Category Archives: Politics

Taking stock of third parties, independents

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

Three events have occurred the past two weeks that are noteworthy, particularly for the growing number of voters who call themselves independents and the small percentage who actually vote for candidates who are not Republicans or Democrats.

First, on May 29, Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed into law a bill moving Arkansas’ 2016 primary elections from May to March 1. The stated goal was to include Arkansas early with other Southern states in the so-called “SEC primary” so the state would have more of a say in who the Democrats and Republicans nominate for president. It might help Mike Huckabee in his campaign a little by giving him an early state win.

A consequence is that challengers have less time to decide if they want to run against incumbents. That’s particularly the case for independents, who unlike party-affiliated candidates must collect signatures to qualify for the ballot. Under a bill passed in 2013, independents must submit their signatures by the end of the filing period. This election, that would be November, so they must begin collecting signatures in August for an election that won’t occur for another 15 months.

Mark Moore of Pea Ridge, who ran as an independent for the state House of Representatives in 2012, says the 2013 law requiring independents to file so early is unfair and unconstitutional. After all, it gives them the same deadline to qualify for the ballot after collecting signatures that it gives party candidates to merely sign up with their filing fee. When the primary is in May, independents must collect signatures in the dead of winter. The election before the law’s passage, seven independent candidates ran for the state Legislature, including Moore, who won 39 percent of the vote in a two-person race. In 2014 after the law was passed, only one independent ran for that body.

Moore wants a return to the old law, which allowed independents to file first and then collect their signatures. He’s filed a lawsuit and says legal precedents are on his side. His day in court is July 27.

Second, Rep. Nate Bell of Mena, ironically the co-sponsor of the law Moore is suing to end, announced June 2 that he himself is now an independent and no longer a Republican. So now the 135-member Legislature has only 134 Republicans and Democrats.

The third-term legislator, known for being quite outspoken, has not given a reason for his switch other than to say it would enable him to better serve his constituents. He was a strong opponent of moving the primary to March, arguing that it was unfair to candidates and their families.

Finally, just hours after Bell’s announcement, the Libertarian Party of Arkansas submitted 15,709 signatures to the secretary of state’s office, far more than the 10,000 signatures it needed to qualify for the 2016 election as a “new” party. Arkansas law requires it to do so because its candidate for governor did not receive 3 percent of the vote in the last election. Under state law, if the Libertarians’ presidential candidate does not win 3 percent in 2016, they’ll have to collect signatures again for 2018.

Libertarians call themselves the “party of principle,” and that principle is that they want much less government. They would cut all federal government programs significantly if not completely, including Social Security and Medicare, and they also would cut defense spending while legalizing marijuana.

The party’s newly elected chairman, economist Dr. Michael Pakko, points out that every Arkansas voter had at least nine Libertarians on the ballot in 2014, including all congressional races and all state constitutional offices. In the statewide races, no Libertarian candidate won more than 6.4 percent. A numbers guy, Pakko knows the party is not ready to win major elections, but he says the party is growing and will be a viable alternative if enough voters ever decide they’ve had enough of the major parties.

The way the American political system is set up almost guarantees a two-party system, despite the fact that parties are not mentioned in the Constitution and despite George Washington imploring his fellow Founding Fathers not to succumb to party politics.

America’s economic system, meanwhile, is designed to offer unlimited choices. In the cereal aisle I have dozens of viable alternatives.

I don’t want that many choices in the voting booth. But it seems like the political system could learn from the economic system, and give me more than two.

Should secret political donors be disclosed?

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

About 70 people turned out for a political demonstration on the State Capitol steps Tuesday – a fraction of the number that would have appeared if the subject were a controversial social issue, but I’ve seen plenty of smaller crowds there.

The issue was campaign finance reform. A coalition of groups were calling attention to their coming effort to gather signatures for a ballot initiative serving two purposes. First, it would make Arkansas the 17th state to call on Congress to advance a constitutional amendment allowing it and the states to regulate campaign funding. That’s just a request. Second, it would require independent political groups in Arkansas to disclose their donors. That would be the law.

Among the speakers was Rhana Bazzini, an 81-year-old Floridian who previously had marched from Sarasota to Tallahassee to protest current campaign finance laws. Bazzini pointed out, correctly, that every issue – education, health care, the national debt – is connected to how we elect our public officials.

