LITTLE ROCK — It’s been something less than a stellar beginning for the Arkansas General Assembly.
The eventual winner of the District 24 House seat, Keith Crass of Hot Springs, died less than a week before the election.
Fred Smith came close to being denied the District 54 House seat after a complaint that he lived not in Crawfordsville-the most recent news stories now place him in West Memphis-but in Walls, Miss. The House seated him anyway upon the recommendation of the state Claims Commission, only to see him resign 20 days later after his conviction on a felony property theft charge.
Now state Sen. Bruce Holland of Greenwood faces charges of careless driving, improper passing and fleeing after leading what a Perry County sheriff’s deputy described as a 20-mile high-speed chase into the next county.
Holland conceded that he was “going too fast,” but said that he didn’t know he was being chased by a vehicle with flashing lights. On the other hand, according to news accounts, he initially said that he “passed about three cars in a row,” but later denied improperly passing other vehicles. Go figure.
They say bad things come in threes. In that vein, here’s hoping that the Legislature turns the corner so that its luck improves, for there is much work to be done, some of it fairly serious.
Speaking of serious work, here’s also hoping that others follow the lead of the House Public Health, Welfare and Labor Committee in considering potentially troublesome legislation such as House Bill 1053.
Sponsored by state Rep. David Meeks of Conway, the bill presumed to keep the insurance mandate in the federal health care law from applying to Arkansans.
Now I don’t like that mandate any better than Meeks does. The ultimate authority, of course, will be the U.S.Supreme Court-more than half the states have initiated lawsuits or joined others in suing over the mandate, and I have no doubt that the litigation will go all the way to the top-but I think Congress overstepped its authority by compelling Americans to buy health insurance. However, just because Congress overreaches, that’s no excuse for the Arkansas Legislature doing so.
Yes, yes, I know that the Virginia Legislature passed a law that makes it illegal to require any resident of that state to purchase health insurance, but Virginia is at the fore of the litigation charge, and that doesn’t come cheap. It won round one last month when U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled in Richmond, Va., that the mandate goes beyond Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce under the U.S. Constitution, but the fight isn’t anywhere near over. The feds have already filed their appeal. The 4th U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond has scheduled oral arguments for May 10-13.
It is laudable that Meeks wants to “protect people who want to make their own health care decisions,” but if he wants to make exceptions to federal law, the place to do that is in the Congress, not the state Legislature. What’s commonly referred to as the supremacy clause in Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.”
That’s not to say Congress cannot overreach its authority. It can and it has. The commerce clause in Article 1, which the Obama administration invoked as the authority for the mandate, has figured in some interesting U.S. Supreme Court cases.
The U.S. Supreme Court has the final say when it come to interpreting federal law.
Either Meeks doesn’t understand this or he’s showboating. Since his degree is in pastoral ministries and not jurisprudence, the former would appear to be the case. On the other hand, clearly HB 1053 is a tea-party bill and Meeks is a tea-party guy, so there is a third possibility, sheer presumptuousness. But that’s for others to say.
Whatever the case, the House committee that considered HB 1053 failed to recommend it for passage by the full House on Tuesday after state officials, including a representative of Attorney General Dustin McDaniel’s office, advised against it.
“Barring the reversal of longstanding legal precedent,” Assistant AG Jean Block told the committee, “the outcome of any litigation is virtually guaranteed to be unsuccessful for the state of Arkansas. We believe this is a federal issue to be decided in the federal courts using federal, not state, dollars.”
Maybe the Arkansas Legislature should follow the lead of the new U.S. House of Representatives and start including with every bill introduced a concise statement “citing as specifically as practicable” the constitutional power or powers granted to enact it.
Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 01/28/2011