By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

During an 81-day session, Arkansas state legislators considered 2,200 bills and passed 1,288 of them into law. That’s a lot in a short amount of time.

The session was relatively brief. The legislative volume was not out of the ordinary, but were there really 1,288 ways Arkansas needed to be fixed – especially this way, this fast?

This is not a column bashing legislators, whom I find to be generally honorable and likable, with flaws like the rest of us. Many are idealists who spent months walking the streets of their hometowns campaigning for office with no guarantee they would win.

They want all that work to mean something, which is why they filed an average of 16.4 bills per legislator. (There are 135 legislative seats, but one was vacant this session.) Many lawmakers are reluctant to vote against each other’s bills for fear of offending someone they may need later for their own legislation – plus, it just feels kind of rude. As a result, many bills are passed with overwhelming majorities, at least in one chamber. Because there are so many bills – and because legislators don’t have staff members to read them – most of the important work happens in committee. There’s just too much to do in too little time.

The Legislature’s cooperative spirit enables it generally to get its work done – unlike Congress. Under the Revenue Stabilization Act, Arkansas state government will not run a deficit this upcoming fiscal year. In contrast, the Congressional Budget Office projects Uncle Sam will add $468 billion to the national debt in 2015 – the equivalent of about $1,459 per American, and this was a good year. In contrast to the Legislature’s 1,288 acts, Congress passed 296 laws over a two-year period in 2013-14 and 283 in 2011-12, according to the Pew Research Center. In other words, the Legislature passed more than twice as many laws in 81 days as Congress passed in four years.

Congress and the Legislature exist in very different universes. Congress deals in trillions while the Legislature deals in billions. Congress governs a vast, diverse country with significant regional and partisan differences. In the Arkansas Legislature, most Democrats and Republicans have similar viewpoints. The politics is less professional in Arkansas – though it’s moving in that direction.

Still, it probably would be best if Congress were more like the Legislature and if the Legislature were a little more like Congress. Passing 1,288 laws in 81 days – that’s just too many.

So here’s a modest proposal: Each legislator should be limited to filing about 10 bills per session. That would have cut the number to 1,340 this year, creating a more deliberate process and giving legislators a chance to focus on their priorities. If a bill is only 11th on their list, it can’t be that important to them.

This should start as a flexible rule of thumb enforced by the Legislature’s culture rather than a formal, legal limit enforced by law. Issues arise late in a session – for example, banning adoption “rehoming” – and legislators need to be able to file another bill if they are the best positioned to do so.

The downside would be that legislators would write longer, broader bills – try to get two for the price of one, in other words. Yes, that’s a danger, but the more a bill tries to do, the more likely it will contain provisions that draw opposition.

In 1,288 ways, legislators over the past three months have changed Arkansas through the force of government. Some of those laws were good and some weren’t, but all of them were passed in a hurried environment that places too much emphasis on passing bills for passing bills’ sake. Lawmakers should slow down and do less, but do it more deliberately.

•••

I need to make a correction. In a column about the Legislature’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act published around April 1, I wrote that I voted against the state’s 2004 amendment banning gay marriage. I had my elections confused. I voted in 2008 against a ban on unmarried couples adopting or fostering children, which also passed. It was aimed at gays and lesbians and also affected heterosexual unmarried couples.

I’m pretty sure I voted for the gay marriage ban in 2004. I would not vote that way today. Americans should not look to the government to define marriage. Let the government focus its attention elsewhere – and pass fewer laws at the state level thanks to a 10-bill limit. See above.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas’ state government was designed to have a weak governor, and that tradition has continued. The framers of the current 1874 Constitution ensured a veto could be overridden by a simple majority vote, and later amendments, such as the one that transferred the governor’s authority to the lieutenant governor when the governor leaves the state, have continued that tradition.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson pretty much took a sledgehammer to all of that during this recent legislative session.

On issue after issue, the Legislature gave him whatever he wanted. He wanted a middle class tax cut. It passed. He wanted to buy time on the Medicaid private option, so he asked legislators to extend it for two years while they study what to do with it. Even those who campaigned on an over-my-dead-body platform said yes. When the House Committee on Public Transportation advanced a bill transferring part of general revenues to highways, Hutchinson said it didn’t fit into his budget, so the sponsor killed it, though with a promise from Hutchinson to appoint a task force to study highway funding.

