Category Archives: State government

After legislators meet, marijuana more limited but still legal

Legislature, Politics, State government, Uncategorized

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

It was a good legislative session for some (gun rights supporters), a bad one for others (supporters of more highway spending), and for supporters of medical marijuana, it was as good as could be expected.

The amendment passed by Arkansas voters in November could be amended with a two-thirds vote by legislators, and at least that percentage likely voted against it, as did Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. There were ample opportunities these past three months for those lawmakers to mostly overturn the amendment overtly or subversively. But the attitude among many legislators and the governor was that regardless of what they believed about the amendment, the people voted for it, so their democratic duty was to make it work.

An early test was House Bill 1058 by Rep. Doug House, R-North Little Rock, which changed a provision in the amendment requiring doctors to certify that the potential benefits of medical marijuana likely would outweigh the risks for a patient. Doctors, Rep. House argued, would be reluctant to make that claim because there are no accepted medical standards for marijuana, which remains an illegal drug in the eyes of the federal government, and they could face liability issues. The bill allowed doctors instead to simply state the patient suffered from one of the qualifying medical conditions spelled out in the amendment. In other words, they were identifying an illness, which they would do anyway.

If the spread of medical marijuana were to be limited, here was the perfect place to do it. The Legislature could simply leave the amendment exactly as the voters had approved it, and many doctors wouldn’t prescribe it. You could see the wheels turning as legislators considered that possibility. It passed the House with 70 votes, three to spare, on Jan. 17, and then passed the Senate with 24 votes, none to spare, on Jan. 23. The governor signed the bill into law as Act 5 four days later.

Efforts that would have significantly limited the drug failed to advance. Senate Bill 238 by Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, would have delayed the legalization of medical marijuana in Arkansas until it is legal in the United States. It didn’t even get a motion in committee. Senate Bill 357 by Rapert would have prohibited the smoking of marijuana anywhere in Arkansas. It failed twice in the Senate. House and Senate bills that would have made it illegal to sell edible marijuana products each failed in their respective chambers.

Legislators in all passed two dozen medical marijuana bills, and some did limit its use or add to its price and thus make it less accessible. Act 1098 by Rep. House adds a 4 percent tax for cultivation facilities, dispensaries, and other medical marijuana businesses. The tax will pay for regulating the drug but will raise the price for consumers at least 8 percent. Other laws prohibit smoking marijuana where tobacco smoking is prohibited, ban products that could appeal to children, allow schools to prevent marijuana-impaired students from attending school, and ban the possession of marijuana by military personnel or their caregivers and on military sites. Act 593 by Rep. Carlton Wing, R-North Little Rock, includes a range of legal protections for employers if they take action against employees who are impaired while on the job or if they exclude employees from safety-sensitive positions.

Even with those changes, lawmakers did not fundamentally alter the fact that marijuana soon will be available in Arkansas, legally, for qualifying patients. The market merely awaits the bureaucratic process and the establishment of businesses. The first licenses for growers and dispensaries could be issued by the end of September, and then there has to be time to grow the plants, build the facilities, and open the doors to patient-customers.

Of course, there is the matter of marijuana still being illegal for any purpose under federal law, which covers every square inch of the country, including Arkansas. All of this is happening because the Obama administration looked the other way, Congress tacitly approved, and the Trump administration so far is following suit.

This would be a lot less weird if federal law were either changed or enforced. Seeing how neither apparently is going to happen, expect to see medical marijuana – legal in Arkansas, technically illegal in America – available for purchase around January.

What’s a legislative session like? Controlled chaos

Legislature, Politics, State government

Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, testifies before a House committee about his bill allowing guns on college campuses. Often, committee meetings are standing room only.
By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Now that the regular session lacks only a planned one-day return May 1 before adjournment, 12 legislators have written letters to their chambers asking the record to reflect they didn’t mean to vote a certain way on a particular bill, as reported in Monday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

That’s not a big deal. Over three months, the state’s 135 legislators filed 2,069 bills, 1,074 of which have become law. They recorded, between them, hundreds of thousands of votes, so a few fumbles are to be expected. None of the 12 mistakes affected the outcome of legislation.

The news does present an opportunity to describe what a legislative session looks like, which is, in two words, controlled chaos.

Legislators meet in a biennial (every two years) regular session for about three months starting in January of each odd-numbered year and then meet for about a month in a budget-focused fiscal session in even-numbered years. In between, they meet in special sessions called by the governor as needed.

Days at the Capitol start in the morning with committee meetings, where some bills are discussed at length while others pass or fail quickly.

