Whatever momentum might have existed for switching from electing Arkansas Supreme Court justices to appointing them by merit surely was lost when the state voted overwhelmingly for the unmeritorious outsider Donald Trump for president.
Voters who so clearly resent qualification and expertise assuredly would recoil at a proposed ballot issue asking them to amend the state Constitution to take away their power to install state Supreme Court members by their votes and give that role instead to the governor and a small committee.
Those voters would no doubt demand pure democracy, though pure nationwide democracy would have given them President Hillary Clinton. They love members of an electoral college, but not experts.
We indeed live in a time of declining consistency and raging irony.
State Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, a lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and nephew of Governor Asa Hutchinson, is not giving up altogether on reforming our process of seating state Supreme Court justices.
He is shopping a draft of a proposed constitutional amendment that would provide as follows: The chief justice of the state Supreme Court would notify the governor of a vacancy. The governor would send five names of potential nominees to a nomination commission made up of five people, three of whom he would have appointed, with the other appointees coming from the Senate president pro tem and the speaker of the House. The nomination commission could strike two of the five names. It would then rank in preference the other three, or all five if striking none. Then the governor would pick without regard for the commission's rankings. The state Senate would then confirm the governor's nominee. Justices would serve single 14-year terms.
That's far more governor-centric than a more dispersed merit-selection process designed by the Arkansas Bar Association last year that couldn't quite garner the two-thirds majority vote of the House of Delegates to gain formal endorsement.
While Hutchinson's proposal would give Uncle Asa and subsequent governors a boatload of power, it's far better than the tainted election process we have now, infested as it is with outside "dark money." And that is Hutchinson's transcendent point.
"I'm serious about it," he told me of his draft amendment, seconds before he indicated he really wasn't much.
Hutchinson said the chances of getting the House or Senate to vote to refer the proposal--by a new system of one referral from each chamber that apparently will be the voluntary practice this year, abandoning the historic joint referral of three--seem slim.
But he is holding on to the proposal in hopes of getting something done, at least, about the abominations of recent state Supreme Court elections by which big-money mystery television ads showed up attacking a candidate without the least fairness, identification or accountability.
"We've got to do one or the other--switch to appointing or deal with the dark money," Hutchinson said.
He speculated that a bill by Rep. Clarke Tucker of Little Rock to require disclosure of donors to dark-money groups engaging in "electioneering" in state political races--electioneering defined as spending money to advance or attack a candidate during an active campaign period--may run into trouble in a Republican Legislature aided and influenced heavily by stealth conservative groups.
But, if so, Hutchinson seemed to think a chance existed for a fallback position paring the bill's application to Supreme Court races, especially if its enactment would quiet the noise about doing away with elections altogether and switching to an appointive, or merit-selection, system.
The new chief justice, Dan Kemp, has indicated an interest in better regulation of "dark money," although he benefited from it last year when mystery outside groups attacked his opponent, Associate Justice Courtney Goodson, in abundant television advertising.
They did so on what I deemed a mistaken belief that Goodson was the more liberal and anti-business choice, a conclusion based on the fact that she is married to a rich class-action lawyer.
Arkansas judicial politics is much too nuanced and colorful for quick outsider understanding.
But one thing not so nuanced in Arkansas politics is the Trumpian affection for the unmeritorious.
Voters had made four straight selections of the less meritorious choices in state Supreme Court races until they accidentally got the Kemp-Goodson race right last year.
They'll surely cling to their right to return to a losing streak. The best we might hope, then, is to shine a little light on these outside mystery groups.
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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 01/26/2017