The Legislature convening historically this week for a dominant Republican takeover will start out doing easy right-wing things. That's what y'all voted for.
Personal income taxes will be cut by $100 million for everyone being paid between $20,000 and $75,000 a year. That will make the tax system fairer but strain the treasury unless the economic recovery accelerates and the private option form of Medicaid expansion gets renewed to provide Medicaid matching savings to the state.
A woman's right to choose abortion will be hampered in whatever way the state hasn't hampered it already and to the extent the courts will eventually allow. A bill to discontinue state aid to all the worthy services Planned Parenthood provides because it also refers women for abortions got 17 votes, needing 18 in the state Senate last time. The Republican majority is now bigger and more zealously right-wing.
If there is any new way to stomp on immigrants and gays and public education as usual in favor of charter schools or school choice, then that also will happen.
Tort reform and a voter-identification requirement, both requiring constitutional amendments, apparently are the only favorite right-wing issues that will be off the table. That's because Senate Democrats were smart enough to load up four of the eight memberships on the Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee that considers and recommends the referral of those amendments.
After all of that--then and only then, on toward March--will this Asa Hutchinson-led assembly tackle the two ideologically vexing complexities.
Those are prisons and the private option.
They are ideologically vexing because they pose actual problems requiring real work.
It sounds for all the world as if Hutchinson would like to finesse both.
State prison officials, facing an inmate population nearly 40 percent over capacity and backed up in county jails, advocate building a $100 million prison.
But you can't easily cut taxes $100 million and come up with that kind of money. And I'm reminded that it takes a couple of years or more to build and staff and open a prison, which does not solve the immediate problem.
Hutchinson's stated ideas don't solve it in the short term either. He has talked of alternative sentencing and finding a better way to release prisoners so they can more readily get jobs and cope non-criminally and avoid re-incarceration.
None of that helps the Pulaski County jail or any other county jail. None of that helps the arresting police officer who knows his arrestee will be perfunctorily signed out because there's no space in the jail. None of that helps the innocent party victimized by a criminal act committed by someone who ought to have been in jail.
Two potentially worthy ideas, neither free but both less expensive than an entire new prison, are to expand existing facilities or farm out some of our population to private prisons.
Either way, the long-term challenge would remain to give released inmates a better chance at making it in the free world. A friend of mine advocates the traditional 12-step program at a designated pre-release center, which also would coordinate job opportunities and training with relevant state agencies. It's as good an idea as any.
As for the private option, Hutchinson appears to be angling for a major late-January announcement in which he would talk about general health-care "reform" and perhaps casually mention therein that he either favors or opposes--I would assume favors--continuation of the private option.
I predict the headline will be the casually mentioned part. I suspect the broader "reform" will be seen as ribbons and bows, depending, of course, on what it is.
Hutchinson may want to tie the private option to so many new work or work-training requirements that we'll have to seek an entirely new federal waiver. And that might require him either to call for continuing the private option on a kind of probationary status while the waiver is pending or suspend coverage to a quarter-million in that meantime.
I would assume he would want to continue the private option on probationary status.
Of course I seem to be assuming quite a bit.
Outgoing state Rep. John Burris said on Talk Business and Politics on Sunday that Hutchinson might fashion a position so new and so much his own that it would be neither pro-private option nor anti-private option.
That would be a world-class magic trick.
I suspect the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and other hospitals--and the rest of us--will need to know exactly which it is, and will be able to figure that out easily enough.
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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.
Editorial on 01/13/2015