When the full chambers meet in the afternoon, both the House and Senate have rules of order and decorum, but if it were a kindergarten class, everyone would be placed in time out, especially in the Senate. It’s civil, but legislators mill about engaging in private discussions with each other, or they shuffle in and out of the chamber to meet with lobbyists and hometown folks. Some bills have everyone’s attention, while others involve noncontroversial corrections to the law that legislators trust were hashed out in committee and vote yes, or have a fellow legislator vote yes for them while they are out of their seats. The chairperson – Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, in the House and Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin in the Senate, or legislators taking their places – occasionally has to bang the gavel and fuss at the kids when they become too disruptive.

Legislators are doing an enormous amount of lawmaking in a very short period of time, which is how, 12 times, they accidentally voted the wrong way. Meanwhile, they are voting on bills they may not have had much time to study while hearing from competing constituents – and, occasionally, taking a break to talk to reporters. At the same time, they are trying to maintain relationships with each other. It can be a delicate balancing act voting against a fellow legislator’s pet project and then asking him or her to vote for your pet project five minutes later. As a result, many bills successfully navigate the chamber, House or Senate, where they originate but then die on the other side. There are less hurt feelings that way.

The process could be better and more deliberative so that lawmakers are not racing through 2,000 bills and passing 1,000 at such breakneck speed. Perhaps legislators could spend more time in session and earn the pay raises they recently received, but on the other hand, the more time human beings are given to make laws, the more opportunities they have to make bad ones. State Rep. Andy Davis, R-Little Rock, proposed a constitutional amendment that would have limited legislative sessions to 60 days but have them occur every year rather than the current setup of a 90-day session one year and a 30-day fiscal session the next – the idea being that legislators might let bills simmer rather than rush them to a boil knowing they would have more than one legislative session between elections. It didn’t advance. Another possibility would be fewer, longer bills that incorporate more technical changes all at once, the downside being the longer the bill, the more things to find wrong with it. I’ve wondered if the 135 legislators should each be limited to 10 bills to create more time to carefully consider each one. Surely Arkansas law doesn’t need more than 1,350 possible changes in a given session.

Democracy is messy, and it’s supposed to be, but Arkansas government works OK. The budget is balanced, though the state has some debt and is relying on the federal government too much. The worst bills usually die, while those creating big change usually get softened along the way. For the most part, things happen cautiously and incrementally.

Anyway, this is the 91st biennial regular session, which means we’re still around after 90 of them.

How technology helps you avoid paying taxes

Legislature, Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve cut your own taxes in recent years by evading them, probably unwittingly, thanks to the internet.

That would apply to you if you are buying products online these days from an out-of-state seller who doesn’t collect sales taxes, even though state law says they’re just as due as if you bought the goods from your local merchant. The local merchants certainly don’t like that, because it means the prices they charge are 8-9 percent higher through no fault of their own.

This is happening because while the state government requires the merchants to collect the tax, the federal government, by virtue of a Supreme Court decision, forbids state governments from requiring the same of out-of-state sellers. Buyers are supposed to pay the taxes on their own, but few taxpayers comply, either because they don’t know, or they don’t know how, or it’s just too inconvenient. There’s a form to fill out, and buyers would have to keep up with a year’s worth of purchases and determine which sellers with a presence in Arkansas collected the tax, and which sellers from elsewhere didn’t.

The current state of affairs obviously is unfair to local merchants, which is why big ones like Walmart and small ones alike want to change it. There’s also the numerical reality that the state has collected $102 million less in revenues this fiscal year than it expected to collect, and $51 million of that is because of lower than expected sales taxes. How much of that is because people are buying more online from out-of-state sellers? Some.

But changing the law is hard because of that Supreme Court ruling and because making people pay a tax they currently can avoid certainly feels like a tax increase. Lawmakers prefer cutting taxes, which they did this legislative session for lower-income Arkansans, for veterans, for manufacturers, and for soda pop.

Still, there were efforts. During the legislative session, which recessed Monday, one proposal would have required larger online retailers to charge the tax while watching to see what happens in a South Dakota court case that would challenge the existing federal prohibition. Senate Bill 140 by Sen. Jake Files, R-Fort Smith, failed in the last day of the session in the House, though it may or may not have helped inspire Amazon, the biggest online seller, to begin collecting sales taxes in Arkansas voluntarily March 1. Another bill would have required those retailers to tell Arkansas consumers how much sales tax they owed. That one by Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, passed the House but never even got a vote in the Senate. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Steve Womack has tried for years without success to address the issue at the national level in Congress, which is where it should be addressed. That effort hasn’t gotten very far.

