Asa acts responsibly

Today's column may ruin Gov. Asa Hutchinson politically. But the truth must be told.

I will now reveal that Asa ... drum roll here ... has behaved with uniform responsibility in regard to the same-sex marriage ruling.

He has dared in his ever-measured way to recite the simple reality that so many in Arkansas don't want to hear--that the law is the law; that the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling is narrow and applies to government action, not personal religion; that we in Arkansas will abide by the ruling, of course, whether we like it or not, which Asa says he doesn't, and that county clerks don't have the option to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

In the event you find it odd that a man would warrant praise simply for instantly accepting the case law of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, I would refer you for comparison and contrast to the attorney general of Texas and the jurists of the state Supreme Court of Alabama, who, in the fine Southern tradition, have recommended lawbreaking.

Then there is the gab-master, Mike Huckabee, except he has no responsibility except to show business, and for whom there really is no excuse or relevance.

As I told you Sunday, Hutchinson is a bit of a lawyer's lawyer. He is a tad too trained in the themes and details of ours as a nation of laws to go all demagogic in the way of the aforementioned.

It's funny how things turn out.

Once we thought Huckabee the moderate and enlightened Arkansas Republican as opposed to Asa's frightfully extreme, Bob Jones University-instilled, sex-prosecuting "Righteous Brothers" form of extreme conservatism.

Perhaps both Mike and Asa have changed. Or maybe it's a simple matter of the one with actual responsibility meeting that obligation and the one cynically fashioning a Falwellian commercial brand no longer needing to worry with that. Or it could be that we never really knew Asa and were guilty as usual of stereotypical assumptions.

I'm thinking it's some of all that, but maybe a lot of the latter.

We confused Asa with his brother, Tim, a non-lawyer who was indeed extreme.

And liberals have always despised Asa for accepting appointment as a House prosecutor of Bill Clinton's impeachment.

But it was not Asa's hypocrisy when his brother ventured out of his longtime marriage and toward remarriage with a woman who had worked for him.

And--forgive me here, liberal friends--it was not Asa's fault that Clinton made sexy time with an intern and lied under oath.

Ponder the private sector and the case of a company president who gets caught entangled with a young woman intern and then gets sued over it and is found out to have lied in the deposition.

Might the board of directors have any problem with that?

Alas, now I will be ostracized for a couple of days in the liberal wards, both of them, where they like to say that anyone would lie to deny extracurricular sexual activity.

Huckabee, meantime, is doubling down, or quadrupling down, on his spectacular and utter nonsense--his demagoguery that would be dangerous if anyone took him seriously--that the Supreme Court does not make law unless the other branches of government go along.

It's curious, or maybe it isn't. When the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in the Lake View case that the entire state public education system was fatally flawed under the state Constitution, Huckabee, as governor, responded with commendable seriousness to yield subserviently to a tax increase and school consolidation.

But now he says the U.S. Supreme Court is a cipher to be defied.

Marbury v. Madison, 1803, established the prevailing precedent of "judicial review," meaning that the Supreme Court may rule with binding authority on the constitutionality of legislative acts.

With occasional dustups, such as a civil war and a few school-integration crises, our noble nation has adhered to the precarious but essential premise that we accept Supreme Court rulings as law. Otherwise there is no redress for statutory infringements on constitutional provisions. Otherwise there is anarchy.

It is technically true that last week's case specifically applied only to the three states named in the lawsuit. But it is more thoroughly true that the Supreme Court ruling becomes full precedent, or case law, to which all district federal jurisdictions must now adhere should lawsuits arise against violators.

That's how it works. That's how it must work. That's what Dwight Eisenhower showed Orval Faubus.

Brown v. Board of Education applied to Topeka. But when Faubus and Little Rock went rogue, the 101st Airborne applied Brown v. Board of Education to Little Rock.

We don't need any more of that variety of infamy and shame in Arkansas. Let Alabama and Louisiana and Texas take it. They seem perfectly willing.

And let us hope that Asa's conservative base can find it in its heart--or its heart at all--to forgive him his current concession to responsible governing and the law.

That's at least until he tries to save Obamacare in Arkansas.

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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 07/02/2015

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