Have you noticed that the sneering young Dardanelle Sand Lizard has become daddy to other state Republicans, especially the timid older ones like U.S. Sen. John Boozman and U.S. Rep. French Hill?
Boozman was recently violated by a hidden-camera trick when a faux-friendly questioner lured him into telling what he thought was private truth. He said the presidential race of 2020 was over when the Electoral College said so based on what the states had said. He said it was crazy for Donald Trump to contend that the vice president had the supreme singular power to choose the president.
But Boozman also said, "That's Tom Cotton's opinion," as if to suggest the senior senator's statement of obvious fact lacked validity until nestled in the junior senator's superior sanction.
Have you seen the Boozman television commercial showcasing his endorsement by Cotton, who does most of the talking? Have you seen Boozman's more recent commercial in which he doesn't speak, but Cotton does, to say "we work as a team"? It is clear Cotton is captain. Cotton might as well say, "Don't worry about John. I tell him what to do."
Do you remember when Hill conducted a town-hall meeting on health care by having Cotton at his side to help him? Some of those liberals were so scary, bringing up their pre-existing conditions and rolling their wheelchairs toward the stage.
Remember when Hill was in a tight race for re-election with state Sen. Clarke Tucker but got fortified at the end through stealthy Facebook ads targeted to voters who supported Trump but not necessarily other Republicans? The ads alleged that Tucker supported rampaging gangs of terrorist Mexican immigrants, which sane people knew to be false. The ads were produced, strategically targeted to the non-sane and paid for by Cotton's political action committee. They ignited the deplorable turnout.
So, last week, Cotton came in with a friend-of-the-court brief to support the Republican state Legislature's gerrymander to protect and advance Hill's political standing by diluting the Black voting strength in Pulaski County in the 2nd District in the new congressional districting plan.
What the Republican Legislature did was take 20,000 or so mostly Black voters in southeastern and southern Pulaski County out of the 2nd District and divide them among the 1st and 4th districts, while adding 20,000 or so nearly all-white voters from Cleburne to the 2nd.
Speculation is that there are more Confederate flags in the 2nd District than there were before.
The point of the Republican remapping was that Hill, while surviving every two years, was having to fret too much. Sparing him the inconvenience of thousands of mostly Democratic Black voters in Pulaski in exchange for hill-county white conservatives would fix his fretting.
Naturally, aggrieved parties filed federal suit against this gerrymander. Now Cotton, because he must stick his nose in everything to protect the runts of the Republican litter, got a couple of Virginia lawyers to put together a friend-of-the-court brief to stand up for Hill.
Cotton's brief says that, sure, yeah, it's a partisan gerrymander, and asks: What of it? Gerrymandering to protect partisan interest is not illegal.
His brief acknowledges that diluting Black voting strength would be actionable if there was proven discriminatory intent. Here, he said, the purpose was simply to advance Republican interest; that, quite by coincidence, the mapping and math equalization to achieve that partisan advancement necessitated carving out these two pieces of the 2nd District that bordered the population-declining 1st and 4th Districts across southern and eastern Arkansas.
That most of those carved out were Black was just an oops, you see.
The legal issue, then, is whether Republicans decided to move out mostly Black voters and move in overwhelmingly Republican white voters without meaning any politically weakening harm to the Black voters.
The questions are whether there was another just-as-convenient way, or other just-as-convenient ways, to move out 2nd District residents to equalize the 1st and 4th districts, and whether the harm to Black voting interest was made by so-called "cracking," meaning taking mutual-interest Black voters previously joined as a 2nd District force and not only moving them, but dividing them into two districts where they are more outnumbered than they were in the 2nd.
Might Republicans have carved out Trump voters in White County for the 1st and Trump voters in Saline County for the 4th? But wouldn't that have made Hill fret more?
I wouldn't bet on this lawsuit as it wends its way through the Republican 8th Circuit or even to the Republican U.S. Supreme Court. Just as partisanship is all right in redistricting, so it often is in the federal judiciary.
But the initial three-judge 8th Circuit panel hearing the case looks two-thirds thoughtful, with two solid Arkansas judges and only one Trump nominee (from Minnesota).
Hill might be made to fret a bit in round one. But Cotton can hold his hand.
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.