This isn’t the only tax cut Arkansans have received in recent years thanks to technology. The primary means for funding roads is the motor fuels tax, which is paid on a per gallon basis. Its advantage is that it’s a user fee – those who uses the government service pay for it, and those who use more, pay more. But as cars have become more fuel efficient, they require fewer gallons to travel the same distance, which means drivers are paying less in taxes to drive on roads that cost more to build and maintain. Meanwhile, the motor fuels tax hasn’t increased at the federal or state level in decades.

Douglas tried to address this issue with a 6.5-cent wholesale fuel tax to fund a bond issue referred to voters in 2018, but it never even passed the House.

No one wants to pay higher taxes. What’s more likely is significant tax reform changing which taxes we pay, at least at the state level. To generate ideas, state legislators this past session created an Arkansas Tax Reform and Relief Legislative Task Force that will start meeting soon.

I don’t know how it gets past the constitutional issues on the online sales tax, but clearly something needs to be done about highways. The cleanest solution would be to increase a user fee for highways while decreasing taxes that pay for other things.

That would mean spending less on those other things, which sometimes can be almost as hard politically as raising taxes. Maybe another task force?

Execution imagery

Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“Image,” tennis player Andre Agassi said in a commercial in his younger, long-haired days, “is everything.”

That’s not true, of course, and Agassi grew to deeply regret uttering the words. But for any state trying to compete in a global economy, while image isn’t everything, it’s certainly a lot.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has crisscrossed the globe trying to sell Arkansas to potential investors, knows this. That’s why in this past legislative session he played defense against any potential bill that would impose state bathroom standards like North Carolina’s law, which cost the state 400 jobs from Paypal alone and was recently repealed. It also was a motivation for his spending a fistful of political capital moving the state’s commemoration of Gen. Robert E. Lee to a Saturday in October, far from its previous home on the same day as the Martin Luther King Holiday. Now only two former Confederate states, Mississippi and Alabama, celebrate the civil rights leader and the Civil War general on the same day.

Despite those efforts, Arkansas’ image has taken a bit of a hit the past couple of weeks in the eyes of some people. For a few days, the law allowed concealed carry permit holders to take their guns just about everywhere, including into Arkansas Razorbacks games. Fair or not, the idea of gun-toting fans made a lot of national headlines and was a step too far for the Southeastern Conference – not exactly a left-wing organization. After the SEC released a statement warning the law could affect the Hogs in a variety of ways, including, ominously, “scheduling,” the Legislature quickly passed another law restricting guns in those venues as well as other places.

That national story came and went. Another story will have a more lasting effect. As you probably know, Arkansas is set to execute eight convicted killers over 10 or 11 days, depending on how you do the math, from April 17-27.

Why so many so quickly? A U.S. Supreme Court decision in February set the stage for the eight to become the first in Arkansas to be executed since 2005 – the long delay caused by legal challenges and difficulties obtaining the three drugs used in the lethal injection. The makers of those drugs, which have other uses, do not like being associated with the death penalty for moral or public relations reasons. Many refuse to sell the drugs to Arkansas, while others will do so only anonymously, which Arkansas obliged with a state law now being challenged in court. The state’s supply of midazolam, used to render the condemned unconscious, expires April 30, so it’s a case of “use it or lose it” or try to find more.

Arkansas thus has become a center of attention in the international debate over the death penalty – illegal in all but one country in Europe, which Hutchinson has visited attempting to woo jobs to Arkansas. In a press conference Monday, he said other states have not suffered economically after carrying out the death penalty in the years since Arkansas last did, including Texas (187 since Arkansas’ last, according to the Death Penalty Information Center), Florida (33) and South Carolina (8). He said it would be unfair to punish Arkansas for taking longer than other states to carry out executions.

But those states did not perform eight executions in 10 or 11 days. In fact, no state has ever matched that pace in recent memory, which is why it’s being referred to in some quarters – and I’m just reporting this – as an “assembly line.” A state’s image is not based on fairness but on attention, and this is getting attention.

Image, as Agassi knew, is not everything. The state’s policies on the death penalty should not be controlled by the fear of being called uncivilized by a European continent that plunged the world into war twice in the 20th century.

At the same time, how Arkansas is seen does matter – even more so the way it sees itself. The second half of this month could be a sobering, reflective time to live in Arkansas.

At least, it ought to be, regardless of where we stand on the death penalty. Right or wrong, let this month not simply be a source of headlines. After all, we’re talking about killings here – the eight the state is preparing to administer to those men on Death Row, and the 10 that put them there.