Then there were the constitutional amendments. Legislative leaders indicated they didn’t really care to refer any of those to the voters, so the process looked dead in its tracks. Then Hutchinson said he wanted two – one to end the aforementioned practice of giving up his powers to the lieutenant governor, and one to increase the fund Arkansas uses to attract economic superprojects like auto plants. Both now will be on the ballot in 2016.

How did a system designed to produce a weak governor instead produce an orchestra conductor like Hutchinson? One explanation is that he displayed extraordinary political skills this session. He took potential train wrecks like the private option and Common Core off the table by appointing task forces to study them, and when all heck broke loose with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he charted a middle ground that made him a hero to both sides even though he originally supported the bill.

History also was on his side. Hutchinson is the first Republican governor to hold office with a Legislature controlled by Republicans since shortly after the Civil War. His party wanted to govern effectively rather than look like the dog that caught the car and didn’t know what to do with it.

Hutchinson had another explanation during a sit-down session with reporters in his office last Thursday.

“The strength of the governor is from the respect of the office and the recognition that we need to have a leader, and also the desire to have the governor succeed,” he said. “And so that’s impressed me, and that’ s not a Republican thing. That’s a Republican and a Democrat thing. Democrats who opposed me, they not only said it, but they showed it in actions that it is important for Arkansas that the governor succeed.”

Contrast that attitude with this statement made by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, now majority leader, during an interview with National Journal on Oct. 29, 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Democrats often point to that statement. To be fair, according to the fact-checking site Politifact, he said it in the context of discussing historical elections and said in that same interview that Republicans were willing to work with Obama “if he’s willing to meet us halfway.”

Still, Republicans’ priority from day one of Obama’s administration clearly has been to position themselves for future elections – just as Democrats in Washington will behave if a Republican presidential candidate manages to beat Hillary Clinton. The days when the president had a “honeymoon” after being elected may be just a fading memory.

Of course, it’s not the job of Democrats and Republicans to help each other succeed – particularly not in Washington, where the parties have real differences in their stated goals. But Washington could use more of Arkansas’ spirit, and Arkansas probably could use a little of Washington’s. Very little, but a little.

The latter will happen in Arkansas over the course of the next two years. Hard decisions on issues like the private option must be made, and legislators in both parties increasingly will challenge the governor.

It will get tougher for Hutchinson, just as it did for previous governors after they had been in office for a while. Unlike in Washington, most legislators still will want him to succeed, but eventually the honeymoon will be over.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Remember the scene in the movie “Jerry Maguire” where the football player portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. makes the sports agent played by Tom Cruise shout, “Show me the money!”?

The part of Gooding was played this legislative session by Rep. Jana Della Rosa, R-Rogers. The part of Tom Cruise was played by a Legislature that, unfortunately, decided to keep silent.

In Arkansas, candidates can file their reports online or on paper. The reports can be viewed one at a time in paper form at the secretary of state’s website, votenaturally.org. Because it’s not searchable, tracking the money requires painstaking research – more than most journalists will take time to do, and certainly more than most citizens have time to do.

Della Rosa, a freshman legislator, tried without success to pass a bill that would have required legislative and statewide candidates to file campaign finance reports online into a searchable database. That would have enabled any citizen with an internet connection to quickly view who contributed to an elected official’s campaign, and how much. It also would have allowed citizens to determine how much various interest groups had donated across the board, and to whom. Candidates must file their reports online in 40 states, Della Rosa argued.

Campaign finance transparency is important not because elected officials supposedly are crooks, because most aren’t. It’s important because all legislators are human beings, and human beings react in predictable ways when given certain incentives. One way is this: Generally, human beings take care of those who take care of them. If you want an idea of what legislators would like to do in office, check out their campaign websites. If you want to know how they actually will vote, check out their campaign finance reports.

Needing 67 votes, House Bill 1233 failed in the House, 48-33, with 19 not voting. Legislative opponents offered unconvincing arguments about slow internet connections, the complexities of filing online, or the possibility of being cited for an ethics violation because of an internet issue. One said he was too “dimwitted” to learn, so Della Rosa offered to help him.

Let’s be charitable and say that opponents were mostly afraid of change and were not thinking creatively. They could just mail their forms to someone with a good internet connection and pay them to input them online, just like they pay the companies that print their yard signs. Della Rosa even amended the bill to allow candidates to opt out by submitting an affidavit stating that they lacked the ability to file online and that doing so was a substantial hardship. The secretary of state’s website would explain that they had opted out. That wasn’t enough.

