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

This is the part of the legislative session where I look forward to lawmakers going home, because they do not always listen to me.

Last week, I asked them to approach their jobs with restraint after they voted to ban communities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances. That law was passed after Fayetteville enacted such an ordinance through its city council and then rescinded it by a vote of the people – an indication that democracy was working just fine there.

Then this past week, the Senate voted 30-1 to require all public school districts to teach cursive writing by the third grade. Some schools have stopped teaching this skill. Only Sen. Bruce Maloch, D-Magnolia, voted no. It passed in the House, 66-21.

It’s my experience as an observer that most state legislators are honorable, admirable and likable. Go to the State Capitol on any given day, and you may be encouraged by the civility and sobriety of most of what happens.

But legislators are people, and people tend to want to use power to make others see things their way. Legislators should beware of that temptation.

There is evidence that learning cursive writing may be beneficial for students. It may be good to write the entire word without lifting the pencil, and by learning both cursive and print, students learn to write the word in two different ways. A 2006 study by Dr. Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington psychologist, found that writing in cursive, writing in print, and keyboarding each activate different parts of young brains. Important historical documents were written in cursive or something like it. Someday, today’s kids may want to read their great-granddad’s letters home from the war.

Opponents, meanwhile, say it’s an antiquated and increasingly irrelevant skill in a digital age, and other skills are more important. When is the last time you wrote a capital “Q” in cursive?

But the question isn’t who’s right. The question is, who decides, after what process? Legislators, after debating the issue in a couple of committee meetings? Or local school educators, using their professional judgement while considering their communities’ unique situations?

Schools didn’t drop cursive writing because their teachers are lazy. They did it after weighing the benefits of teaching cursive against the realities that they have too much else to do, in large part because of No Child Left Behind, the Common Core, and other decisions by others, including the Arkansas Legislature. Teachers were not lined up outside the Capitol chanting for the right to teach cursive writing.

As is sometimes the case, there seems to have been very little thought given to this latest government mandate. The sponsor, Rep. Kim Hendren, R-Gravette, conceived of it because his granddaughter could not write in cursive. It was first debated in the House Education Committee on Feb. 10, where it was passed that day, and by Feb. 19 it was sent to the governor. It seemed like a good idea, and some legislators probably didn’t want to oppose a colleague whose vote they may need later.

Contrast this educational mandate with another one passed by the Legislature – Hutchinson’s requirement that all high schools teach a computer science class. Hutchinson spent a year talking about the issue on the campaign trail and made it the subject of his best commercial, the one with his granddaughter playing basketball. The public and professional educators had a chance to thoroughly vet the proposal. There was little opposition.

That’s the way to pass a mandate.

The opportunity to assert power should send chills up lawmakers’ spines. They should hesitate to do so, especially if they know little about a subject, and there are people who know more because of their education and experience, and those people make decisions at a local level, and those decision-makers are accountable to voters, as educators are through their locally elected school boards.

Notice I used the word “hesitate.” If local control were always the rule, it would have taken a lot longer to desegregate schools. Instead, legislators should take things issue by issue, and slow down. When asked to substitute their judgement for the judgements of others, they should be inclined to vote no unless given a really good reason to vote yes.

In other words, they should have left this one to the local schools.

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

Arkansas is now a Republican state, and there is a strain in Republicanism (and in the Democratic Party, and in human nature in general) that seeks to assert power. It has already happened once in a big way this legislative session. Legislators should resist the temptation to do it again.

I’m referring to Senate Bill 202, which makes it illegal for local communities to create their own classes of citizens protected from discrimination. It passed easily in both houses. Gov. Asa Hutchinson opposed the bill because it usurps local control but, unwilling to fight this battle and issue a probably useless veto, he is letting it become law without his signature.

The new law comes in the wake of a local ordinance passed by the Fayetteville City Council last year that would have banned discrimination in the workplace against various groups – but really, it was all about gay rights. Business and religious groups collected enough signatures for a popular vote to overturn the measure. Voters narrowly overturned it. The Eureka Springs City Council recently passed its own now apparently meaningless anti-discrimination ordinance.

The sponsors of the bill said they did not want businesses to have to deal with varying rules city by city – which, by the way, happens all the time. Every locality has its own rules about a lot of things. Arkansas is a collection of wet and dry counties, gambling islands, speed traps, etc.

