The lawsuit over the LEARNS Act has always been about time, which is about up.
We're going to get the law in its full effect by Aug. 1 or sometime before then. And the Marvell-Elaine school district is going to get run inevitably, probably imminently, by a charter-school management company.
The voucher awards to parents will start slowly and, if we're lucky, maybe stay that way, with most of the money going to subsidize needlessly well-off people who already put their kids in private schools.
It is still possible the group seeking to circulate petitions to refer the act to the ballot in November 2024 will indeed get it to the ballot, though that's an arduous, against-odds undertaking--both to get the names and then persuade the voters, particularly if the local rural schools don't seem much affected.
And it might be that a few people the charter-school management company fired in the Marvell-Elaine district could get their jobs back because their dismissals were ordered by a company operating at the time on a contract provided by a law not yet in effect.
But that depends on the Arkansas Supreme Court, which now comprises a former chairman of the state Republican Party, Cody Hiland; the wife of another former chairman of the state Republican Party, Barbara Webb; a formerly hyperpartisan Republican state senator, Shawn Womack; and, in Rhonda Wood, a woman who might argue that she's a straight-arrow justice but whose associations over the years are transparently Republican.
I know: Justices are supposed to be nonpartisan. Some are. But a lot aren't. And at least four of the seven on the Supreme Court aren't.
Make no mistake: Sarah Sanders is boss of this state, dictating from the executive branch to the legislative and judicial branches.
Here's where we are now in the legal dispute that now appears unlikely to come to much:
A Pulaski County circuit judge has said the emergency clause on the LEARNS bill was not passed constitutionally, meaning the law is not yet in effect and won't be until Aug. 1. That invalidates all that's been done and stops anything that might be done, except planning either for Aug. 1 or the date when the state Supreme Court likely votes by at least 4-3 to overturn the Pulaski judge.
It is entirely possible the court won't rule before August, in which case the matter would be moot because that's when bills without emergency clauses become effective.
There has been hue and cry from the anti-LEARNS side that Sanders and Attorney General Tim Griffin are in defiance of the rule of law by insisting that implementation of the law is full speed ahead regardless of what the judge said.
But this may be semantics: If Sanders and Griffin are meaning by implementation that they must continue diligently to plan the implementation, which is coming by August one way or the other, and thus by the new school year, then that's fine. But they can't actually command anything as long as the operative court order says the law is not yet in effect.
What matters more than politicians' bold, poll-tested rhetoric is that the state Education Board yielded fully to the judge and his ruling late last week. It met to take over control of the failing Marvell-Elaine district upon the illegality of the charter-school management arrangement under the judge's ruling.
The board said planning for the school year in Marvell-Elaine had to be taking place now, and that there was no one to do it at the moment except the state.
One reason for the suit had been to permit some other Marvell-Elaine solution--not rule by the state and not rule by a charter-school management firm. But no one has come forward.
It appears the state will run things for now and rehire the charter-school manager, perhaps as soon as LEARNS is declared activated, whether by the Supreme Court or the calendar.
Most likely, this lawsuit will end as evaporated water from a pot that simmered all summer and threatened at times to boil.
The anti-LEARNS people will be revealed as irrationally exuberant. Sanders will be revealed, again, as a cynical talking-point automaton tweeting that a "radical liberal judge" was trying to introduce critical race theory and indoctrination to the schools and deny parents the right to do anything.
The suit was simply about the effective date of the law, and is now nigh unto moot.
The real solution is at the ballot box. And I'm not talking about the referendum on the law, which may not get to the ballot.
I'm talking about the kinds of people we elect and the kinds of ideas they have.
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.