I exercised on Thursday my annual privilege to moderate a panel of legislators at the Arkansas Rural Development Conference.
What I gleaned from this year’s installment was that the private option is probably here to stay, but legislators can take or leave judges.
——————I asked panelists to answer yes or no on whether the state’s innovative private-option form of Medicaid expansion amounts to the same thing as Obamacare.
Right-wingers say that it does as they attack fellow Republicans who support the private option.
Left-wingers also insist that it does. They want to make the point that Arkansas embraces Obamacare even as it assails it.
Responsible pragmatists in between get the rhetorical squeeze.
Rep. Kim Hammer of Benton, a Republican and evangelical preacher, said the private option was not Obamacare and that he probably was inviting an attack mailer by saying that.
Rep. Greg Leding of Fayetteville, the House Democratic leader, said he wished he could say that it was, but couldn’t.
House Speaker-designate Jeremy Gillam of Judsonia and Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Beebe agreed it wasn’t. Sen. Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock, a Democrat, said that it was, and was alone in that view.
Sen. Jim Hendren of Gravette said the private option wasn’t Obamacare in the way that a tire is not a car. But he said you don’t need the tire if you don’t have the car.
So I asked for predictions: Would the private option get reauthorized next year?
Leding said probably. Dismang, a prime architect of the private option and the incoming Senate president pro tem, said you couldn’t possibly say at this point.
Chesterfield said a three-fourths vote was a high bar.
Hammer and Gillam said yes, but with unspecified “modifications.” Hendren said there’s a lot of money behind it and money usually wins.
In the back of the room, having dropped in during our session, was Hendren’s uncle, Republican gubernatorial nominee Asa Hutchinson. He looked straight ahead, without affect.
He, if elected, will have a lot to say about whether and how the private option gets sustained. I predict that he, if elected, will support it with a couple of window-dressed changes seeming to make the program more conservative.
I deplored the essential dishonesty of campaign politics, with right-wing groups attacking pro-private-option legislators as supporters of Obamacare.
Hendren and Chesterfield told me to get over it. They said you can’t control what people say in politics. They said you can only hope to counter it. Hammer said we’d need to do away with some of these newspaper editorials and columns—I can’t imagine whose—if we tried to do away with bogus attack mailers in political campaigns.
But consider the cynical case of state Rep. Terry Rice of Waldron. He benefited from “Obamacare” attacks on the incumbent private-option supporter he unseated last Tuesday, Sen. Bruce Holland of Greenwood.
But on the day after he won the primary, Rice told The City Wire in Fort Smith that he was neutral.
After all these years, I still have trouble with the notion that deception is a commonly accepted practice of campaign politics.
So about judges:
Dismang and Gillam, the likely leaders of the next Legislature, both said they don’t see anything wrong with Sen. Jason Rapert’s proposed resolution in which the Legislature would urge the Supreme Court to take a specific action in a specific case.
That would be on the appeal of the same-sex marriage ruling by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza.
They said judges are always sticking their noses in legislative business.
So for the record: The role of the judiciary to pass judgment on the constitutionality of legislative acts was established more than two centuries ago in Marbury v. Madison. But the judiciary only rules in that context when a party files suit alleging grievances and asks for an official interpretation of the law’s adherence to constitutional principles. The Legislature gets to make all laws and spend all the money. That’s plenty. It needn’t and shouldn’t offer its uninvited help to the Supreme Court in how to rule in a specific case.
Gillam said legislators have embarked on a study of recall laws in Wisconsin and other states to determine whether they might refer a constitutional amendment for voter consideration. It would provide for citizen-initiated petitions to call recall elections for judges and other constitutional officers.
But we have recall provisions already. They’re called the next elections.
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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.