Category Archives: Politics

Another state government mandate – this one in writing

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 That law was passed after Fayetteville enacted such an ordinance through its city council and then rescinded it by a vote of the people – an indication that democracy was working just fine there.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 Important historical documents were written in cursive or something like it.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.

Captain Legislature didn’t save the day in Fayetteville

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.

It’s not about whether terrorists should rot

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

“In my opinion the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don’t do that then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.”

That’s what U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton said Feb. 5 during a hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. He got a lot of attention because of that.

Let’s start by pointing out that Cotton, a decorated war veteran who volunteered for duty, has a perspective that those like me who stayed safely at home cannot have.

That said, the issue is not if confirmed terrorists should rot, but where detainees should be held. And it should not be in the government’s little corner of Castro’s island.

According to the New York Times, 780 detainees have been sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison since it opened in 2002. Of those, 122 are still there, 649 have been transferred, and nine have died on the island.

Most of those remaining probably are terrorists, but how do we know? Because the government has told us they are? That’s not the way America is supposed to work.

In America, we’re supposed to be skeptical of the government, but that’s hard to put into practice at Guantanamo Bay because it lacks some of the checks on the government’s power that exist elsewhere – juries, journalists, churches, human rights activists, etc. There has been little that anyone outside of the government could do when the detainees have been sent there – or when they have been sent elsewhere. If President Obama says it’s worth the risk to send them back home, well, should we trust that’s so?

The nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Did you catch that? Our rights aren’t granted by the government, and we don’t have rights because we are Americans. We have rights because we were created. All men are created.

We have to respect that. American citizens can’t just blindly trust the government when it says that every detainee is a terrorist, and it can do with them as it wishes for decades without any oversight by anyone else. If we accept that, then we could be next.

We’ve seen the best of America since the attacks of Sept. 11, including acts of heroism and sacrifice such as those performed by Cotton.

But those attacks also have brought out the less-than-best of America. Osama bin Laden not only succeeded in killing 3,000 people, but he also convinced us to change our way of life and sometimes to ignore our founding principles, all based on fear.

Guantanamo Bay has hurt the country’s standing in the world, which is why the president called it “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.” And by “president,” I mean President George W. Bush, who wrote that comment in his autobiography. He wanted to close the prison and send many of the detainees back to their own countries. “Cold-blooded killers,” on the other hand, should be tried in U.S. courts, he said while in office.

Yes, in U.S. courts, or at least in some kind of legitimate process allowing Americans to keep an eye on the government. First, because it needs to be determined one-by-one that the accused actually are cold-blooded killers. And second, because the nation’s principles include not only the pursuit of happiness but also the pursuit of justice. All men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, and all men should face the consequences of their actions.

Governor, enjoy this while it lasts

Asa for web

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.

Voters should select, not elect, judges

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

The recent admission of bribery by former circuit judge Michael Maggio is an example of why Arkansas should consider changing the way it fills judicial offices – still relying on average citizens, but not by using elections.

Maggio pleaded guilty Jan. 9 to a felony bribery charge and now probably is on his way to prison. He had reduced a jury verdict against a nursing home operator from $5.2 million to $1 million two days after receiving large campaign donations from the operator.

Clear-cut justice-for-sale cases like this are relatively rare, so let’s not overreact. The corrupt official was caught, so you might say the system worked.

The problem, however, isn’t so much the obvious cases of bribery that can be prosecuted. The problem is when judges are merely influenced. Who donates to judicial campaigns? Often, those who have an interest in the outcomes of judicial decisions in general, such as attorneys and nursing home operators.

Elections of judges and justices has always been the least democratic of all ballot races. Candidates aren’t supposed to discuss how they would rule on specific cases because a judge should remain impartial until hearing the evidence. Meanwhile, they aren’t allowed to run under party labels, which at least would give voters a sense of where they stand. Many voters are just guessing.

In the future, the problem may go from voters having no information to them having a lot of bad information. More and more, the waves of campaign dollars swamping the executive and legislative branches is engulfing judicial races. In some other states, ads by outside groups in judicial races are as nasty as the ads for other offices. It hasn’t really come to Arkansas yet, but when it does, it will change not only judicial campaigns but also the administration of justice.

Solutions? One would be for the governor to appoint justices and judges the way the president does at the federal level, subject to legislative confirmation. That kind of power bestowed on the governor might make some people uncomfortable, but remember that he or she would be held accountable by the voters. A personal example: In 2000, enthusiastic about no candidate, I decided while driving to the polls to vote for soon-to-be President Bush solely because I preferred the justices he would appoint over Vice President Gore’s likely selections.

There is another model. In American democracy, where do registered voters best collect adequate information in a deliberative fashion before making an important decision? Juries.

So let’s have “voter duty” where 100 (or some other number of) Arkansas voters are randomly selected, summoned to a location, and given two days to interview judicial candidates and study their records. The names of the voters would be withheld so the candidates couldn’t influence them beforehand. At the end of two days, the voters would select the officeholders and go home.

We trust jury members to make life-or-death decisions in capital murder cases. Why not trust registered voters to appoint judges, which they do now anyway through the ballot box? Wouldn’t 100 informed and focused average Arkansans do a better job than 1 million scrolling through a list of names on the ballot that they recognize only through campaign attack ads? Best of all, judicial candidates could avoid having to raise money from shady donors who want something in return.

So let’s have a selection process instead of an election process for judicial offices. Elections are a means to an end, not the end itself. The ultimate goal is a just, democratic society ruled by the people. To keep justice from being for sale, 100 people might accomplish that goal better than 1 million of them.