Category Archives: Elections

Is Arkansas a one-party state again?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

On Oct. 12, 1960, Winthrop Rockefeller hosted a “Party for Two Parties” at his Winrock Farms estate on Petit Jean Mountain. About 850 guests each paid $50 to dine on his Santa Gertrudis beef and be entertained by celebrities.

Rockefeller had made improving his impoverished state his life’s mission since moving here in 1953. Part of that mission involved creating a two-party system, which was a big task. That year, the Republican Party fielded only seven candidates for local offices throughout the entire state.

It took 50 years for Rockefeller’s dream to fully come true. After the 2010 elections, Republicans held four of the state’s six congressional seats, the governor was a Democrat, and the Legislature was about evenly split with 75 Democrats and 59 Republicans.

But that competitive two-party system may have lasted only four years. At least at the state level, Arkansas seems headed to one-party dominance again – this time, under the Republicans.

“I hope not,” said Doyle Webb, Republican Party of Arkansas chairman, when asked if that was the case the morning after his party’s historic Election Day victory. “The Republican Party has worked for years to have a two-party state. I think that the challenge of a Democrat Party and its ideas are important to the Republican Party, and I think that two parties in the marketplace of ideas, opposing ideas where the public can hear those ideas, is valuable for Arkansas.”

To be sure, Republicans will never control Arkansas like Democrats controlled Arkansas. Before Tuesday, 59 of the state’s 75 county judges were Democrats. After Tuesday, 54 still are. There will be areas of the state that will remain Democratic, just as Northwest Arkansas was the state’s lone Republican stronghold for decades.

Still, it’s hard to overstate how convincing the GOP’s win was on Tuesday. Republicans now control every congressional office and every statewide office. As late as 2009, the state Legislature was composed of 98 Democrats and 36 Republicans. Now when legislators meet in January, 88 will be Republicans and 47 will be Democrats. Ten incumbent Democratic state legislators lost, as did, of course, Sen. Mark Pryor. No Democrat running statewide won more than 43.2 percent of the vote.

In fact, the Republicans may have won more than they wanted to win. It’s one thing to control slim majorities in the Legislature with a Democratic governor, as was the case before Tuesday. With such overwhelming numbers, Republicans will be fully accountable for whatever happens in state government. It’s all on them.

Moreover, it’s much harder to maintain party discipline when the opposition no longer represents a threat. Instead of one party or two, the state in effect will have several – Democrats, and then various factions of Republicans who work with each other or with Democrats depending on the issue.

The election will have far-reaching effects beyond all this insider politics. For example, the private option is in trouble. Barely passed by the Legislature in 2013 and barely reauthorized this year, the program uses Obamacare dollars to buy private health insurance for lower-income Arkansans. Republicans have been split, but Democrats have been united in support. Now the numbers are not in its favor. It will continue only if Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson leans on his party’s legislators, which he might do if he decides he needs the program. If it goes away, 200,000 people must find health insurance somewhere else. Good or bad, that’s a big deal.

Will Rockefeller, the grandson of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller and the son of Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller, attended the GOP’s victory party Tuesday night. It was a very different kind of gathering than what his grandfather had hosted in 1960. The “Party for Two Parties” had been an introduction. This was a celebration.

One of the heirs to the family fortune is also inheriting a new political legacy. In 1960, his grandfather’s party could muster only seven candidates for local offices. Today’s it’s not only the majority, but it’s the state’s dominant political force, and likely will be for years to come.

The people rule, or micromanage?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The election is over. How did you do?

I’m not asking how many winners you picked. Being in the majority and being right are not the same. The question is, how well do you think you performed your hiring responsibilities?

Most of us probably made a reasonably informed choice in the U.S. Senate race. Despite all the misinformation we’ve heard over the last 18 months, most of us were familiar with the candidates and had an idea of where they stood and what they were about. Same for the governor’s race, and probably for the U.S. House of Representatives. Most of us probably were confident about the more straightforward ballot issues that affect real people – whether or not to raise the minimum wage, and whether or not alcohol should be sold in every county.

The farther down the ballot we went, however, the less confident we were. Let’s be honest: When it came to some of the lesser offices, most of us were just guessing based on not very good reasons. Nothing against him personally, but I’m convinced that Charlie Daniels made a career in Arkansas politics partly because he had the same name as the guy who sings “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Could we trim these lo-o-ong ballots just a little? Could we at least let the governor appoint three positions that few Arkansans care about: treasurer, auditor, and land commissioner? I’m not sure why we’re electing some of these local offices, either, such as the county coroner.

