Politics is the art of the possible. Passing a state budget that didn't turn down a billion dollars in health care reform money was possible. Doing that and then passing a tax increase of any significance for roads is not.
I regret that. I earnestly hope I'm wrong, and applaud the legislators pushing for a fuel tax increase. But the lack of support in the Legislature for a highway tax increase isn't just a Republican thing. It's largely an Arkansas thing. The most popular governor of our times, Mike Beebe, with a Legislature full of fellow Democrats, didn't get that.
Granted, Beebe never had a carrot as big as the new federal highway bill with great mounds of money in it. It requires states to come up with some money of their own. He probably could have pried a tax out of Democratic lawmakers with that. But it's a Republican Capitol with a Republican governor now. Timing is everything.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson defeated an uprising of very conservative lawmakers and would-be lawmakers in GOP primaries this year. Their battle was over health care spending. He remains the clear leader of the state GOP. This is a good thing. If you don't believe that, look at what the lack of a clear leader does to Republicans everywhere else. Open support by the governor of a major tax increase right after this health care fight would be a godsend to his just-defeated rivals.
There's more to unified leadership than just the governor. House and Senate leaders are the ones who steered the health care plan through, along with the rest of the budget. They expended political capital to do it.
The governor and his supporters now propose to divert some general revenue into highways to take advantage of the federal highway bill. This will break a long-standing principle, that highways should be paid for by taxes dedicated to highways. It was a good principle. It started long ago as part of a plan to keep the highway program somewhat detached from legislative politics.
Departing from a principle that served this state well for decades isn't my biggest problem with the plan. My much bigger problem is that the health care plan just mentioned passed without a $1.4 billion-plus cost control measure attached, one the governor pushed for. That's just one example. Any solution to our ever-growing prison expense only gets lip service, too. Drug courts, prisoner re-entry programs and other measures didn't get the money they need. Money spent on pre-kindergarten education is another expense proven to be fiscally conservative. It has that rare, proven money-saving quality: It works.
Our very Republican Legislature talks a good game as far as controlling costs. I wish they'd taken more action before planning to divert general revenue into highways.
I'm a fiscal conservative, but by a definition that's obsolete. When I was young, a fiscal conservative was someone who shunned risk. He didn't buy anything he wasn't sure he could pay for. He left an ample cushion in his budget for unforeseen events. He didn't talk about how there's plenty of savings to be made in budgets. He found them. He didn't just talk about going through budgets line-by-line. He did that.
And when a lot of money was needed, the need was undeniable and his carefully hoarded savings weren't enough, he cursed through his gritted teeth and passed the smallest possible tax needed to raise the money. Old-fashioned talk like that gets you branded a liberal now. You're not a conservative now unless you live dangerously. Timing is everything.
Speaking of timing, I asked some friends of mine who are faith-based voters and others who are very conservative on other matters if they would vote for Donald Trump, their party's presidential nominee. Some won't vote for him, period. Others are still depressed and don't know what they're going to do. The most interesting answer, though was the shortest:
"Two words: Supreme Court." The meaning was clear. The president fills court vacancies.
That's the argument each major political party always uses with dispirited voters -- but they both use it because it works, and it works because that's a very good reason. Now it's even better than it used to be. When Congress is dysfunctional and the president is constantly in check, it's the courts that decide the tough questions. It was the Supreme Court that settled gay marriage and Obamacare, for instance. The court's role -- as the adult in Washington -- isn't going away any time soon.
Commentary on 05/14/2016