You hear a lot of chatter in the lawyer community about the Arkansas Supreme Court, an array of seven supposed eminences presuming to be august, but perhaps actually neither very eminent nor august.
It may be that the right of homosexual people to marry each other and escape blatant discrimination over private acts is all gummed up in petty high court folderol.
I’d contend we’d be better off with gubernatorially appointed justices rather than these elected ones, except that, in the case of Mike Beebe as governor, his pal Cliff Hoofman would end up holding every judgeship.
You hear that there’s this schism on the current high court and that it happens for some reason to pit the three female justices—irascible Jo Hart, conservative Karen Baker and Mrs. Johnny Goodson, the wife of a politically wired and hyperactive class-action mogul based in Texarkana, and whose actual given name is Courtney, against outgoing Justice Donald Corbin and maybe another one or two of the men.
One shred of conceivable hard evidence came after Attorney General Dustin McDaniel told me one day for quote that this Supreme Court seemed to be result-oriented, meaning it figures out how it wants to rule and then backs into some contrived legal justification. That is a pretty darned serious charge to be made in the area of justice.
So then Corbin hauled off and issued a stinging dissent to some majority opinion favored by the three women in which he cited McDaniel’s comment and suggested that maybe the attorney general was right.
You hear that Goodson is going to run for chief justice, which would be mighty danged cozy, but that the current chief, Jim Hannah, might give up his retirement earnings—by running past the age of 70 in defiance of an ageism state law designed to keep senility out of our judging—and take her on.
Presumably that would be to try to save the court from … well, her, owing to her close personal relationship with the politically hyperactive class-action mogul from Texarkana.
I don’t think the chief would actually do that. Retirement income is very nice. Old people enjoy receiving it.
So I fear Chief Justice Goodson is a tragic inevitability, and that it’s the main reason everyone assumes that—no matter what other personal factors may be at play in the pending and now delayed gay-marriage case—she will vote to reverse Circuit Judge Chris Piazza’s overturning of the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
If you want to run for anything in Arkansas right now, you need to keep the homosexuals down.
Seven in 10 Arkansans believe legalizing same-sex marriage would destroy the sanctity of the state’s heterosexual marriages, most of which are so sanctified that they either end in divorce or represent second and third attempts at wedded continuity.
So this is the situation on the gay-marriage case:
The Supreme Court agreed to expedite the case and conducted oral arguments in October. Everyone assumed, owing to prevailing court practice, that the court would get the ruling out by its mid-December taking of a holiday break. But it didn’t.
Now there’s talk that the case would be held over to the next term, in which case Corbin will be off the court, replaced by a conservative Rhonda Wood likely to vote differently from Corbin—he to affirm Piazza, and she not.
For that matter, also put in question might be the gubernatorially appointed service of a special justice to replace the disqualifying and aforementioned Hoofman, who had an ill-advised private conversation with state Sen. Jason Rapert.
Any conversation with Jason Rapert is very likely ill-advised. In this instance, the demagogic Rapert had pushed through an unconstitutional legislative resolution presuming to tell the justices to overturn Piazza. So then Hoofman found it necessary for some reason to get on the phone with Rapert about something or other.
In the course of a few hours last week, I heard from two highly placed legal sources that:
The court was going to overturn Piazza, and Corbin had written a powerful and stinging dissent, and the women justices in the majority had decided to delay the issuance of the ruling until the new court gets seated next year so that Corbin’s dissent would get round-filed forever, never to be seen.
The court was going to affirm Piazza, 6-to-1, but somebody was holding up her dissenting opinion, also to stymie Corbin in some way.
Either way—or even if by some entirely different way—a delay until the next term could raise procedural complications meaning that the case might have to be re-argued and that the court would have wasted everyone’s time to this point.
Gay marriage is going to be legal and common in this country before too very long. But what this cast of robed Arkansas characters is going to say about it is but a wild guessing game.
And a postscript: If any of that business about a round-filed Corbin dissent is true, he should simply send his dissent by word document attachment to his home computer and then email it to me as soon as he formally leaves the judgeship. I’d be happy to see if there might be column fodder in it.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.