OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: The art of circumspection

Jonathan Dismang is the ever-circumspect president pro tem of the state Senate, a man devoted to logical linear action and deft avoidance of newsmaking.

He had advised his flock of Republican-majority senators not to do precisely what state Sen. Trent Garner of El Dorado went ahead and did Monday.

Garner called for the state House of Representatives to impeach Pulaski Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen.

Garner explained that Griffen besmirches his judging by evident pre-emptive prejudice.

Garner should know. As Dismang had endeavored to explain, any impeachment by the House of the judge would send the matter for trial and verdict to the state Senate. That's where senators would be jurors. Senators thus should be careful not to prejudge Griffen in their public comments, the president pro-tem ever-circumspectly explained.

What Garner did was pre-emptively prejudice himself as a possible juror by calling for a process that would install him as a juror for a judge whom he was saying should be impeached as a judge because he was prejudiced as a judge.

If that's unclear, just think about a pot and a kettle.

I asked a few legislators whether Garner's action would amount to anything, and all said not quite yet.

These were legislators wholly disapproving like Garner of Griffen's entering a death penalty-related ruling and then going straightway to demonstrate at the Governor's Mansion against the death penalty. But they said the Supreme Court had ordered a review of the judge by its disciplinary commission, and that the Legislature should stand down, at least pending that action.

Anyway, they say in the House that they have found no rules or process on file for impeaching anybody over anything. So what they have done--with some foreboding, it seems--is move in this special session to set up a process and rules for an impeachment.

At the moment, though, a lone state senator's public posturing amounts to nothing in the real-world legislative process. It rolls the eyes even of like-minded colleagues. But it appeals to the fire-breathers and red-meat-eaters back home.

"Trent, get up there to Little Rock and do something about that crazy *** judge," the grandstanding senator might well have been encouraged by a constituent.

"I'm on it," Garner might well have replied.

The right response would have been, "I can't talk about that, Bubba. As a senator, I'd be a juror for the impeachment trial, and, because of that, I've been advised to keep my powder dry for the time being."

Instead he engaged in an apparent attempt to compete with Jason Rapert and Bart Hester for right-wing grandstander of the year in the state Senate.

The competition is intense. Rapert would seem a perennial favorite with his chronic preening sanctimony.

But Hester posted the Supreme Court chief justice's cell-phone number on Twitter. He did it because he didn't like a court ruling that kept the state from killing as many death row inmates as quickly as he wanted. Hester crowed that he favored methods of capital punishment that would be cruel and unusual for sure.

Now comes Garner, a freshman who hones his right-wing grandstanding skills as a home-state staff aide to another master, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton. He shares with Young Tom both an admirable history of military service and no remote aversion to mentioning that service in every spoken paragraph.

For example, Garner watched Kenneth Williams' execution--generally described by witnesses as punctuated by convulsions, jerking and moaning--and declared that Williams felt no pain.

Other than some special skill as the inverse of Bill Clinton, meaning an endowment to feel others' lack of pain, what would possibly qualify Garner to so declare?

He said he'd been in war and that he'd seen people die painful deaths, and that Williams on that gurney did not compare.

I respectfully submit that, in the matter of another's pain, one can speak authoritatively only about the physical suggestions of it that one sees in another, not about what one couldn't possibly feel in another, especially when the other is under sedation limiting his ability to express himself.

But on the death penalty--and pretty much anything else--people don't see so much with their eyes as their biases.

Speaking of biases, my take on Judge Griffen is clear. I admire his sensibilities and his determination to express them. But he does a disservice to the judiciary by not being more of what Dismang is, meaning circumspect.

I'd like Griffen to keep talking, keep provoking, keep demonstrating and to choose of his own volition to stop judging, at which he is quite competent.

Or vice versa.

Impeachment seems a little extreme, which probably means its time in Arkansas has come.

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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 05/04/2017

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