LITTLE ROCK — Dreaded Washington tactics have infested the fiscal session of the state Legislature.
Once, we saw divisions at the state Capitol between metropolitan and rural, or between Little Rock and Fayetteville, or between right-wing and righter-wing.
Now we see partisanship for the sake of partisanship. Political modernism has come to once-quaint Arkansas.
We have beheld arbitrary positions based wholly on political angles. We have witnessed hyperbole. We have seen policy positions get locked down stridently for the mere sake of electoral positioning.
Everything this week has been about disliking or not trusting those no-accounts on the other side. It has been about not wanting to cede any conceivable rhetorical or electoral advantage for November.
If you get beat, you see, then you wouldn’t be around next time to paralyze state government with partisan fear.
Republicans offered a wholly arbitrary and political proposal to take a statistically insignificant $21 million from Gov. Mike Beebe’s conservative budget of $4.7 billion.
They proposed it for the sake of proposing it, for a talking point, possessing as they do large enough minorities to block the supermajority vote required to introduce the Revenue Stabilization Act in a fiscal session.
A cut for the sake of a cut and for the sake of talking points? A procedural gambit availing itself of a minority’s ability under the rules to obstruct the majority?
Does any of that sound familiar?
Republicans were wanting to pare the proposed budget from 3.5 percent growth to something closer to 3 percent. That’s utterly no big deal.
The official economic forecast easily could have required Beebe to limit his budget to 3 percent growth. In that event, I promise you, no one in a state agency would have said a word about layoffs or draconian harm to the needy people of the state.
But that’s exactly what Beebe got his affected state agency directors to say. Layoffs would occur, we were told. Sixty-one, maybe, which, even if so, is minuscule in the vast state government work force. It’s also fewer than the likely number of layoffs in the newspaper industry in the last 25 seconds.
Services would be reduced, we were told. The Economic Development Commission, which exists to offer bribes to industries to come to the state (most of them rejected), wondered what part of its jobrecruiting efforts Republicans would like it to discontinue.
That’s like a newspaper having to cut costs and asking readers which Razorback recruiting update they’d like not to receive. The readers likely would say keep the recruiting updates and take your paper down a couple of pages by starting with that blasted Voices page.
We got a rare look early in the week at a misfired text message from House Speaker Robert Moore, a Democrat lauded as bipartisan only a few days ago. In this text, which somehow wound up on Republican operative Jason Tolbert’s blog, Moore indicated that his House Democratic troops didn’t want Beebe to agree even to a million dollars in Republicansuggested cuts.
Was that because the state couldn’t afford any? No. It was because Democrats calculated that Republicans would claim they had rescued the state from Democratic waste and would use that rhetorically in races this fall in their potentially historic attempt to take control of the Legislature.
So Beebe gathered leading Republicans in his office Wednesday and told them he had found not quite $700,000 in cuts he could go along with. Wow, what a near-perfect budget he had previously drawn. What on Earth would have happened if the official revenue projection had been $800,000 less?
So then Republicans came back with an alternative plan to surrender surplus funds to deficit-headed Medicaid. Thus they would give up the local projects they had always enjoyed from that surplus.
Beebe turned that down, too, saying he needed flexibility. How much flexibility does he have, though, in a budget in which he can’t find even $700,000 to extract?
Continued pork is better for incumbents and there are more Democratic incumbents than Republicans ones—barely, for now.
I’ve known Beebe for 30 years. I know how he thinks. And I am confident in asserting that, left to his own devices, he’d call in leading Republicans and cut a deal landing somewhere closer to his 3.5 percent than their 3 percent.
He would let the Republicans claim rhetorical points while countering more effectively that good government is about efficiency and compromise and pragmatic solution, which is the very essence of him. It’s the very kind of thing that has netted him approval ratings nearing 70 percent.
Then he’d tell the few affected agencies to live with a little less cash, for goodness sakes.
Actually, that’s precisely what he has told them every year when he has drawn down the grocery tax, thereby taking sums from the state treasury comparable to what the Republicans wanted to take in this case.
But, alas, that was before somebody carried the Washington virus to Little Rock.
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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 02/23/2012