The big news out of Washington last week was that half the Arkansas congressional delegation voted correctly, presumably not by mistake.
A record of correctness as high as 50 percent in an Arkansas congressional performance on a significant and contentious matter requiring bipartisan solution had not been seen in years.
Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack voted at the usual brink for a typically imperfect $1.7 trillion spending bill. It contained expenditures they thought important--defense in one case and local earmarks in the other, mostly. They deemed unacceptable the alternatives--a government shutdown; more stop-gap, short-term, status-quo spending measures addressing no new needs; and a contentious fight starting back at Round One with the new divided Congress next year.
U.S. Reps. Rick Crawford, French Hill and Bruce Westerman were true to destructive partisan form. They said the bill contained too much reckless money and was the product of a failed spending system, the latter point of which was certainly true.
But that was irrelevant to end-of-year urgencies with spending authority expiring. It's fair, then, to characterize their position as preferring to shut down the government and deny the Defense Department essential new spending, and Ukraine essential new aid, and Yellville back home money to fix its sewer system.
Crawford, Hill and Westerman joined the usual conservative Republican chorus saying Republicans should have killed the bill and deferred the matter until next year when they will swear in a new, if narrow, House majority. But Womack said counting on a House Republican majority to get anything done when it can't agree on a speaker, and when the Senate would still be under Democratic control, amounted to severely flawed reasoning.
Womack was right, of course. The House had in hand a $1.7 trillion bill the Senate had passed with 18 Republican votes joining all Democrats. Yet Westerman said he was proud to vote to blow that up. More likely, he was proud to crow about voting to blow up a bill that he knew was going to pass.
As for Westerman's disdain for the process that led to the take-or-leave brinkmanship ... he can keep working on that. Remember: His party will have the House majority come January.
Womack's brave correctness put him in a club of only eight other Republican House members, and one of those was Liz Cheney, who doesn't count because she's a truth-teller on Donald Trump.
The situation in the Senate was better. Cotton and Boozman had 16 Senate Republican colleagues joining them in voting for the spending measure.
Some of those made sense. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell supported the bill, finding it a practical solution to an urgent situation. His leadership team--John Thune, John Cornyn--went with him. Then you had the usual GOP Senate moderate suspects--Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins--who went along. Then you had assorted oddballs, by which I mean Lindsey Graham.
But why would a usually snarling extreme right-winger like Cotton go along?
It probably was because of his principled devotion that can't be denied--to defense spending, which gets more than half of this $1.7 trillion. He also negotiated seemingly in good faith for a late amendment increasing the categories of persons eligible for compensation as terrorism victims. Mollified on that, he presumably felt obliged to support the bill.
Boozman? I've written over the years that he votes the way McConnell wants. Then I've written that he votes the way Cotton leads him. In this case, the "aye" vote obliged both masters.
But I shouldn't mention those masters without also saying that Boozman could argue that his real masters are his Arkansas constituents, who just sent him back with a big vote. And this bill marked a return after 11 years to the inclusion of "earmarks" for projects back home.
Arkansas made out well in those earmarks, which Boozman stood up for in spite of wide criticism in years past--and still, with French Hill, for example, saying this bill still didn't have sufficient guard rails for corruption and misspending in these local projects.
Boozman said he couldn't speak for all the earmarks, but that the Arkansas delegation had worked hard to make sure the state's projects were cautiously and responsibly chosen. He also said he liked that the Arkansas expenditures came on top of funds already compiled from other sources for those projects. He said he wanted the federal government to help others build, not to build itself.
The fact is that this is no occasion to nitpick or over-analyze the motivation in the rare, welcomed, responsible and thoughtful votes of three members of any deep-red state's congressional delegation.
Only one other state joined Arkansas in having both its Republican senators cast votes for this bill. That was South Dakota, which suggests that this was more likely a moment of pleasant aberration than the start of anything positive.
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.