And how we elect our public officials is through legalized bribery. I mean, let’s call it what it is. Serious candidates ask donors for money; unless they are super-wealthy, they have no choice. Groups who want something from the government give candidates money, which buys access, sympathy and loyalty. The more they give, the more access, sympathy and loyalty they receive. You know that version of the Golden Rule that says, “He who has the gold makes the rules”? That’s a fundamental part of American democracy.

This has always been the case, of course, but the dots between money and politics are becoming ever more connected. In America, money is speech and corporations are people, and under the 2010 Citizens United ruling, corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts on campaigns.

The result of that ruling has been the creation of independent groups spending enormous amounts to spread half-truths and slander political candidates while hiding under the cloak of anonymity. A single donor, or a small group of them, essentially can buy their own candidates in legally approved secrecy. Because more money is going into judicial races, justice increasingly is for sale.

I am not sure if there are easy answers for this. Money tends to find its way to power like water finds its way to the bottom of a hill, no matter what laws are passed. Also, I can see the argument that spending money to advance a political idea is a form of political speech, as well as a property right.

The obvious problem with that last argument is that more money equals more speech, which, after all, is supposed to be “free.” We know this current system is having a corrosive, corrupting influence on our politics. It’s creating a class of ultra-wealthy political sugar daddies. It’s accelerating the transfer of wealth from middle class taxpayers to the one percent. (Remember the bank bailout?)

It’s also affecting our daily lives. According to the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons the colonists broke away from Great Britain was to better enable the pursuit of happiness. The constant barrage of negative political ads isn’t making anyone happy except those who get paid to produce them.

What do you think? Should there be limits to the amounts that donors can give to candidates and/or independent political groups? Should campaigns be publicly financed, so that more candidates could run for office without having to rely on these legalized bribes? Or would that just open up new cans of worms?

At the very least, disclosure of donors to independent political groups ought to be required. If people are able to spend millions of dollars to elect a candidate, at least the rest of should know about it. That’s the law these groups want in Arkansas, and they probably are going to have to pass it through a ballot initiative. This past session, Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, tried unsuccessfully to pass a disclosure law through the Legislature, and it didn’t even advance past a House committee.

“Speaking” is by definition a public activity, so there should be no expectation of anonymity when doing so. If people want to spend their millions to shout from the hilltop, they can’t expect to do so from inside a cave. So when the canvassers ask for my signature to place this measure on next year’s ballot, I’ll enthusiastically write my name – in person and in public.

Leadership needed to keep the republic

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

As Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall at the end of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him if the delegates had created a republic or a monarchy. According to notes written by Dr. James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

He did not say “democracy,” which the Founding Fathers saw as “mob rule.” Instead, they created a republic, where the people have ultimate authority by electing their officials but don’t stand in town squares and raise their hands to decide national issues.

Given that history, should elected officials vote their consciences, or should they follow popular opinion? Both, if they are doing their jobs. They should listen to their constituents and give great weight to their wishes, but if all they do is stick their fingers in the air and then follow the political winds, why should they exist? Why not just post every question currently facing Congress on the internet and let us all vote by clicking? How much funding should the Central Intelligence Agency receive this year? Click.

The character quality that’s needed, and the one that’s been missing far too long, is leadership. Elected officials must be willing to make tough calls, explain their decisions, and then accept the consequences. In some countries, if you lose power, you die. Egypt, for example, recently sentenced its previous president, Mohammed Morsi, to execution. In the United States, former Sen. Mark Pryor became a well-paid lobbyist after being “deposed,” as did Blanche Lincoln, Tim Hutchinson and many others.

And that brings us to the national debt. I think I first wrote about the subject in 1992, and frankly, I’m getting tired of trying to convince you people to be concerned about it. But I’ll try again. The debt has reached $18.2 trillion – roughly $57,000 for every American man, woman and child. It’s partly financed by foreign creditors, which is a really stupid idea. The government has many trillions of dollars in assets and is not bankrupt. But this is a growing problem because the government has made many trillions of dollars’ worth of promises that it cannot keep.

