The Hutchinson administration concocted a very weird way Thursday to do no less than save Medicaid expansion.
Yet it didn't happen.
It failed largely because of petulant partisanship by minority Democrats, who saw a way to feel important again and vent frustration.
A man whose identity I can perhaps share at some point had come up with ... well ... it's a scheme, a procedural trick, by which the Medicaid bill could be extracted from the 10-senator right-wing obstructionist cabal exploiting the three-fourths majority requirement for passing an appropriation.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson assembled the Senate Democrats on Thursday and told them that, if they would go along with this gambit--by voting to amend verbiage into the Medicaid appropriation taking out the Medicaid expansion money--then he promised he would veto that line of verbiage, which is in his authority, and thus restore the money. And that would prevail, you see, because there weren't nearly enough obstructionists to form the majority vote required to override his veto.
It was an organized charade, but a way around the 10. You have no Medicaid unless you find a way around the 10.
The Democrats said no. It wasn't that they didn't trust Hutchinson. And it wasn't that they were worried about the legality of the scheme, which would have been a sounder reason.
Arkansas Times blogger Max Brantley raised questions from a source the next day about whether a governor's line-item veto could be wielded in such a way. There's no law or precedent against it. The Times pointed to a couple of marginally related attorney general's opinions that might entice the Koch-brother minions to sue. I wager they'd lose.
Anyway, if there is no other way to break the 10, then calculated risks must be taken.
The real Democratic intent by balking was to poke fingers in the eyes of the 10 obstructionists.
Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock told David Ramsey of the Times that Democrats ought to be able to vote as they pleased, just as those 10 could. She said it was not her job to bail out some right-winger who was all strung out trying to take money from nursing-home residents and disabled children.
It was her job, though, as well as that of all legislators, to take whatever nose-holding steps might be necessary to save that money for nursing-home residents and disabled children.
The Democratic focus should be two-fold: Saving Medicaid expansion and working with the rare blessing of just about the only expansion-supportive Republican governor south of John Kasich.
It's not about your party. It's about the needy.
But Democrats were tired of being the grownups. So they went to the playground and flipped the bird to 10 brats down the way.
Here was the aforementioned scheme: The Joint Budget Committee would amend a little "special language" section into the Medicaid appropriation excising the money for the Medicaid expansion, or private option, or Arkansas Works, which would otherwise stay in the document. The bill as amended in that way would come back to the Senate floor. Presumably, at least a couple of the obstructionists would then vote for it, since it would then say what they wanted it to say, and even though they knew that Hutchinson had line-item veto authority and was intending to use it to take the special language out and effectively restore the funding.
But why would any of the 10 obstructionists go along with that?
It was because a couple of them were looking for a way out. They didn't have an end game, meaning any alternative to throwing granny out of the nursing home.
As the Joint Budget Committee convened Thursday afternoon to consider attaching this amendment to take out Medicaid expansion money, but eventually to save it, two of the obstructionists, Sens. Bart Hester and Blake Johnson, were telling reporters they'd probably vote for such an amended Medicaid bill if it came to the floor.
That would have been enough to pass it with a three-fourths majority, even with Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow suddenly deciding he might have to vote no because he had discovered the old news that Medicaid paid for morning-after birth-control pills, which are not to be available for women in the man's world Rapert inhabits.
But then this happened: Nearly all the Democrats on Joint Budget voted against the amendment and it failed on a 22-22 tally.
So now the tactic might be tried again Tuesday.
Perhaps the Democrats will come around to the scheme. Or perhaps two of the 10 will yield conventionally, the better option. Or perhaps we're doomed.
What Democrats must hope is that they didn't blow on Thursday the best chance to avoid doom.
That would be the first thing Arkansas Democrats have accomplished since about 2010.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/17/2016