On Election Day, voters should be responsible for selecting policymakers who make and enforce the laws that govern our lives. Then we should monitor those policymakers to ensure their decisions reflect our priorities. In other words, we should be our state’s board of directors.

Governors, mayors and county judges should function like the president of our business. They should be responsible for hiring those who simply perform a specific bureaucratic function – such as dispose of tax-delinquent property, which is what the land commissioner does. I as a voter don’t need to elect that person any more than I need to elect the person in charge of the landscaping along the highway. The governor already appoints positions that are far more important, such as highway commissioners, and there doesn’t seem to be a movement to elect those.

The objection to appointing these positions is that it would give the governor more power and open the door for more cronyism. Maybe he’d just hire his buddies for these three jobs that don’t pay very much.

That’s a concern. To counteract that, the public must hold the governor accountable for potential misdeeds in his administration. If state government functioned more like a business and the treasurer were appointed, then after Martha Shoffner accepted those bribes, the governor would have fired her, and then he would have had to stand before his shareholders – the state of Arkansas – and explain all red-faced why he hired this person as state treasurer in the first place. Instead, we the voters had elected someone we’d never heard of to do a job few of us can even describe.

Americans are raised to believe that more is always better. Two scoops are better than one, and a super-size is better than a medium.

But more voting does not necessarily lead to a better democracy. At the same time, not enough voting opens the door for insider cronyism. I don’t know where the sweet spot is, but voters should focus on those offices that make policies and actually run the government, and not be expected to hire those simply doing a job. After all, our state’s motto is, “The people rule,” not, “The people micromanage.”

Issue 1: More democratic, or more meddling?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Should legislators be entrusted with more power at the expense of the governor and state agencies? You’ll decide by voting yes or no on Issue 1.

The proposal would amend the Arkansas Constitution so that all state agency administrative rules would require approval by a legislative committee before they could go into effect. The committee could make those approvals during legislative sessions or during the interim between sessions. According to the text of the amendment, the Legislature would define how that process occurs.

If I were arguing in support of Issue 1, I’d say this: The Legislature is state government’s most democratic institution. It’s the most transparent and the closest to the people. For average Arkansans, administrative rules hatched by state agencies often are no different than laws: It’s still the government telling us what we can and cannot do. Any new such potential restriction of our liberty should be approved by elected representatives reflecting the will of the people.

Why vote against Issue 1? There are practical and constitutional concerns.

The obvious practical concern is that it will lead to too much legislative meddling and too much politics in day-to-day administrative activities.

Might legislators hold hearings, for example, about when hunting season begins? Certainly – not just about the day, but about the hour. Maybe even the minute.

Legislators generally serve the state pretty well, but sometimes they involve themselves in areas that really aren’t their business and where they aren’t experts. Even though it’s a part-time job, they already gather for regular sessions, fiscal sessions, special sessions, and committee meetings. How could these busy, part-time public servants possibly consider every state agency rule with any sort of competence? Sometimes the details should be left to the full-timers.

The constitutional concern is that Issue 1 fundamentally changes state government’s power structure.

First, it alters the separation of powers between the Legislature and the governor by involving legislators in day-to-day decisions that traditionally have been handled by the executive branch.

Moreover, it potentially gives a lot of power to a few people. In the Legislature, committees are very important, but not all-important. Bills must pass a committee in order to advance, but ultimately both the House and Senate must vote yes or no, followed by the governor’s signature. If Issue 1 passes, the buck stops with “a legislative committee.” What committee, and who will serve on it? The amendment says only vaguely that the Legislature “may provide by law” for one.

This amendment isn’t necessary. If its purpose is to ensure state agencies function democratically, those mechanisms already exist in most cases. Most agencies are under the authority of the state’s governor, elected statewide by voters from Crossett to Bentonville. Agencies hold public hearings where regular Arkansans can comment on proposed rules. Finally, the Legislature already exercises power over state agency rule-making. It funds the agencies. It can write laws that prohibit bad rules from being enacted in the first place. If it doesn’t like an agency’s rule, it can pass a law overturning it.

I started this column by asking if legislators should be entrusted with more power at the expense of the governor and state agencies. Actually, none of them are supposed to be fully trusted in a democracy.