A number of groups – the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Budget – are trying to educate the American people about the debt, and, just as with my columns, it’s not getting through. Americans know no entity can indefinitely spend more than it collects and are concerned about the debt in the abstract, but they oppose specific cuts and don’t want to raise (their own) taxes. It’s hard to balance a budget if you don’t decrease outgo and/or raise income.

Anyway, democracy often doesn’t reflect the will of the majority on a particular issue, but the will of the loudest and most committed less-than-majorities. Any spending cut or tax increase will attract fierce opposition by the groups most affected. What matters is not what 51 percent want. What matters is what 15 percent want that the other 85 percent won’t fight for.

The debt is not the kind of issue that leads Americans to march on the Capitol. It’s a terrible injustice that affects mostly people who are too young to do anything about it. There will never be a groundswell of support for paying it down, even though the alternative is leaving it to our kids and grandkids, which surely few of us want to do.

Because there’s never going to be a groundswell, elected officials must lead. They must make tough decisions that they explain to the public, and then they either will be re-elected, or they will lose and become lobbyists. No one will lop off their head if they raise the gas tax or cut a program somewhere.

It takes a special person to do this, because apparently it’s very tempting in Washington to do whatever it takes to be re-elected. These types of republic-leaders can’t get elected without support. They need campaign donations – in larger increments from those who can, and in smaller increments from the concerned common man. I really wish those groups I mentioned, or at least their allies, would start playing a little more hardball.

There’s been enough talk about this subject. A few of us must lead, and a few more of us must have their backs. And if the American people won’t accept that this republic can’t keep going into debt, then I guess we won’t be able to keep it.

Arkansas seeks to find its place in the nonstop campaign

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

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday that legislators will be returning to Little Rock for a special session May 26. The main reason will be to pass a bond issue to help Lockheed Martin compete for a contract to produce the military’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the replacement for the Humvee, in Camden.

Lockheed Martin is a global megacorporation with $45.6 billion in sales in 2014, so it will be interesting to see what Arkansas taxpayers will be asked to fund. But this is the way the game is played these days, so Arkansas must play it. At stake is the production of 55,000 vehicles – basically, the auto plant the state long has coveted – and that’s not counting what foreign militaries might order. About 600 jobs would be created in south Arkansas, which needs them.

Legislators also will consider ways of streamlining state government – Hutchinson hasn’t offered concrete proposals regarding how – and might consider moving Arkansas’ political primaries, or maybe just the presidential ones, to March 1. That’s the subject of the rest of this column.

Tired of ceding the early presidential nominating process to Iowa and New Hampshire and then being forgotten later, a group of Southern states are considering holding their primaries March 1 in what many are calling the “SEC primary.”

Arkansas voters don’t usually play much of a role in presidential politics. The state’s primary election occurs so late in the process that many candidates have dropped out by the time Arkansans vote, and the state is so small that the remaining candidates don’t make it a priority. Legislators considered the SEC primary in the recently completed regular session. The bill didn’t pass, but support didn’t die. Maybe it would make Arkansas more relevant. It might give Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign a boost, which his supporters would see as a plus.

These campaigns start early – Jan. 3 in Iowa in 2012, in fact. This year, the Iowa caucus will be Feb. 1, nine months before the general election, and the New Hampshire primary will be Feb. 9. And of course, candidates already have been campaigning for months.

Didn’t we just have an election? These days, elected officials are so focused on the next campaign that they can’t do the jobs voters chose them to do in the previous one. And that’s a problem with real-life consequences.

Case in point: The federal Highway Trust Fund is nearly empty, and the bill that funds it expires at the end of this month. A real, multi-year replacement is badly needed, but time is running out. We were in this same situation last year, but of course an election was coming up, so Congress passed a gimmicky, short-term fix that funded 10 months of construction with revenues borrowed from the next decade. Now those 10 months are over, and we’re right back where we were. Uncertain about what Congress is going to do this time, the state Highway Department has cancelled $282 million in construction projects this year. Last month, the American Trucking Associations’ chief lobbyist told Arkansas trucking executives that a bill must be written this year or else we’ll have to wait until the end of 2017 because presidential politics will get in the way.
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Contrast American democracy with Great Britain’s recently completed parliamentary election. Queen Elizabeth formally dissolved Parliament in late March at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron, the election was scheduled for May 7, the parties campaigned, and 66.1 percent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives won, and Cameron retained his post. It was over in six weeks.

