'People's house' eviction

Let's stop calling it the Governor's Mansion. Now let's call it Casa del Asa.

The mostly pointless special legislative session that just ended, which was mainly to move Obamacare money from beneath one shell to another to generate highway revenue, contained the thoroughly non-urgent item of a 104-page "efficiency bill."

The bill represented a vast amalgam that repealed or reworked largely obscure or dormant commissions and task forces. House Speaker Jeremy Gillam had supervised the compilation.

He said he and his people had determined that most of those commissions or task forces didn't do anything.

Apparently there was an emergency need to stop these commissions from doing what they weren't doing.

A little section appeared near the end of the vast bill that apparently qualified as an emergency in the mind of somebody. Somebody named Hutchinson, it would seem.

The section abolished the Governor's Mansion Commission, reconstituted it with members no longer serving defined terms, but at the personal whim of the governor, and specifically deleted the long-standing section of law giving the commission authority over remodeling, renovation or other physical changes to the building and grounds.

The effect is that Gov. Asa Hutchinson now rules the roost. The commission is toothless. If it messes with him, he can replace it.


Former Gov. Mike Beebe, whose wife, Ginger, worked with the Commission to turn the Mansion into perhaps the state's leading charity-function venue, always declared at those functions that the Mansion was the "people's house."

Now Asa and his clan are landlords and rent-free tenants.

Perhaps you wonder: Why make this change in law after all these decades, during which, perhaps tellingly, the only other public squabble between the First Family and the Mansion Commission occurred in the tenure of the last Republican governor, Mike Huckabee?

His wife, Janet, didn't like being told what to do, or having to ask. But all the Huckabees did in the way of law was get two new commission spots added so that Janet could work with a couple of pals. As perhaps you'll recall, she proceeded to haul a house trailer into the backyard.

The Beebes inherited those Huckabee commissioners and co-existed without a peep.

A source close to the Hutchinsons responded to my question of "why" with his own question: How would I like it if Bryan King and Nate Bell, legislators I usually disagree with, assembled every morning at my dining table and presumed to tell me how to run my household?

I wouldn't much like it, though I maintain a perverse affection for King and don't always disagree with Bell.

But my house is a private residence. Taxpayers didn't build it. Taxpayers don't keep it up for my free use.

Apparently what's happened is that a couple of interior decorators, one a holdover Democrat and the other a new Republican friendly with the Hutchinsons, have disagreed about the executive residence's décor. The Hutchinsons and the Republican decorator reportedly want to Rogers-ize the place--make it all new and shiny. The Democratic decorator wants to preserve it--keep it all Arkansas-centric and period-evocative.

It's much like the difference between the Quapaw Quarter and Chenal, the separate planets framing the vast divide we call Little Rock.

What this new law means is that, for example, somebody could bequeath the Hutchinsons a piece of religious iconography and they could decide to install it on the Mansion grounds as part of a new water feature. And there would be no publicly authorized tacky police to stop it.

Sen. Jason Rapert could get his Ten Commandments monument erected out there so long as Asa and his Bob Jones University-educated clan liked the idea, as surely they do.

This change meant so much to House Speaker Gillam that he threatened to table an economic-development benefit for the people of Mississippi County if the area's Democratic state senator, David Burnett, didn't vote for the bill in committee.

Burnett yielded to Casa del Asa so his constituents might get steel-mill jobs.

Gillam, taking a break Saturday from moving rocks on his berry farm, told me that, based on "conversations we heard," presumably conversations started by the complaining Hutchinsons, he and Sen. Missy Irvin decided to include the Mansion Commission item.

Gillam said that, after all, it's "their residence," meaning the Hutchinsons.

Actually, by long design, the governor and his family have occupied and controlled the private living quarters, and the Mansion Commission has exercised public responsibility for the balance of the property, with, of course, the collegial input of the temporary occupant.

Gillam told me, "If this turns out not to be the right balance, then we can fix it in the regular session."

It seems to me the only remaining legislative emergency, no doubt worthy of another special session, is the formal renaming as Casa del Asa.

------------v------------

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 05/24/2016

Upcoming Events