This legislative session is already weird and it's not a week old yet.
This is the first session for a new governor. The Legislature's usual first order of business for such sessions is to teach the new governor who is boss. The best recent example was in 1997. Beleaguered rookie governor Mike Huckabee declared the session taught him who his friends were and that he didn't have many.
The next new governor, Mike Beebe, was treated more kindly because he was an alumnus of the Legislature, but still had to do a lot of coaxing. He got a cut to the grocery tax through but only at the end of that session, after everyone was assured and then reassured that the state could afford it.
So I'm taken aback by the smooth running Gov. Asa Hutchinson is getting so far, even though it could all fly apart tomorrow.
He is a Republican governor working with a big Republican majority, but when was that ever a good sign that peace was going to break out? Go talk to the speaker of the House in Congress on the subject of GOP harmony. Closer to home, Huckabee was a Republican, too. He had "Shiites" in his party when there were only a few Republicans to start with.
I want a $100 million tax cut, Hutchinson says. OK, says the Legislature. They haven't passed it yet but no holler went up. I want action on that tax cut before we do anything else. OK, says the Legislature, even though this means they'll start a session by tightening the state's fiscal belt by a notch. In effect, that will limit every lawmaker's room for maneuver. Forget about a new prison now. That's not happening.
To help pay for the tax cut, I want you to consider delaying some tax cuts that you passed before I got here, the governor says. Sure, we'll consider that, says the Legislature.
I'm not accusing the Legislature of bowing down. I'm accusing them of being reasonable. A Legislature being reasonable takes some getting used to.
Less important but more jarring was when I looked up what my "corner caucus" was up to. I didn't see a single unborn baby or gun bill in the mix of what they'd filed for the first few days. That was strange. The Northwest corner has been the lonely home of Republicans for decades. As I've written before, we didn't elect representatives in the past so much as we sent missionaries. We dispatched zealous types to Little Rock to make converts, not laws.
Fear not, social conservatives. There will be plenty of anti-abortion bills. For now, it appears that your legislators are just focusing on bills that might survive a court challenge.
Even the Democrats are behaving well toward the governor. I admitted weeks ago that Hutchinson's decision to not take a public stand on the private option health care plan kept the peace within the Republican Party. What I didn't expect was how well his silence would keep the peace with the Democrats. Democrats want that plan kept. They hold out hope that Hutchinson will support it and convince his party to support it. So they're wisely being polite.
All good things must come to an end, and the peace before the governor takes a stand on private option is a good thing. He's going to have to present a budget and will show his hand on the private option Thursday. It's hard to see how we can afford the very tax cut he's insisting on and, at the same time, turn down all the federal taxpayer money that supports the private option. Hope still lives among plan supporters that Hutchinson can find a way to make the plan palatable to members of his party who don't like it.
There are grounds for such hope. As one lawmaker pointed out, where's the pre-filed bill to repeal private option? There is none. There would be one if this was the take-no-prisoners issue it's often portrayed to be.
There's a lot more to life than the private option. The most urgent legislative priority is to relieve county jails all over Arkansas of state prisoners. Note my earlier remark that a new prison is out of the picture. It's absurd to cut taxes and then let criminals free for lack of prison space. Solving the jail situation is the session's toughest nut.
Doug Thompson is a political reporter and columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Commentary on 01/17/2015