Great Britain has its own problems, of course, and nobody here wants a monarch, but the United States clearly is not well served by a democratic government where few have time to govern anymore. According to the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the three inalienable rights that led to America’s founding. Are the nonstop campaigning and barrage of toxic negative advertising helping you pursue happiness?

We’ll know whether the primary election will be moved before the session begins because only issues where the outcome is reasonably certain will be included in the call. It will be predetermined behind closed doors, which is not very transparent but is efficient.

At least they’ll govern, and then voters can decide if they did the right thing. I hear there’s an election coming up.

Huckabee the anti-Romney

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

I didn’t think that former Gov. Mike Huckabee was in the first tier of presidential hopefuls when he started talking about running. I probably had him at the bottom of the middle tier – somewhere around former Sen. Rick Santorum.

After covering Tuesday’s announcement, I’d move him into the first tier.

Huckabee’s appearance in his hometown of Hope drew a large crowd and lots of media. It was professional, with staff members and volunteers. He and wife Janet seemed confident and resolved. His campaign later announced his schedule for fundraising – always a weak spot of his.

Some people are saying he’s just looking for publicity. It didn’t look that way Tuesday. He already had a TV show, which he gave up in order to run.

No, this is a presidential campaign. The question is, can it be a winning one? His campaign points to poll numbers showing he has high favorability ratings among Republican voters compared to some of his potential opponents. Certainly, he knows how to speak to the party faithful.

His speech, which lasted half an hour, laid out a campaign theme of “From Hope to Higher Ground.” He mentioned gay marriage and abortion, of course, but he spent more time talking about economic policies, and that’s where he differentiates himself from many Republican candidates.

Average Americans’ wealth has stagnated at the same time that the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us is becoming kind of scary. This is one of the defining issues of our time, but Republicans are terrible at talking about it, in part because too many of them, like Mitt Romney, identify with the 1 percent.

Republicans say they’re the party of smaller government, and they should continue to be that, but they must do a better job of explaining why. They must blame policies, not people, but they really must blame less, period, and offer a positive vision for the country. If they spend the next year-and-a-half being simply the anti-Obama, anti-Hillary party, they’ll win Arkansas but won’t win the presidency. It sounds touchy-feely, but they must show they care about the problems, hopes and dreams of average Americans.

You can’t fake that, and that’s why Huckabee’s candidacy can’t be dismissed. In some ways, he’s the anti-Romney. He’s making a lot of money now, but he spent most of his life in the middle class, and that’s where his sensibilities remain. Tuesday, the former Pine Bluff and Texarkana pastor painted himself as the candidate of the common man in a way that Romney, the venture capitalist, could not pretend to do.

The term for his brand of blue collar, anti-elite politics is “economic populism,” and it speaks to a segment of the population that votes in Republican Party primaries but doesn’t necessarily donate much money to campaigns. It’s a bit out of step with the direction the party’s been going, and a lot of big donors don’t like it. Huckabee criticizes government in general, but some conservatives don’t trust how he would govern specifically, given that as governor he helped create a statewide government health program, ARKids First, and raised some taxes (while cutting others). The powerful Club for Growth thinks he’s too liberal and has already bought $100,000 in anti-Huckabee ads running in Iowa and South Carolina. He’s called it the “club for greed.”

But all the candidates face headwinds. The party tends to select the safest, best-funded choice. That’s Jeb Bush this year, but even his own mother has questioned if Americans should elect a third member of the same family. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s candidacy has lost its shine. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul probably bucks Republican Party orthodoxy too often to be nominated.

Unlike the Democrats, Republicans don’t have a favorite at this point. So if Huckabee wins Iowa, he can start doing some damage.

This is not an endorsement of Huckabee’s candidacy or a prediction he’ll win. I still believe he’ll run out of gas at some point. The Republican establishment will want to coalesce behind someone early so it can target Hillary Clinton. In the end, the winner will be the candidate favored by the big money donors. It usually is.

Whoever that is, it has to be someone who can speak about the middle class and to the middle class. He or she must connect, not just campaign. Huckabee can do that, and that’s why he’s in the first tier.