Everything weird, woeful and wonderful about Arkansas politics and government took center stage Wednesday afternoon.
As one conditioned by the years to think in terms of newspaper headlines, I conjured these: "Governor blasts bills, OKs them" and "GOP governor defends minority voting strength, GOP chairman fires back."
I know of no other state that meets itself coming and going quite like that. Most states are conventionally left or right. We're ... well, we're Arkansas.
We're conservative, indeed currently extreme in terms of noise made and influence wielded by a general minority that is decisive in Republican primaries, which are tantamount to election.
But we're peculiar with our sustaining penchant for governors, at least until the looming dark cloud of Sarah Sanders turns us into a Trump outpost, who govern with finessed practicality rather than partisanship or philosophy.
Bill Clinton once vetoed a gasoline tax increase and lobbied to have his veto overridden--so that he could say he opposed the tax but improved the roads. Mike Huckabee spouted right-wing rhetoric while expanding children's health insurance, overseeing the biggest tax increase in the state's history and ridiculing "Shiite Republicans" who "drink a different Jesus juice than I do" on immigration. Mike Beebe managed to serve as governor for eight years without ever giving his outright view of abortion.
Now our lame-duck governor, Asa Hutchinson, who prosecuted Clinton and was once considered Huckabee's right-wing Republican rival, occupies the left flank of Arkansas politics merely by being logical and sometimes fair-minded.
So, Wednesday afternoon could have been any other afternoon in Arkansas.
Hutchinson, the consummate slicing-dicing pragmatist, came out at his press briefing and said the Legislature had sent him two bad bills from last week's extended session, then proceeded to explain with firm conviction all that was bad about those bills while saying he wasn't going to sign them. Or veto them.
His third option was to take action by taking no action, meaning do nothing to the bills, by which they'd become law without his signature. That's what he chose.
And it made perfect sense.
Hardened social-media liberals deplored Hutchinson for being invisible or without backbone, because he allowed the no-signature law. Right-wing state senator Trent Garner assailed him for being "MIA," because he forcefully criticized the bills.
Those reactions mean you hit the ball solid.
The latest polling shows Hutchinson with a 58 percent approval rating and the Legislature with a 46 percent approval rating. But that's irrelevant. We never get to that number in Arkansas. The Democrats are so marginalized by national liberalism that everything gets decided by the best execution of the extreme-right belly flop in the Republican primary.
At this rate Sanders and Leslie Rutledge will show up for their GOP gubernatorial debate, if they have one, attired in the latest in holstered assault weaponry.
The bills in question Wednesday afternoon--there were four of them, but they were two in duplicate, for some reason--would, in one case, put requirements on employers to provide ways for employees to avoid covid vaccines mandated by the Biden administration, and, in the other, redraw the state's congressional districts in a spiteful way to cut Pulaski County into three districts because it votes Democratic. In that process, the map would remove majority-minority precincts from Pulaski and then split them again between two other congressional districts.
Hutchinson said the vaccine bill was a mandate itself on business that, by its mere debate, served to undercut the state's vital push to get more people vaccinated.
But he said, hey, it has no emergency clause, so, by his letting it become law, there'll be 90 days in purgatory to get the bill appropriately sued.
He said the Pulaski County carve-up was ... well, he said "troubling," which is Asa-speak for excremental.
He recalled that he found himself litigating a redistricting suit 30 years ago during which he became sensitized to the appropriate concern among minority groups not to have their voting strength diluted.
But he said, hey, the U.S. Constitution places congressional districting in the hands of the Legislature and, by his letting this map become law, the inevitable litigation against the plan could get cooking.
The state Republican Party chairman then put out a statement defending the districting plan, siding with the statewide minority that is an intraparty majority and against the man who, as governor, is supposedly the titular head of the party.
Through it all, no one declared outright the basic factor, which is that Arkansas is governed by an antique constitution written by people who fled the Carolinas and Tennessee because those places had gotten too big and fancy, and who wanted the least governmental oversight possible.
Fearing a governor who could actually govern, the state's founding fathers provided that, yeah, a governor could veto a bill, but the Legislature could override by a simple majority vote.
Another day of per-diem collection and sinister chortling by wingnut legislators--that's all Hutchinson would have accomplished by vetoes.
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.