I've seen states of flux before, and the LEARNS Act is sure enough momentarily in one, not that our Trumpy governor admits it.
All of that probably will get resolved with the state Supreme Court justices interrupting summer vacations to issue an appeal-pending stay of Pulaski Circuit Judge Herbert Wright's ruling last week.
He declared in a final order that the LEARNS Act cannot be treated as in effect because it won't be legitimately in effect until Aug. 1 considering that the emergency clause wasn't executed properly when passed earlier this year. That emergency clause was passed in the same way all emergency clauses have been passed for several years.
Wright had previously issued a temporary restraining order pending a final ruling. The Arkansas Supreme Court had declined to lift that temporary injunction until reversing itself the next week.
So, Wright held a full trial a couple of weeks ago and issued his ruling Friday. He said, as he had signaled with the temporary injunction, that the state Constitution means "separate" when it says that emergency clauses on passed bills, to put those laws into instant effect, must be passed by "separate" votes.
What they have done in recent years at the Capitol is handle all that in one vote, then record it separately.
No one much cared until Ali Noland of Little Rock, a devout public-school defender and smart lawyer, sued in behalf of patrons of the Marvell-Elaine school district. They objected to the state's action under LEARNS and the emergency clause to order the failing district essentially overtaken by a charter-school management firm.
Then the group wanting to circulate petitions to refer LEARNS to the November 2024 ballot--primarily to stop its voucher system for private, church and home schools--jumped on the suit, since it would give the group more time to seek signatures.
So, now, Attorney General Tim Griffin says he's going right back to the state Supreme Court. And Gov. Sarah Sanders, speaking haughtily, but I repeat myself, says the "absurd" suit won't stop diddly and the implementation of the law will proceed apace.
A spokesman for Griffin chimes in that there is no injunction in effect to stop implementation.
No, but there is a final order--a law, that is--that says LEARNS is not yet in effect.
You need to remember that these Republican rulers of Arkansas hold indicted Donald Trump as their role model and that he tried to disregard more than 60 adverse court rulings to pull a coup keeping him president though he lost the election.
The rule of law is becoming more a Democratic than Republican thing.
Having said that, it is surely true that the state could continue to work on implementing the LEARNS Act--perhaps even to continue the application process for parents and private schools for vouchers--even with a court order against its effectiveness. But it certainly couldn't continue for now imposing the Marvell-Elaine solution. And it can't for now run the clock on the repeal-referral petitions.
That's unless the Supreme Court imposes a quick stay of Wright's order.
Otherwise, the usual appeal process--with briefs and oral arguments--would extend a Supreme Court ruling until after Aug. 1, in which case the suit against LEARNS would have succeeded to its fullest possible extent simply by the truths of the calendar.
That's not to say any new solution would have arisen in the Marvell-Elaine district or that the petitioners would get their requisite signatures to hold the law in abeyance until November 2024.
Mainly, the issue is the flux, including one potential element I haven't mentioned: Judge Wright's order that "separate" means "separate" would seem, without explicitly saying so, to invalidate every emergency clause passed in the recent session.
We're only arguing about a difference at this point of 30 or so days, but the opportunity would seem to exist during those days for some impish gadfly to expand the flux into something of a mess.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.