A meek little guy with a mustache announced himself the new sheriff in town at the Arkansas Supreme Court on Tuesday.
I'm on record predicting that the mild-mannered new chief justice, Dan Kemp, the Church of Christ elder and longtime circuit judge from Mountain View, will get eaten alive by the clique of justices that bedeviled the chief justiceships of the late Jim Hannah and the interim Howard Brill.
One in that clique--Courtney Goodson, wife of the rich class-action mogul Johnny--was the foe whom Kemp defeated for the chief justiceship. It's awkward.
That's not to call Kemp weak. Meek is not weak. Anyway, blessed are the meek, the Lord said.
Mattie Ross was certainly not weak. But when she plunged into a pit of rattlesnakes, she got bit.
Who am I calling rattlesnakes? Perhaps the metaphor is too harsh. Let us stipulate merely that Goodson, Associate Justice Jo Hart and Associate Justice Karen Baker were the prime actors in the court's politically motivated delay of the same-sex marriage case, usurpation of administrative power from Hannah and passive-aggressive resistance to Brill's interim leadership.
Kemp's formal investiture was conducted Tuesday afternoon in the Supreme Court chamber in front of Kemp's specially invited guests, including, to my surprise and near-horror, me.
Inviting the guy who writes in the paper to sit there like a respectable person among real friends and truly important people--that was a new-sheriff affront right there, it seems to me.
The ceremony was an understated spectacle. There was more to it than met the ear.
The current justices came out and took their seats. Goodson assumed their leadership, acting temporarily in the way the voters had declined to let her act permanently.
She told a story about "teamwork," and packing parachutes for others.
Then she yielded to Kemp's taking of the oath down front--from retired Chief Justice Jack Holt--and robing ceremony. Then she proclaimed that Chief Justice Kemp should come forward and take his seat to lead his court.
She moved over one seat, leaving the vacant chief's chair for Kemp, where he would plop himself down between her and Hart.
Kemp went the long way, taking some time. I heard him say he needed water, which he most certainly did considering that he was getting ready to give prepared remarks that might invite a dry throat.
He read mostly platitudes for a few pages and then said that the aforementioned Jack Holt had told him that chief justices get all the blame when things go wrong and little of the credit when they go all right.
He said that, since he was the voters' choice to be in charge, and since the law makes the Supreme Court chief justice the leader of their entire state judicial network, he would forthwith assume full administrative control of several of the court's judicial and professional committees and offices. Then he thanked the members of the court who had been serving as administrative overseers and liaisons to those offices and committees, specifically Goodson and Hart.
I was sitting there wondering if anybody else had picked up on the fact that the Barney Fife-looking guy had just laid down some new law for the dazed-looking Goodson and the glaring Hart.
I bolted the courtroom to charge my phone to put all that on Twitter. I ran into a court employee and asked her if Kemp hadn't just taken jobs from Goodson and Hart. The court employee replied only by directing me to the clerk's office where copies of Kemp's remarks were available.
She was saying, I guess, that the printed text would tell me whether he said what he said and I heard what I heard.
I called around later to see if perhaps I'd overreacted. I was told yes and no, by this explanation: The chief justice is by law the leader of those committees, which other justices had begun leading when Hannah was ill and Brill was interim and disinclined to bold permanent moves. But the chief may delegate. That Kemp wasn't delegating was a strong message. In fact, a couple of the justices who were being displaced hadn't been advised ahead of time. The more conventional path for Kemp would have been to make his announcement in a justices' private conference.
Don't make too much of it, but don't make too little, I was advised.
I'll wrap up this way: Dan Kemp said to meet the new boss, different from the old boss. He may not have heard the last of it. His being eaten alive remains a possibility. But people are complex and not always quite what they seem.
Blessed are the meek, but listen closely to the spunky.
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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 01/12/2017