The state Senate probably will vote next week to reinstate Sen. Alan Clark's seniority effective in 2025, resolving to let ethics-defying bygones be bygones.
Maybe Sen. Stephanie Flowers will deliver another of her stirringly bitter denouncements of Clark and her Senate oppressors. She has a history of legitimate grievance and a gift for expressing contempt for the ruling establishment.
On Wednesday, Sen. Jimmy Hickey rose to make a motion. It was that the Senate would agree that, when it assembles after the election of November 2024 for its organizational meeting for its 2025 session, Clark's loss of seniority as a part of his punishment last year for ethics transgressions would end. He would be restored to previous seniority status, thus vaulting back ahead of most of the senators--including Hickey--to qualify for better committee choices in that organizational gathering.
Hickey brought the initial charge against Clark, which was that Clark prevailed upon a fellow senator, Mark Johnson of Maumelle, to sign him in for per-diem expenses for attending a meeting he did not attend.
Hickey stressed that the current Senate could not take any action now or in November 2024 that would bind the next Senate taking the oath in January 2025. But he said he thought it appropriately transparent to make clear now his and others' intent regarding Clark.
The seniority suspension was plainly imposed as a two-year sentence, Hickey said. We need to move on, he said.
Flowers, the sometimes-fiery Black lawyer and Democrat from Pine Bluff, rose at that point to ask what the heck.
You see, Clark did not get the seniority suspension for the per-diem fraud. He got it for subsequently filing a weird get-even complaint against Flowers because she had received per-diem for Zooming from home during the pandemic through a Senate staff error and paid back the overpayment in full as it was calculated by the Senate staff.
Clark filed no complaint against a lame-duck fellow conservative senator who'd received similar overpayments.
The Senate condemned Clark's complaint against Flowers as frivolous and abusive and chose at that time to suspend his seniority, putting him 35th of 35.
Flowers rose to speak against Hickey's motion. She delivered one of her patented tirades of disgust.
She said she hardly knew what to say about such a stunning personal affront. She decried that senators would forgive officially Clark's false attack on her for what they had judged at the time to be a "spurious" personal accusation. Yet no one had said a word, she said, about the seniority status she lost by no fault of her own but merely so that a Republican could take her long-held seat on Legislative Council.
That happened in the 4th District caucus earlier this year. Young whipper-snapper white Republicans voted to revoke the rule making seniority the basis for membership from the caucus on the Legislative Council. Flowers was first in seniority in that caucus. Another Black woman and Democratic senator, Linda Chesterfield, was second. Yet both were cast off the Council by the brazen abuse of partisan power as an idle plaything.
Chesterfield got back on Legislative Council through the Democratic caucus. Flowers didn't want to stay on by another route if her young Republican colleagues, after always talking so nicely to her face, were going to do her that way.
Consider how Flowers might feel: A Republican senator who targeted her for a frivolous ethics complaint and got sanctioned for that wrongdoing was to get his seniority restored while no one in power was proposing to let her back on the Legislative Council though she did nothing wrong in getting kicked off.
Flowers pleaded with her colleagues to vote down Hickey's motion. She said that, if they didn't, she'd take it as a revelation they were no better than a "doggone scoundrel," as she assessed Clark, who, she said, had never apologized to her.
The motion failed, getting 16 votes but needing 18. But there were 10 Republican non-voters, either cowed by Flowers or first-termers addled by the personal controversy.
For that sound and fury, Hickey probably will bring the motion back up next week and pass it with addled non-voting Republicans fortified in partisan unity.
And the fact is that, absent the motion's passage, nothing would prevent the Senate from voting at that organizational meeting in November 2024 to restore Clark's seniority.
For that matter, no Senate membership can dictate any rule on the next Senate. Whatever is done unofficially before January 2025 would require being done officially by the next group of sworn-in senators.
As for Flowers' race-tinged banishment from Legislative Council members by power-obsessed white Republicans, that could only be revisited by the 4th District caucus in place in January 2025. The caucus could vote to restore the old seniority system of membership and permit Flowers to return to her former Council membership.
That would amount to a thoughtful courtesy reflecting a similar spirit as applied to Clark. Thus it seems unlikely.
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.