Pulaski Circuit Judge Tim Fox will rule any minute on whether the state Legislature's ban on mask mandates by schools and state and local governmental entities is unconstitutional or otherwise fatally flawed.
He already made a preliminary ruling to bar, until a final decision, any enforcement of the ban. That way, schools choosing to require masks had permission to do so, which more than 100 exercised.
Last week the judge held the trial on the actual case.
You have to think he would throw out the law on a more thorough expansion of his preliminary assessment. But you have to know without question that the law, surviving in court or not, is reactionary and extremist.
It is born of momentary right-wing rage and resentment--but I repeat myself--over mask mandates during the pre-vaccination coronavirus outbreak. And it makes continuing state law of that moment's pique.
Tom Mars, the lawyer who worked for then-Gov. Mike Huckabee and Walmart in his pre-gadfly life, was a plaintiff's lawyer in the case. He drilled down to the real point at the end of last week, using his Twitter activism to post as follows: "The emergence of yet another covid variant on the heels of the recent mask mandate trial underscores the public health threat created by the [Arkansas Republican Party's] legislation banning face masks and conclusively proves that existing vaccinations aren't the panacea for covid."
That partly takes to task the clumsily contrived legal argument from the Republican-dominated Legislature that masks shouldn't be mandated because of the more effective availability of the very vaccines the right-wing legislators also don't want mandated--and which didn't exist at the time of Gov. Asa Hutchinson's statewide mask mandate last year.
But, more broadly, I take Mars' tweet also to mean simply that stuff happens requiring government authority.
Absolute laws embedded in the statute books based on today's mad fits might not work for every future instance. Lawmaking ought to be taken more seriously than this Arkansas Legislature takes it when--from that resentment and rage along with fear of losing Republican primaries--it passes any cookie-cutter extremism that comes along.
The stuff that might happen might be called Omicron.
That's why your 401(k) just plummeted. Well, panic over Omicron is why it just plummeted.
We can hope the panic will prove as overcooked as it has been premature. The fact is that we don't know yet what this Omicron might do.
But the emerging unknown can be useful, not for panic, but as a worst-case scenario for illustrating the peril of lawmaking by huffiness.
Omicron is the name global health officials have given the latest variation of the coronavirus, a mutation first reported in South Africa and now spread to several European countries. Researchers say it clearly seems more transmissible than the original and Delta, but that they can't yet credibly respond to panic that it could evade existing vaccines and wreak more worldwide health havoc faster.
Let us maintain the fervent hope that the world can better impede by lessons of experience the spread of this new variant; that the new variant will present mild symptoms, and that existing vaccines will work well against it because it's a variant, not a brand-new menace.
But let us also, in the context of reactive state lawmaking, consider the worst case--that this variant will be exponentially more speedily transmissible and largely undeterred within our systems by the existing vaccines. Let us consider that case numbers in Arkansas soar higher than ever and the hospital crunch becomes a crisis.
Let us also consider that the federal government is not in a position amid inflation to print any more money to bail us out with stimulus or recovery checks. Let us understand that we can't afford to shut our economy back down.
By such a scenario, only by a mask mandate forbidden by law in Arkansas would we have any hope of fighting the spread as people continued going to work, school and church.
Local governments couldn't enforce anything without state sanction and backup, which would be illegal by this reactionary law born of resentment.
As Hutchinson's lawyer pointed out at the trial last week, the governor couldn't even require National Guard troops to protect themselves and others by wearing masks while evacuating a virus-overrun hospital.
It may be that conservative huffiness may not be the best mood for making laws covering all situations going forward.
It may be that governments need powers for dealing with contingencies and emergencies, not laws forbidding them from addressing them.
Because stuff does indeed happen.
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.