Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s position on the U.S. House Republican health-care bill is that it is terrible and that it is fine.
“You’re giving me a false choice there, Todd,” the governor said last week to NBC’s Chuck Todd. The newsman was trying to get Hutchinson to say whether Arkansas would be better off with the status quo than the House measure.
What Hutchinson was attempting was to be a good and pragmatic Arkansas governor and a good and pragmatic contemporary Arkansas Republican at the same time.
It’s what his entire Arkansas gubernatorial essence is attempting.
He says that’s not a false choice. But it’s at least a circus trick.
Hutchinson says the House health-care bill would ill-serve Arkansas. He sounds a bit like John Kasich in speaking the truth that the bill would harm low-income persons by capping Medicaid and failing to give states the resources and flexibility to find their own ways to keep needy people covered.
He points out what I explained in this space last week — that the House bill would give new tax breaks to higher-income persons based on their age while reducing tax advantages for the low-income working people Hutchinson wants to move off Medicaid to make that program more efficient.
Hutchinson’s declared position is that the House bill is a good starting place but a terrible ending place. He says the House should go ahead and move the process along to get the bill to the U.S. Senate where it could be made into decent law.
Why bother with such a contortion? Why not oppose the House bill on the basis that it’s terrible?
It’s because being a good Arkansas Republican and a good Arkansas governor means spending much of one’s life on a high wire.
Arkansas is a Trump-crazed state. Donald Trump, more popular than Asa in Arkansas, needs to get this House bill moved along, never mind the details, which can be haggled over later.
Otherwise the preposterous second-place president would appear stymied in his own big-majority chamber on what is both the central Republican promise, which is to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the foundation for all further domestic policy.
As we have seen, appearances matter more to Trump than anything real.
Beyond that, the state’s four Republican House members may find it politically convenient to go along with their leadership as well as the superficial poll responses of their Trump-loving constituents back home. That would mean voting for the bill. They don’t need the governor of their party making them out to be opponents of the people if they do.
All of that amounts to a microcosm, a very large and consequential one, for Hutchinson’s entire governorship.
He appears to have adopted a broad theme and developed a sense of history for his governorship. It’s that he wants to modernize the place economically. But that sometimes requires that the state moderate its extreme conservative political instincts.
For example, Hutchinson’s party at home favors extreme social measures to discriminate against gays, lesbians and transgender persons. But those policies send a signal to national and international corporate centers that Arkansas is a backward place unsuitable for the modern world and thus their expansion. Hutchinson thus tries to avoid, finesse, deflect or water down those measures.
His sponsorship of the legislation to separate the observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s risked offending the conservative base that wants to honor the state’s heritage more than attend to its future. But, for the attempted modernizer in the governor’s office, it was about ridding the state of the self-imposed and utterly unnecessary black mark of a place that wouldn’t honor a civil-rights leader without pairing him with the general who led the fight to save slavery.
Hutchinson’s modernizing efforts are ever-arduous and in one case of his own curious making.
He told me once that international corporate executives look askance at the American death penalty. Yet he now proposes that Arkansas set a world land-speed record for official state barbarism by killing eight inmates in 10 days next month.
I suppose his thinking is that the death penalty is the law in Arkansas and we may as well get done with the killings that are ready to go, rather than spread them out.
If you must fall off the gubernatorial high wire, one time is better than eight, and now is as good a time as later. I guess.
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.