Let me tell you what I'm hearing on whether the Hutchinson administration's scheme to pass a bill it would then veto, and thus cleverly save Medicaid expansion from Senate Republican obstruction, is legal.
"It's 80 percent likely to be legal. That's better than zero chance of passing the bill straight up."
"It's probably legal, but not cut-and-dried."
"I'd put it at a coin toss."
"There's a way to do the same tactic but raise that 50-50 in a more legally defensible way."
I like that last one.
A 50 percent chance of having Medicaid expansion suddenly jerked from 267,000 poor people by a court injunction is a little better than zero chance of persuading two of the 10 Senate Republican obstructionists to do the right thing.
But it's not a whole lot better.
It's always best to do a policy straight-up, and to persuade bad guys to become good guys, than to engage in an organized charade.
But if the 10 aren't moving, and if you must take your legal chances, then you need to execute your charade in the most legally unassailable manner possible--by writing a different kind of amendment that the governor would line-item-veto. That's what was being worked on Monday.
So let me acknowledge--no, the word is admit--that, their partisan petulance aside, Democratic legislators may have accomplished something positive Thursday by balking at the scheme as proposed at that time.
Democrats naturally were displeased that I wrote Sunday that they engaged in petulant partisanship in resisting Gov. Asa Hutchinson's openly admitted trickery to try to save Medicaid expansion.
Actually, that might not be a correct statement.
Several Democrats have not denied, but defended, the partisanship, petulant or otherwise.
On Sunday former Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat, wrote a guest column for Talk Business likening my dismay over Democratic political angling to belief in unicorns.
But what really irked Democrats is the very idea that they might now be to blame if Medicaid fails in this fiscal session. They insist the real culprits would be the 10 Republican obstructionists in the Senate.
So let me amend previous remarks: The 10 obstructionists of course would bear the blame. Democratic petulance would be merely an unfortunate complication.
Some Democrats balked at the trickery last week for the understandable reason that they needed time to process the odd scheme the governor had foisted on them with short notice.
But, yes, some were simply putting partisan petulance over the desired policy result, and saying so.
On Thursday after the governor's scheme was foiled by Democrats, and after I assailed the Democrats for that, state Democratic Party communications director H.L. Moody put this post on Facebook: "When did it become the responsibility of the minority to pass the Gov's agenda? Especially when Repubs will hit them over the head with Obamacare from here to Election Day."
Here's the easy answer to that playground-caliber query: It became Democrats' responsibility to help pass the Republican governor's agenda at the moment the Republican offered himself as the only one of his kind south of John Kasich to try to do the right thing, a thing that Democrats believe in.
Yes, Republicans have been known to engage in the cynicism of sending out campaign fliers attacking Democrats for voting for the Medicaid expansion that the Republican governor was trying to get them to help him save. Yes, that's hypocritical, infuriating to Democrats and disgraceful.
But the best way to combat that kind of cynicism is simply to be better.
It is to do the right thing on policy. It is to do the right thing for the people. It is to explain very calmly and clearly that the Republicans are being disgracefully dishonest when they deploy these cynical campaign tactics.
And then it is to check the returns on Election Night to see if the voters have come to their senses.
And if they haven't, at least your service would have been a source of pride.
There are worse things than losing elections. Taking health insurance away from poor people is one.
Voters usually stagger back eventually to the right thing. Arkansas Democrats, if they are to hope for new relevance, need to be there to greet them.
The prevailing Democratic position seems to be as follows: It's the fault of the 10 that we're in this fix. It's not our job to bail out those 10. We'll do what we have to do, but, for now, let's keep the pressure on the 10, not use us to find a way around them.
But let's remember that, in 2013, three young Republican legislators defied their party orthodoxy to design the private-option alternative form of Medicaid expansion. One got beat over it. The Democratic governor smartly acquiesced because there was no other way to get Medicaid expanded.
That spirit of 2013, not any unicorn--that's all I'm looking for.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/19/2016