They're having a trial all week in federal court in Little Rock on the big Arkansas law against gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.
That's the one that says such treatments are forbidden in the state no matter what pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists and parents think about a child's gender-identify situation.
Lawyers say they need two weeks of testimony, actually.
Either way, it beats all to heck the time spent gathering information on the issue when the state Legislature made the first-of-its-kind law last year usurping the practice of medicine for right-wing legislating.
That bill, HB1570 by Rep. Robin Lundstrom of Elm Springs, was instant law, essentially, upon filing early in the last regular session on Feb. 25, 2021. It certainly was well on its way by March 2 when an amendment added 45 House co-sponsors and 18 Senate co-sponsors.
It takes 51 votes to pass a bill in the House, and, in the Senate, 18, meaning the co-sponsor list was a lay-down hand and all anyone needed to know.
The problem with the Arkansas legislative process is not only that it's the playground of extreme conservatives. It's the supersonic recklessness.
These legislators breeze into town for a regular session of 60 to 80 days every other year. Instantly they start filing bills reflecting their latest arising aversions to supposed liberalism. Why, they say, now they're making little girls of little boys or vice versa, and only the Arkansas General Assembly can stop it.
Those bills promptly get sent to committees dominated by like-minded right-wingers, also known as co-sponsors, who know better than to vote "no," or even "whoa." In the gender-identity context, constituents back home would deem them supporters of woke perversion.
Lundstrom's bill came out of committee March 9 and got passed by the House the next day. It came out of Senate committee on March 22 and got passed March 29 on the floor, where, remember, 18 of the 35 members were co-sponsors.
Then, on April 5, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, one of the last reasonable Republicans, vetoed the bill. He explained that, as a small-government conservative, he opposed political usurpation of both doctor authority and parental rights. He was especially sensitized by learning that the bill would end therapies in mid-process for already confused or distressed children.
The House and Senate overrode his veto the next day. Voila. Legislators had given themselves medical licenses. They had adopted children for purposes of medical care.
There was only one set of brakes, and it belonged to the federal courts, which granted an injunction to consider a suit against the law's constitutionality, which is being done with testimony all this week.
Democratic legislators tell me that a few of the more reasonable Republican legislators apologized to them for their votes and complained about such matters getting sped to the floor. They said that left them no choice but to go along or face the music back home at Sunday School, in the coffee shop and via voice mail from neighbors.
It doesn't have to be that way. The Legislature makes its own rules and designs its own processes. Its leaders could slow things--make them studious and deliberative--but only if the members permitted, which they won't as long as they fear that townsfolk would vote them out for siding with information and deliberation.
I personally find no fair quarrel with a legislator saying that he or she is concerned about gender-affirming care for gender-dysphoric children. I find no fair quarrel with that legislator wanting to hold the medical community to account.
I find no fair quarrel with that legislator persuading others to call for an exhaustive interim study--with per diems paid all around--to gather relevant materials and take testimony from doctors, parents and even, or especially, affected children.
I would even be open--after all that fact-gathering and testimony-taking, perhaps taking a year or more, and depending on what was found--to a legislatively mandated state Medical Board process to write new and presumably tight regulations governing whether and how such treatments could be undertaken.
But I would want only physicians to compile the regulations and I would insist that legislative committees authorized to sign off on such regulations could not deny the implementation of any of those regulations except by a super-majority vote.
That would let elected legislators air appropriate concerns and play a significant role in pursuit of data-driven and peer- reviewed revision.
But such concern should never be turned into law within 30 days by mere filing of a bill with passage pre-emptively assured by the number of co-sponsors.
There is a way, if we'll accept it, to let legislators be only legislators, and parents be parents, and physicians be physicians and troubled children be less troubled.
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.