Rage against reason

We now know that members of the state Senate's Republican caucus engaged in an email conversation Thursday evening.

The subject was how these senators might finagle to give the false appearance of resisting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage.

They can't actually do anything. The ruling is the law.

That's unless they want to go around the country drumming up support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between only a man and a woman, which an unlikely two-thirds of Congress would have to vote to refer and an unlikely 38 states would have to ratify.

Or they could try something even more perilous, which is to persuade the legislatures in two-thirds of the states to call a convention to reconsider, altogether alarmingly, the U.S. Constitution wholesale.

Either way they'd need to besmirch our current constitution of positive principles with a specific and discriminatory rule.

So most likely their talk is nothing more than what a full-faced angry man might call jiggery-pokery.


Earlier on Thursday, this Senate Republican caucus had put out a public statement saying it was committed to looking for ways to protect religious freedom from the perils of the same-sex marriage ruling.

In response to that, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, continuing to behave as a model of responsibility, had put out a statement repeating the simple reality that the marriage ruling had to do only with government, not religious rights. And he reiterated that county clerks, as agents of government, have no choice but to issue same-sex marriage licenses, even if, as permitted by a new state law, they choose not to sign the licenses personally.

It's not altogether clear what's going on with Asa in this display of wise moderation. My best theory is that he is:

• Respectful of the law because of his professional training as a lawyer.

• Wanting to modernize Arkansas economically and surmising that resisting another Supreme Court ruling on broadening minority rights, à la 1957, is not the way to go.

So it turns out that state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway, as if to confirm my praise of the governor, attacked Asa in this email exchange.

And someone privy to this email conversation pulled out Rapert's anti-Asa tirade from the email chain and leaked it to the liberal Arkansas Times' blog.

In this leaked text, Rapert professed outrage that Hutchinson's statement had referred to the governor's deciding what legislative action might be necessary. Rapert, perhaps oblivious to screaming irony, found that arrogant.

Rapert said he had worked hard to vouch for Hutchinson with the conservative base. He said it would now take hard work for the governor to regain his trust.

So I made a couple of calls to determine how severely Rapert had split his britches by getting caught publicly in this assault on his party's governor. And what I got back was that it was Asa who had sustained a splitting of the britches.

Senators seem to believe Asa generally has behaved toward them in a haughty or detached way. Some have grown weary of Asa's soft approach to issues. Several senators in the email exchange might disagree with Rapert's style, but not so much on this issue with his substance.

Apparently, these senators are irritated that Asa keeps talking about fact and responsibility--to the delight of some business leaders and liberal commentators--while dousing them in cold water as they express a desperate need to behave not responsibly, but politically.

The significance is that there is now a schism between the Republican governor and Republican state senators that, unless mended, could have implications for important policy.

The state must soon do something about proceeding, or not proceeding, with an adaptation of the private-option form of Medicaid expansion. Anything that accepts federal expansion money, no matter how conservatized, will have to be appropriated by a three-fourths majority vote of both houses of the Legislature.

So it is important that Hutchinson remains friendly enough with Republican legislators, and influential enough on them, to pass some form of Medicaid expansion spending.

There is no option on same-sex marriage. But it is entirely the state's option on whether to continue to move toward universal health insurance that serves the needy and the private insurance market and saves money for the state budget and hospitals.

Then there is concurrent pressure from the conservative base for the state to bail out of the Common Core education goals.

Asa's attempted finesses on all of that have been exhausting to watch, much less execute. So he seems entitled from time to time to slip up and simply say and do the right thing.

Let's hope Rapert and others can forgive and forget the governor's current indiscretion of responsibility and obvious rightness.

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 07/07/2015

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