As an advocate of less-intrusive government—yes, you heard me—I am heartened by one piece of news from the Arkansas General Assembly.
It is that legislators, amid the general nonsense that has pervaded since the private-option issue got settled soon after the opening bell, are thinking about not referring any constitutional amendments to the voters for the general election in 2016.
Alas, pressure will grow as the session grinds to an end to try make some new constitutional law. So let me put in my two cents’ worth for minimalism. And what glorious minimalism zero proposed amendments would be.
Our state Constitution is mess aplenty as is. It has been made a bigger mess systematically by the Legislature’s relentless asking of the people to add stuff to it every two years, and by the people’s seemingly increasing tendency to oblige.
Amid the mess, you see, this state Constitution permits the Legislature to send three changes to the voters every two years. And, naturally, legislatures have tended, lo these many years, to max out every biennium, sometimes even throwing unrelated matters into one amendment to get more than three changes made.
Either we put entirely too much complex policy minutiae into the Constitution, as with Amendment 59 on property taxes, or we define marriage in a way the federal courts are steadily overturning, as with Amendment 83, or we pretend to be reforming ethics when in fact we’re extending term limits and giving legislators big raises and allowing ethics loopholes large enough to preserve the very culture voters might have thought they were ending, as with Amendment 94 just last year.
Generally speaking, legislators tend in their referrals of proposed amendments to serve their self-interest or others’ special interest.
Generally speaking, voters don’t get a full briefing on the substance of amendments and either vote in a way they don’t understand or with the intention of accomplishing a result that in fact does not get accomplished.
It’s my sense constitutional law has been made by people in voting booths confronting proposals they had not expected, and making decisions from popular names and ballot titles.
The only actual accomplishment is to add to the poisonous distrust of government by voters who, actually, kind of have themselves to blame.
So stop it. Just stop it. Let our state Constitution be. Leave bad enough alone.
The state Constitution started out as a woeful document—written to establish a government by people who didn’t much believe in government—and has been tinkered to worseness ever since.
The U.S. Constitution, a real one and good one, is a statement of principles—not minutiae—and amended only arduously and most infrequently.
In Arkansas at the present time, there is nothing so urgent as to require adding verbiage to the existing effluence of verbiage. If there is something the people want that requires specific new constitutional permission, then they may circulate their petitions and get it on the ballot. Statewide booze, perhaps. Again.
I’d personally like to see a constitutional amendment to do away with the pointless office of lieutenant governor and provide for another office-holder to ascend to the governorship in the event of a vacancy. But that’s not pressing, and, anyway, someone probably would want to let the attorney general become governor, and Leslie Rutledge is attorney general, and that seems somehow even more unsettling than having Tim Griffin as governor.
In that regard, I should acknowledge that Griffin himself proposed a constitutional amendment by which the lieutenant governor would not ascend nonsensically to the governor’s duties every time the governor merely travels out of state—a policy suited to the transportation and communications systems in place in 1874, not to an era of airplanes and Skype.
But none of that is pressing. It’s not the end of the world if Griffin gets to hold a pointless office and keep a couple of bored employees in a closet-sized state Capitol office while he practices private-sector work as a consultant. It merely offends.
One thing that happened this time—and it’s something I told you about before the session began—was that Democrats in the state Senate put on their thinking caps. Badly outnumbered, they loaded up on the State Agencies Committee that votes on amendments to refer.
They did it to block a tort-reform proposal to rewrite the state judicial article and cap damages, and they did it to keep Republicans from responding to the last year’s Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that a voter-ID law violated the state Constitution by proposing an amendment to make it specifically legal.
It is conceivable that Republicans could have changed rules and executed an end-run, but, even at that, they haven’t been able to agree among themselves about what to do on tort reform—whether to try to change judicial rules wholesale by putting new ones in the Constitution, or to try simply to limit non-economic damages.
Beware. There is still time. Something could break through and get referred. Big intrusive government may yet prevail.
But, for now, hope springs for those of us who want government off our backs.
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.