Several days ago, two Republican state legislators warned a small policy group of the Arkansas Farm Bureau that outside agitators must be stopped from exploiting the raging liberal nature of pliable Arkansas people.
Arkansas people must surely resent that--being called liberal, I mean. Pliable is fine.
The topic was the Legislature's recent referral to the ballot in November 2020 of proposed state constitutional amendments. One would make it harder for people to amend the state Constitution by their own initiative. The other would set relaxed term limits for state legislators to try to pre-empt an amendment setting stricter ones.
The way to stop liberalism run amok in Arkansas, state Sen. Mathew Pitsch of Fort Smith told the farm group, is to make it harder for the people to amend the constitution directly themselves.
The people must be persuaded to vote against the people, in other words.
Rep. DeAnn Vaught of Horatio then came along to say that, if groups succeed in passing a more restrictive term-limits amendment for state legislators, then farmers would lose the agreeable nature of good folks like her and wind up with people more to the "left" who don't know real meat from fake meat.
Vaught said that a man in California was behind the term limits movement in Arkansas. But, when asked by a reporter afterward for the identity of this individual, Vaught said she couldn't remember the rascal's name.
He's from California. Isn't that all we need to know?
The U.S. Term Limits organization that has pushed restrictive term-limits legislation in Arkansas is based in Melbourne, Fla., which sounds kind of like California.
Let us take these presentations one at a time, starting with Pitsch, the senator from Fort Smith.
He told the group, according to an amusing piece in this newspaper, that Arkansas people have exposed their dangerous liberal bent in recent years by allowing themselves to be talked into approving such evils as medical marijuana to ease people's pain, casinos to give a poor guy a chance at big bucks, and a higher minimum wage to enable a poor working man to afford a few more canned goods at the supermarket.
It's happening, Pitsch said, because cynical people from out of state take advantage of our relatively easy way to get an initiative on the ballot. He said they hit up for the qualifying signatures mostly liberal people pretty much contained in Little Rock and Fayetteville.
Why good conservative voters statewide then approve these measures once wasteland liberals get them on the ballot ... that's where the pliable part comes in, I guess.
So, Pitsch explained, the answer is to provide by a new constitutional amendment that these cynical outsiders must collect minimum numbers of signatures from persons in 45 counties, not just 15.
That way, Pitsch said, we can better protect our state Constitution--by the people and for the people and from the people.
"In Arkansas, the outside world looks at us as an easy market," Pitsch was quoted as telling the farm group. "And what they have done is they have figured out that you can go to about two spots in our state, where there is [sic] big populations, predominantly one type of ideology."
So let's force these out-of-state agitators over to Clarendon and down to Fordyce and see how many of those people they can con into wanting relief from pain, a chance to win money and a higher wage.
It's all very odd, by the way. David Couch, a gadfly lawyer in Little Rock, kind of thought he was the mastermind of these citizen initiatives, at least on the minimum wage and medical marijuana.
Then came Vaught to explain to the farmers the Legislature's other referred amendment to set term limits at 12 years but allow legislators to take four-year sabbaticals and start another 12 years--and, by the way, have none of that apply to sitting legislators.
The point is to give the people a term-limits option that only sounds like term limits. Maybe, being pliable, the people would fall for it instead of a proposal that may be coming from the mystery guy in California, or Florida, to limit terms much more strictly including for current members.
Vaught said that, if we get stuck with that real term-limits restriction, we'll end up with new legislators from that dreaded left.
These Arkansas liberals apparently are losing elections in the state at present not because the state has gone Trump-simple and right-wing, but only because of the term-limits situation.
How that works, exactly, is unclear.
What is crystal clear, though, is that the Arkansas people must be persuaded to do what only they can do, which is protect themselves from themselves.
Thank goodness, then, that they're pliable.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Web only on 05/08/2019