The current system of checks and balances allows that distrust to be exercised in a healthier way than this proposal would. The way it is now, state agencies do their job under the leadership of the governor, while the Legislature has the first say and the last say through the laws it writes. Issue 1 moves that needle too far toward the Legislature and will cause more problems than it will solve.

I’m voting no. You?

After a long campaign, here are reasons to vote FOR Cotton or Pryor

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

While sitting in a crowded waiting room the other day, my wife overheard a woman say she didn’t know what to do about the Senate race. Mark Pryor votes with Obama, the woman said, and Tom Cotton gets all his money from billionaires.

She no doubt reflects a lot of voters. After a year-and-a-half of campaigning and more than 50,000 television ads according to The Center for Public Integrity, the election for U.S. Senate is largely about these caricatures the opposing campaigns have painted about each other.

Who’s to blame? The campaigns, of course, for selling it, and voters for buying it. Members of the media are guilty, too, of course. We mostly just repackage the products the campaigns provide.

So I’m done. We all know why not to vote for these candidates. Here’s why you should vote for them.

You should vote for Tom Cotton because he’s disciplined, and strong, and brave. As a younger man, he took a break from his promising legal career to volunteer for tours of combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a congressman, he’s shown he will not back down from a fight and will not compromise his convictions. He’s taken unpopular stances he knew would be used against him: for raising the retirement age, because the system needs reform; against Hurricane Sandy relief, because politicians had used that tragedy to pack the bill with nonemergency projects; against the farm bill, because most of the money is spent on food stamps, a program that he believes has grown too big in recent years.

You also should vote for him because, if Republicans take over the Senate while keeping the House, then Congress might again function at least somewhat like a legislative body that serves as a check and balance on the executive branch, instead of remaining the divided and dysfunctional mess it’s become.

On the other hand, you should vote for Mark Pryor because he’s compassionate, and determined, and willing to consider others’ points of view. He’s shown he can play the hand dealt him – a good one as the son of a popular former governor and senator, and a bad one fighting cancer or running under the same party label as an unpopular president.

As a senator, he’s been willing to meet with others in the middle when so much of that body has camped out on the wings. When the government shut down, he was part of a group of 14 practical-minded senators who bridged the gap and helped it reopen. He does not forget that the big-picture legislation he passes affects average Arkansans. He also does some of the little things, like helping create a database that keeps track of truck drivers who test positive for drugs and alcohol.

You also should vote for him because, after a half-century of one-party rule under the Democrats, Arkansas should not become a one-party state under the Republicans.

There are reasons to vote for the other two candidates, too. Both Libertarian Nathan LaFrance and Green Party nominee Mark Swaney have put their names on the ballot knowing they represent parties that have no money, no infrastructure, and no chance of winning. They’ve done this because those parties most closely represent their deeply held convictions. They’ve campaigned at their own personal expense and on their own time. When given the chance, they’ve proven able to eloquently explain and defend their positions.

At this point at the end of a long campaign, many of us have determined that all our choices are all bad. Certainly there is much about Cotton and Pryor that I cannot support – especially the way they have torn down each other. Regardless, one of these two men will represent us, and our decision as voters should be based at least partly on choosing who would do it better instead of simply avoiding the one who would do it worse. They both have flaws, and they both have admirable qualities.

So let’s try to vote FOR something, even if all we are voting for is the democratic process itself. People died for this.

Libertarian LaFrance pledges to limit own term, donate part of salary

By Steve Brawner

Nathan LaFrance of Bella Vista, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in Arkansas, today announced a “Leading by Example” pledge stating that he would serve no more than two terms if elected and would donate all after-tax income earned above his 2014 income to chaNathan LaFrance Candidate photorities serving Arkansans.

LaFrance, an employee of the Walmart corporate offices’s Energy Department, said in a press release that he is promising “to live the changes he will fight for in Washington, D.C.” He supports term limits in Congress, including two terms for senators, and he proposes “the phase out and elimination of all federal income redistribution programs, to be replaced by private charitable organizations.”

As part of the pledge, LaFrance also promises that his office “will be available to all Arkansans on a first come, first serve basis.  … A corporate CEO will wait their turn in line behind a dairy farmer; a millionaire will wait their turn in line behind a working parent struggling to put food on the table.”

LaFrance received 2.5 percent support in a poll released this week by Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College.