People out in the public are saying the Legislature acted fraudulently to pass Medicaid expansion last week.
They never have liked seeing sausage made. But I witness a lot of them ingesting it with a biscuit.
Among insiders in the Capitol I'm hearing that people would be calling Mike Beebe a genius if it had happened just this way when he was governor.
And here's what I'm saying: Medicaid expansion is good. It's compelling. It's vital. Dropping it now would have been catastrophic fiscally, economically and humanly. We ought to be grateful for a Republican governor who took ownership of it and passed it at some risk on his wide right flank.
The three-fourths majority requirement to appropriate money is constitutional nonsense and any legitimate way around it is good government, not bad.
The tactic deployed last week was near brilliant, and, eventually and by healthy collaboration, much more legally sound than ... say, your garden-variety Jason Rapert bill or Bob Ballinger bill.
Somebody will sue. Somebody always does.
But I'm picking the state to win.
The gambit was probably sound in the way the Hutchinson administration first offered it, which was to put a line in the appropriation striking the expansion money and then excising that line after passage by a line-item veto. But it was made much better by state Rep. Clarke Tucker of Little Rock, a lawyer and Democrat and apparently a smart guy.
He spent the weekend before last studying the matter and coming up with a way to phrase that veto-able line by having it end the expansion program, now called "Arkansas Works," by a date specified. That was rather than presuming to strike actual dollar parts otherwise contained in the appropriation. There were troubling attorney general's opinions on that point. Tucker's way, everyone agrees, is more legally sound.
And now the Legislature is going to pass a law setting a much-later sunset date to reinforce its intent and make moot the line, which Hutchinson vetoed Thursday afternoon the moment the bill arrived in his office from the House.
A member of the black caucus had asked Hutchinson two days before what would happen if legislators voted for the bill with the line doing away with the program--only because Asa had solemnly vowed to veto the line and then defend their action publicly--and then Asa died between the time of the vote and the transmission to his office.
The governor chose not to take a chance on getting run over by a truck on the way home.
Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin said it was silly to ask him what he'd do if Asa bought the farm. So I told him that, of course, he didn't want to take a stand for expansion unless absolutely necessary, but that, if he suddenly became governor with the issue pending, he'd no doubt honor Hutchinson's clear intent and veto the line.
"You're putting a lot of words in my mouth there," he said.
Well, yeah.
It's blessedly moot. Asa's not a bad governor, even considering the numb-skulled move of ousting Baker Kurrus as Little Rock school superintendent.
Griffin? That's another question altogether. He's one of those guys always on the phone, confronting something surely important requiring his expert attention. I believe him to be the most self-important lieutenant governor I have seen in many years of walking past that closet of a pointless office.
There are all sorts of rumors in the Capitol about the identity of the person conceiving of the veto scheme. I've spread a couple myself.
There probably was a coincidental meeting of minds. But I'm sure Asa is telling the truth when he says he was pondering his predicament about three weeks ago when the idea occurred to him and he Googled "line-item veto."
You see, it ran through his head that, if he couldn't break the obstruction of 10 senators, the way to take out the expansion money that already was in the vast medical service appropriation bill would be with a line of what's called "special language." And then he thought--wait, don't I have constitutional authority to veto a line in a bill?
Democrats are still wary that Hutchinson made some horrible deal with two of the obstructionists to get them to vote openly for a charade. A "bathroom bill," perhaps, meaning one of those primitive and pointless Southernisms to address a non-problem about men taking over little girls' public restrooms.
Hutchinson told me he made no deal whatever.
But, trust me, deal or no, we're going to get a "bathroom bill" proposed no later than the next regular session in January.
An idea that bad will never be ignored in a Legislature infested with Rapert and Ballinger and that grandstanding ilk.
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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 04/26/2016