JOHN BRUMMETT: No soup for you!

On Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson told the joint legislative assembly loftily that the time had come to put partisanship aside and do what was best for the state.

Blah. Blah. Blah.


On Wednesday, the overwhelmingly dominant Republicans in the House of Representatives consolidated all future committee-appointment power singularly in the person of the next speaker of the House--a Republican unless Arkansas has some kind of statewide sex-change operation between now and 2019.

The Republicans declined when asked to extend the most minimal courtesy to the minority Democrats.

This is about a new rule, to take effect with the next regular session. It says the speaker will personally appoint the full memberships of all committees. He or she will simply put everybody on committees by his or her sole choosing. Then he or she will return to his or her throne to behold his or her kingdom.

Rep. Jeremy Gillam, the current second-term speaker, championed the rule although it's not for him. He doesn't intend to seek legislative re-election. He likely is to run for secretary of state.

But having secured such power for his successor at the behest of the Republican membership will likely buoy him in the race to oversee keeping the Capitol lawn mowed and the marble wiped and important papers filed.

Democrats aren't really blaming Gillam, a berry farmer I've long read as a kind and unassuming guy. They think he is under extreme pressure from Republican members to punish Democrats for the comical stunt they pulled on committee assignments this time.

Based on a system of member committee selection by seniority per congressional district, Democrats figured out they could consolidate what little muscle they had by loading up on the vital House Revenue and Tax Committee.

They secured an actual one-vote majority.

Republicans were outraged. They repaired the situation by coaxing two Democrats to become Republicans.

When this proposed new rule suddenly appeared, state Rep. Michael John Gray of Augusta, the Democratic leader, went with a few Democratic colleagues to Gillam to say essentially as follows: Yeah, we played a trick, and y'all are entitled to be mad, and we get it. But a lot of states that have speaker appointment systems guarantee a minimum of minority members on those committees. They often let the minority leader make those selections. Could we do that? Could we have ... oh, as few as two appointments per committee that the minority leader would make in consultation with this caucus?

Gillam said nope.

He contended that the new rule had been contemplated long before the Democratic maneuver. He said it wasn't retribution, but a positive attempt to align the committees more logically by making sure lawyers got on Judiciary and farmers on Agriculture and so forth. Giving up any committee seats to the minority could foil the speaker's latitude to accomplish that, he said.

Gray explained to me later that Gillam's concern could work both ways. Let's say, for example, that the best lawyer in the House--Harvard-educated Rep. Clarke Tucker of Little Rock, a Democrat--offended Republicans by offering ethics-reform legislation that they and the lobbyists and the big-money corporations didn't want to have to deal with. The next speaker could punish Tucker by keeping him off Judiciary, where lawyers are valuable and Tucker's strength would be needed, and putting him on, say, Public Transportation, which is not a focus of personal experience, expertise and interest.

Gray also explained one other factor: A committee without Democratic membership would be unaccountable to public transparency. A lone Democrat on a committee could at least make a speech, offer a motion, ask for testimony, seek a roll-call to make majority members stand by their voice votes (which would require a second vote) or even ask for a special subcommittee on a matter of special interest.

It's called the loyal opposition, and it's a noble and time-honored, indeed vital, concept.

You can't have loyal opposition unless you oblige even token opposition.

Gillam argued to me that members aren't beholden to the speaker after he appoints them to committees. That's true.

But Gray turned over that coin as well: The potential problem, he said, is a candidate for speaker next time going around promising desired committee appointments for votes, then holding the leverage to renege and punish a member over some dispute on a piece of legislative or matter of procedure.

The hilarious irony would be if Democrats took back the House in the next election and installed a speaker who, under the new rule, gave Democrats all the committee assignments they wanted and Republicans all the ones they didn't.

But that wouldn't be right, now would it?

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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 01/15/2017

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