Senate Bill 202 ultimately isn’t about gay rights. It’s about how decisions are made in a democracy, which is why this was a bad bill. Each situation is different, but the principle should be that, whenever possible, decisions should be made at the level of government that is closest to the people. We regular folks have less say about what happens in the State Capitol than we do in our hometowns, and we have virtually no influence over what happens in Washington, D.C.

It’s often said that states are the laboratories of democracy, where ideas can be tried in one place and then adopted, improved or discarded elsewhere. It is good thing that California can pass all kinds of regulations and that Texas can be halfway its own country and that Arkansas can create the Medicaid private option and, then, if it chooses, get rid of it. We learn from each other’s successes and mistakes.

The same is true for local communities. What would have happened had state government minded its own business on this particular issue? Maybe there would have been a flood of discrimination lawsuits in Fayetteville that would have shut down businesses and put people out of work. Or, maybe Fortune 500 companies would have been attracted to the community because they saw it as forward-thinking. Either way, Fayetteville would have determined its next course of action, and other communities could have learned lessons and applied them to their own decision-making processes in their own city halls.

Fayetteville did not need to be rescued by Captain Legislature. The elected City Council openly passed an ordinance. Some people didn’t like the ordinance and collected signatures to overturn it. The citizens of Fayetteville debated the issue publicly and privately. The voters had their say, and majority will prevailed. Until legislators stepped in, maybe the City Council could have considered other ways of meeting the ordinance’s goals without possibly stifling commerce and infringing on religious beliefs. Or maybe in the next election, the people would have voted everybody out and been done with it.

In other words, real democracy was happening there. I’m having trouble seeing what state legislators meeting three hours away in Little Rock needed to fix.

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

We are witnessing the smoothest legislative session in recent memory, thanks to its placement on history’s timeline and the political skills of the state’s leadership, particularly Gov. Asa Hutchinson. He should enjoy this while it lasts.

I say it’s the smoothest because of what it could have been. Going into the session, the debate over the private option threatened to dominate the session. The program, which uses federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private insurance for 200,000 lower-income Arkansans, barely passed in 2013 and barely was reauthorized in 2014. A number of freshman legislators had campaigned promising to end it, but supporters weren’t about to let it die, either. In presenting to the House one of the bills that will keep it afloat for two years, Rep. Kelley Linck, R-Flippin, said it has been perhaps the state’s most debated issue since secession. That was laying it on a little thick, but not that much.

Two things happened, the most important being that for the first time since shortly after the Civil War, Republicans control the Legislature and the governor’s office, and they do not want to give their party’s leader a hard time. One of the private option’s most influential opponents, Senate Majority Leader Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs, is Hutchinson’s nephew and wanted to find a way forward. It’s not Mike Ross’ fault, but if a Democratic governor had been elected with a Republican Legislature, the debate over the private option would be deadlocked at this point.

The other thing that happened was that Hutchinson smartly took the issue off the table by proposing to fund it for two years while a task force studies overall health care reform, including changing the private option into something else. The proposal, sponsored by Hendren, gave opponents a reason to vote yes in hopes of ending the program at the end of 2016. Legislative Democrats knew there is a time to fight and a time to make peace, and this was not the time to fight. It not only passed, but it passed easily.

The rest of Hutchinson’s agenda is sailing through the Legislature. He’s already signed into law the middle class tax cut that was the centerpiece of his campaign. His budget has been meeting little resistance. His bill to require all high schools to offer computer science will have no problem passing.

He should not get used to this. Some of the legislators who campaigned against the private option but then voted for Hutchinson’s proposal could face primary opponents in the next election because they didn’t vote “no” enough. The task force will recommend significant changes and will no doubt want to change the private option’s name, but it won’t simply recommend ending it. That means the debate we’ve had the past three sessions will resurface in 2017, if it doesn’t do so earlier. The 2017 legislative session will not be the first in 150 years that Republicans control both the Legislature and the governor’s office. By then, it will be the norm. Factions will develop, and dissidents will be emboldened.

In other words, Republicans soon will start looking a lot like Democrats always looked when they were the undisputed majority party.

Earlier in his career, Hutchinson was a Republican candidate when being a Republican candidate wasn’t cool. Now, he’s a Republican governor when being a Republican governor may not again be this easy.

That’s not to discredit his accomplishments, because he ran a great campaign, transitioned well, and has performed effectively during his first month in office. His leadership has been thoughtful, measured and fair. A lesser governor with fewer political skills would not be this successful, regardless of what historical winds were at his or her back.

He’ll need those skills in the future when those winds start to swirl. They always do.