CONWAY — Arkansas House of Representative members fought along party lines like Congress does during this year’s state legislative session, Gov. Mike Beebe said Tuesday, and that scared him.
Beebe told the Conway Lions Club that while the political makeup was similar in the state House and state Senate, it was House members who couldn’t get along.
“It scares me a little bit... and I hope they all hear this message,” Beebe said. “This year in the Senate the Republicans made up roughly the same percentage as the Republicans in the House, and they didn’t have a lick of problems. They had philosophical differences from time to time, they fought like the dickens if they disagreed on an issue, but it wasn’t an ‘us versus them.’ It wasn’t Republican versus Democrat, it wasn’t a war, it wasn’t Washington-like. Generally speaking, the Senate didn’t succumb to that. The House got closer to going that way, and it scares me.”
Beebe told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after the meeting that he doesn’t know if legislators will become more or less partisan in the coming years but “it’s my job to try to pull people together instead of driving them apart.
“Ultimately, I’m the guy that has to balance the budget, I’m the guy that has to execute those laws that they pass, the budgets they pass. I’m the guy that hears all the stuff from the people after the Legislature’s gone,” Beebe said. “It’s part of my job to try to bring them together.”
Last November, the GOP made large gains in the Legislature. The party picked up 17 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
That brought the makeup to 56 Democrats and 44 Republicans in the House, 20 Democrats and 15 Republicans in the Senate.
House Republican Leader John Burris of Harrison disagreed with the governor’s assessment.
“I don’t think you saw a lot of partisanship, I think you saw a lot of heart and a lot of passion,” Burris said after the meeting. “I think [the governor] saw more ideas than you normally see in the Legislature, and I think that bothered some people who had been in the Legislature a long time, but not me.”
Beebe spent two decades in the Senate before being elected attorney general and then governor.
Burris, who was not at the Lions Club meeting, said later that House Speaker Robert S. Moore Jr., a Democrat from Arkansas City, did a good job of leading a chamber that was nearly evenly split politically.
“I can’t think of an example of a way the House acted in a partisan way at all,” said Burris. “But if someone has an example of partisanship at all I’d love to see it.”
Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said by phone later that the governor was referring to attempts to not pass a budget increase for the state’s School for the Deaf and the Insurance Department. Both were eventually approved.
House Bill 1193 appropriated money for the School for the Deaf. The school’s appropriation is $396,000 less than last year but includes a general revenue increase of $6,389 to fund cost-of-living pay increases for 170 employees.
The other bill, HB1226, was held up repeatedly over some lawmakers’ concerns that $1 million of the $72.6 million appropriation would be used to plan a health-insurance exchange for the federal healthcare law.
DeCample said those votes showed a “departure from discourse and a move toward the ‘do what we want or we’ll hold you hostage’ mentality.”
Burris said the budgets were held up by people who had problems with increased spending.
“If he wants to label that as solely a Republican idea, then I’ll be happy to accept the label,” Burris said. “The end result was tax cuts more than the governor said we could afford and the School for the Deaf and the Insurance Department are still functioning I believe. If that’s the only example he has I would say, No. 1 it’s pretty weak and, No. 2, is the end result was more tax cuts.”
Moore said he would not comment on the governor’s remarks because he was not present to hear them.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 10/05/2011