“I didn’t realize this when I started this, but I think one of the hardest things to do in this building is to convince people to change their own behavior,” Della Rosa told the House on March 26, just before the vote failed. “We make laws – what, we’re at a rate of about 50 a day I think right now towards the end – where we’re telling other people, ‘You should do this. You should do that. This is better for everyone. You should do that.’ One of the hardest things to do is to change your own behavior.”

Sometimes, it takes a while for a good idea to become law – even one based on common sense. This legislative session, lawmakers finally voted to make it possible for a good school district with sound finances to remain open if it falls below 350 students, 12 years after voting to close all school districts that size, no matter their performance.

Maybe Della Rosa can pass her bill in a future session. Or maybe citizens could speed up the timetable by gathering signatures for an initiated act requiring legislative and statewide candidates to file online – without the provision letting candidates opt out. Maybe Regnat Populus, the ethics-promoting citizens group, could take up the cause.

At some point, average citizens must realize that most of the issues that we argue about are like leaves on a tree – blown left and right, falling for a time, and then reappearing in a later season. Campaign finance is a root – probably the biggest root. On every issue, follow the money. Always follow the money.

For Arkansas citizens, that’s still hard to do, but at least Della Rosa is trying to show it to us.

UPDATE: Here’s how the votes stacked up in the House.

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas House Bill 1228, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, doesn’t actually say anything about gay rights. What it says is, “A state action shall not substantially burden a person’s right to exercise of religion … unless it is demonstrated that … (it) is essential to further a compelling governmental interest; and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

Of course gay rights is what led to the bill and is what everyone is talking about. But the more important issue is one fundamental to any society: To what degree should majority values be enforced on a minority?

In this case, what once was the majority view – marriage involves only a man and a woman – rapidly has become the minority view. And yet that view still is held by many people with sincere religious beliefs. The most famous example is photographer Elaine Huguenin, a Christian who was fined $7,000 after declining to take photographs at a lesbian wedding ceremony. That fine was upheld by the New Mexico Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Bob Ballinger, R-Hindsville, says the standard for protecting religious belief has been lowered and needs to be raised. Arkansas’ bill is similar to a federal law signed by President Clinton in 1993 and ones passed by 20 states. President Obama voted for Illinois’ as a state senator – though Illinois also has stronger protections for homosexuals. Most of these laws weren’t related to gay rights at the time they were passed, according to the fact-checking site Politifact.

Indiana, which recently passed a similar law, is really feeling the heat, but so is Arkansas, and it may get hotter. On Monday, protestors chanted “Shame on you!” at a stone-faced Ballinger as he left a committee room. The gay rights group Human Rights Campaign published a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News, which serves Silicon Valley, saying Arkansas is “closed for business due to discrimination.” Walmart and officials with Acxiom have opposed the bill.

A little empathy – and a little less shouting – might be in order here. If you are not gay, imagine how you might feel had you been subjected to ridicule since childhood and if the state had passed an amendment banning gay marriage in 2004? You might be wary of any law you think is aimed at you. And for those who say House Bill 1228 is legalized bigotry, would you want the government forcing you to participate in a ceremony that violates your beliefs? Then why do you want that to happen to Elaine Huguenin?

In a committee meeting on Monday, Rep. David Whitaker, D-Little Rock, asked if the bill could include a non-discrimination amendment. Ballinger said the issue should be debated and considered in a separate bill.

That would be good. It’s a difficult balancing act, but the law must try to protect people’s right to pursue happiness at the same time it protects other people’s right to believe and act as their consciences direct. Probably more time should be taken to consider how that’s done, and in fact that may be happening.

In 2004, I was one of the 25 percent of Arkansans who voted against the state’s anti-gay marriage amendment. I did so because government should not “define” marriage or stick its nose into how two people live their lives.

But I also support the intent of this bill. So I guess it comes down to this: Two people ought to be able to live how they want to live, but the government shouldn’t make another person take pictures of it.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that while we say we believe in freedom, we don’t mean it. Apparently, it’s a fundamental aspect of human nature to use government to force people to agree with us. At its worse, it’s truly terrible, as history has shown. More often, it results in a slow erosion of freedom – sometimes in one direction, sometimes the other, but ultimately to the detriment of all.

House Bill 1228 is the latest battle in this culture war – a war usually framed as involving two sides – those who want the government to enforce conservative personal beliefs, and those who want it to enforce liberal personal beliefs.

There is a third side – we who want the government to focus on protecting freedom, including for those with whom we disagree.

Join our side. All are welcome.