In Asa Hutchinson's Arkansas, gasoline poses an emergency but guns don't.
"We need a little patience here" on new gun laws, the governor said Thursday at a session with reporters in which he called for imminent relief from rising gasoline costs.
He expressed a political and cultural reality and maybe a practical fact.
He explained that we can use the school summer vacation to deliver grants to schools to get them better prepared for possible threats. But, he said, no new state laws on guns would eliminate in the foreseeable future the gun threat for which schools must be better prepared.
On the other hand, with $5-a-gallon gasoline looming and a state budget surplus of more than $600 million likely to present itself when the state fiscal year ends June 30, we'll confront a specific economic burden to working people that we could at least partially relieve with this new pot of extraneous cash.
It seems cold and harsh to say or imply that gasoline is more urgent than guns. But you have to put it in context. You also have to put it in its place, which is a gun-worshipping state that relies for commerce on motor fuel that propels pickups down the highway.
Hutchinson confirmed his interest in bringing legislators into yet another special session this summer to accelerate the effective date of scheduled income-tax reductions and otherwise seek ways to give people direct compensation for fuel costs.
He also said he'd like to take maybe $50 million of that surplus and establish a grant program for capital improvement of security systems and structures at public schools.
But reporters wanted to know about new gun laws such as expanded background checks, a red-flag law, secure-storage laws and raising the age for purchasing an assault-style rifle from 18 to 21.
In response, Hutchinson hailed U.S. senators who are engaged in reportedly productive bipartisan talks about those issues. But he said he contemplated none of those proposals for the special session for relieving gasoline and grocery costs.
As he reminded during the session with reporters, his presidential interest is that the country needs a conservative with common sense. He thinks he is one.
Speaking of that: It is better right now to be a governor of a state with a big surplus underwritten with big chunks of borrowed federal cash than a president in a White House adrift, which is how an NBC report described the latter last week.
Why Hutchinson with a big surplus in a small pond would want Joe Biden's position adrift in this debacle of a country and world is something of a mystery, other than that Asa will have no job at all after this year and perhaps is keen enough on himself to think he could do Joe's better.
Biden reportedly is irritated at aides who, for nearly a year and a half, have scripted his every utterance and choreographed his every move. He says he'd rather be himself--verbally undisciplined, sometimes brutally candid, and occasionally an exaggerator and gaffe-prone. Indeed, he could probably equal his 39 percent approval his way.
At any rate, governors of both parties have taken the initiative, from New York and Connecticut to Florida and Georgia, to suspend state gasoline taxes, usually for three months. But Hutchinson has said he doesn't want to do that in Arkansas because infrastructure maintenance is vital and those highway-user taxes go right back into highway needs.
Conceivably the state could suspend gasoline taxes at the pump for a time certain for the motoring public and send a sum of general revenue surplus to the highway fund to make for the pump-tax loss. But Hutchinson has been more interested in, first, pushing up the timetable for already approved income-tax rate reductions. That would result in immediate withholding relief for workers. Then he wants to work with legislators to see if there is an efficient and fair way to tap the surplus to get gasoline-relief dollars straight to the people.
Sen. Jimmy Hickey, the lame-duck Senate president pro tem, told me weeks ago that he'll need to see the administrative costs of such payments and make a determination of fairness and efficiency in terms of who gets the money and whether it's effectively offsetting driving costs or just floating out there directionless.
In a strict political sense, it's hard to imagine strong resistance to distributing taxpayers' overpayments back to them while gasoline and grocery costs pose threats to basic needs. That's unless this governor was so politically tone-deaf as to gum that up with a bill or two to restrict gun sales.
And this one has made clear he isn't tone-deaf. So, he'll stick to relieving gasoline-cost burdens in his province and otherwise stand back and give an "A" for effort to national senators daring to tackle guns.
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.