IT’S NOT easy keeping up with the outrage-of-the-day at this or any session of the Arkansas legislature. There are so many awful ideas floating around the Ledge, like mines waiting to explode, that it’s a real job defusing them, or even spotting them all as this year’s regular session hurtles to its merciful end like some runaway stagecoach.
As usual, the only protection for the public is eternal vigilance. For bad ideas in the form of proposed legislation are present in profusion at the Ledge. They always have been and probably always will be in a democracy, where any duly elected and installed representative of the sovereign people can introduce any damfool piece of legislation he’s a mind to. Or that one of his big campaign contributors tells him to.
It’s the nature of democracy to produce not just great ideas but sorry ones. As the late great Henry Louis Mencken of Baltimore, Md., and American letters in general once opined, democracy “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Certainly the General Assembly of the Sovereign State of Arkansas has done its part to disgrace the idea of representative government. By making it all too representative of some of our worst traits.
The latest legislative atrocity to come to our attention is styled SB900, which is remarkably similar to earlier attempts to fiddle with the state’s constitutional limit on interest rates. The trick this time: Give the Legislature the power to raise it-a license for usury only payday lenders would love.
Yes, they’re back-the same loan sharks that once got a green light from an attorney general of Arkansas named Mark Pryor. It was one of his more shameful decisions in a long and not particularly distinguished political career.
Happily, the state developed a different and less welcoming attitude toward these bloodsuckers after Mark Pryor left the attorney general’s office for the U.S. Senate. Now the annual interest ceiling stands at 17 percent, but it could be raised by only a majority vote if this session of the Ledge agrees. And if the courts play along, letting these shylocks get back to fleecing the state’s poor and desperate, locking them into loans they may never be able to pay off.
The state’s Supreme Court has found similar end runs unconstitutional in the past, and the Arkansas attorney general’s office is awake to the danger this time. So are groups like Arkansans Against Abusive Payday Lending, which has sounded the alarm. Nobody can say the state hasn’t been warned.
This latest attempt to soak the poor needs to be killed, killed dead, and a stake driven through its black heart so it never rises again. It’s clear that SB900 represents a clear and present danger to those Arkansawyers ripe for exploitation by the unscrupulous.
What’s not clear is why ordinarily decent legislators like good old Jane English of North Little Rock would sign on to sponsor this outrage. They need to disavow this end run around the state’s constitution ASAP. For the sake of their honor and the state’s. Arkansas already has a perfectly good nickname, The Natural State. We don’t want to become known as the Loan Shark State.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 04/08/2013