The just-completed legislative session was not as bad as it looked, which is a low but significant bar.
It's mainly because of what the session did not do.
Indeed, Arkansas legislative success normally will be measured most properly by what gets stopped rather than what gets passed.
This session did not enact either of the proposed bills to discriminate against transgender persons in their public bathroom use. That probably was mostly attributable to Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, the governor's nephew and the unlikely face of the new left in Arkansas legislative politics, which is the old reasonable right.
Hutchinson, as chairman, declined to hold meetings of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the last few days. "Meet at the call of the chair" can be a wonderful legislative device. Or an awful one, depending.
The transgender bathroom issue is not a problem in Arkansas, or anywhere else. The issue is but a grandstanding exploitation by right-wingers seeking a wedge issue. Public bathroom usage gets transacted routinely 24-7 without incident.
Passing a bill restricting bathroom rights of certain gender-identifying persons would have accomplished nothing other than the kind of trouble North Carolina has now extricated itself from. Although Arkansas had less to lose economically through boycotts than North Carolina, Gov. Asa Hutchinson knew the risks and was fortunate that his new-left nephew was well-placed.
Meantime, the state's surplus funds from the ending biennium got put as usual into the General Improvement Fund, but, this time, without any earmarks to planning and development districts for disbursement for local purposes at the personal behest of legislators.
That's long been an outrage of unaccountable, nontransparent and rancid use of public money, to the point that one former legislator has pleaded guilty to kicking some of his money back to himself and another former legislator has been indicted for the same thing.
There was a little self-claiming religious college in Springdale that professed to be giving college educations to people who worked. For that asserted nobility, local legislators sent some of their "personal GIF" to the school and are alleged to have arranged for some of that money to make its way through a consultant--a launderer--back to them.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jason Rapert did not get the Clinton name taken off Little Rock's regional airport.
It would be fine with me if that name had never been attached to the airport. I've about had it with the Clintons myself. But the grandstanding and Swaggart-ian church lady from Bigelow had no business usurping Little Rock's local control merely for his pandering and petulant self-aggrandizement.
There were two things the Legislature didn't do, but should have. It rejected state Rep. Clarke Tucker's bills to disclose donors to dark-money groups who buy our judicial and other elections--because those sinister stealth groups tend to be conservative Republican. And it declined to impose Internet sales taxes, which are already required for payment as use taxes, but unenforced. That's unfair to local retailers who are trying to make a living with actual physical structures.
We did get new laws of dubious constitutionality to restrict abortion rights, but those are going to happen. The courts will figure all that out, as they always do.
Altogether, the governor's management of the session was adequate. The general budget is conservative but preserves a functioning status quo state government. And I don't blame Hutchinson so much personally for signing that guns-galore bill. Sometimes things spin out of control and the best you can do is make a horrible situation less horrible.
The governor initially opposed Rep. Charlie Collins' bill to require colleges to permit faculty and staff members with concealed-carry permits to carry those on campuses. But when the bill seemed to be soaring to passage, Asa supported the amendment attached in the Senate--by new-left nephew Jeremy again--to require 16 hours of special training.
But that fired up the national poobahs of the NRA to come into NRA-worshipping Arkansas to resist new burdens on the right to carry, which resulted in that guns-galore bill that the governor's best tactical option was to sign with his nose held tightly.
A veto would have been promptly overridden. Signing the bill into law and then pushing for a new bill undoing the worst parts of the bad new law--to carve out exemptions for college athletic events, UAMS, the State Hospital, day-care centers and private colleges--was the best course available under the circumstances.
Asa then got bailed out by the Razorbacks and the SEC, who opposed the guns-at-games provision and provided the one force stronger in Arkansas than the NRA.
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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 04/06/2017