysis that Gillam is a salt-of-the-earth, understated and unassuming Baptist deacon and classic rural Arkansas good ol’ boy. If this session succeeds in avoiding a meltdown, it will be in no small measure a result of good will toward him.
Even I want him to succeed, to the extent that right-wing policy enactment can be called succeeding. Procedurally–that’s what I mean.
If you don’t think that personality and relationships count heavily toward lawmaking, then you’ve probably never been near a legislative session. And you may well have never successfully transacted any business, or certainly made a sale. And you probably never landed a scoop as a newspaper reporter, either.
Or been a successful lobbyist, speaking of stalking the Capitol corridors, where I find myself amid a bevy of them whining about this new constitutional amendment barring a registered lobbyist’s buying so much as a cup of coffee for a legislator.
Here’s how silly it is, a lobbyist tells me: He takes a legislator to a Tex-Mex place and they partake jointly of the chips and salsa, because those are complimentary. But if the lobbyist orders a bowl of cheese dip, the legislator may not so much as dip his chip, for that would be illegal. Why, it’d more than that. It would be unconstitutional.
Alas, per usual, I don’t see the problem. Just order your own cheese dip and dip your chip only in your own purchase. Just make sure the waitress gets the tab right.
What I’m hearing is that the bigger-time lobbyists intend simply to invite for dinner entire committee memberships, since the amendment permits food and drink if provided for a legitimate government body.
Lobbyists will probably call ahead to the steakhouse to make sure sufficient heads of beef cattle have been slain for the evening. Those House committees are expansive.
Speaking of the legislative session melting down: A Democratic House member tells me he’s wondered what might happen if Gov. Asa Hutchinson so restricts or conservatizes the private option that Democrats might choose not to vote for it, thereby denying the vital three-fourths majority.
Speaking in a strictly political sense, he says, no Democrat has been rewarded for steadfastly supporting the private option and no Republican has been punished for steadfastly opposing it.
The only reason to support it is that it’s right.
Finally, I’m sitting on a bench on the Senate end minding my own business and doing some acerbic tweeting. All of a sudden I look up to behold the entire black-robed Arkansas Supreme Court walking by.
“There’s our biggest fan,” meaning me, smarts off Justice Courtney Goodson. She’s being ironic, you see.
I suggest that all of them stand still for a photo on my phone, but they keep walking—except Justice Rhonda Wood, who, being new, turns back as if to oblige.
“Just kidding,” I tell her.
You know how sometimes you wish later that you’d said or done something that you didn’t say or do? So I kind of wish I’d jumped up and walked with these robed eminences down to the House side and bugged them all along the way by asking for their as-yet unrevealed vote on the same-sex marriage case.
But there remains a certain unapproachable aura emanating from those flowing black robes. And it’s kind of unsettling to come face to the face with the whole lot of them and sense palpable tension over what you’ve written about one or two or more of them—about Justice Goodson, married to the state’s most politically wired class action lawyer; about Robin Wynne, newly elected after declining to disavow a secret group’s scandalous smearing of his opponent, and, heck, about most of them for taking truckloads of nursing home money and seeming to behave at times more politically than judiciously.
Oh, well. If I ever have a matter coming before the Supreme Court, I assume several of the justices will disqualify themselves on account of despising me. That would let Asa Hutchinson appoint special justices, which means I’d best avoid any and all litigation if I possibly can.
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.