Category Archives: State government

Arkansas Democrats get small win in tough week

Elections, Legislature, Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas Democrats had a terrible week and then a good couple of hours.

The week was terrible for them for a lot of obvious reasons. On Tuesday, Republicans easily won all five of the contested congressional races, only two of which featured a Democratic challenger. At the State Capitol, Republicans increased their majorities by two in the Senate and seven in the House – then by another in the House on Wednesday when third term Rep. Jeff Wardlaw of Hermitage switched parties from Democrat to Republican.

The election’s one bright spot was supposed to be the presidential race. So much for that.

Republicans now occupy 100 of the Legislature’s 135 seats – 74 in the 100-member House and 26 in the 35-member Senate. In 2008, Democrats controlled 102 of the 135 seats.

At the state and national levels, Arkansas Democrats are fast becoming less a minority than a remnant. After a century and a half of one-party Democratic rule, Arkansas looks poised to be dominated by Republicans for decades, if not longer.

Then last Thursday, Democrats won a satisfying little victory when House members selected their committee assignments. There are 10 committees in the House – five more important “A” committees and five “B” committees – and Democrats thought they might could gain a majority on one of the A committees if they played their cards right. They did.

The way it works is that the members divide up by the four congressional districts and meet at the same time in different locations, Republicans and Democrats together, and choose their committees one at a time based on seniority. Early in the process, Democrats saw an opportunity to gain a majority on the Revenue and Taxation Committee. Texting each other across the different meeting rooms, they began selecting that committee. Before Republicans could organize to stop them, they had gained an 11-9 majority.

The move meant that Democrats are virtually nonexistent in the other committees, where the partisan breakdown is 17-3 in Education; 16-4 in Judiciary; 16-4 in Public Health; and 16-4 in Public Transportation. But they now have a majority in the committee through which tax cuts travel, or are supposed to travel.

And that might be kind of important, considering one of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s stated goals is a $50 million tax cut. By controlling that committee, Democrats at least have a seat at the table in deciding who benefits most from that tax cut – lower-income working families, perhaps, instead of higher-income earners. Or perhaps they can use their majority as a bargaining chip for one of their other priorities, such as expanding access to pre-kindergarten classes.

Time will tell how much of an effect their gambit accomplishes. There’s only so much you can accomplish when you’re outnumbered 74-26. Speaker of the House Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, names committee chairs and can select a Republican to chair Revenue and Tax, just as he selected a Democrat, Rep. Joe Jett, D-Success, to chair it when Republicans had a majority. If Republicans want to play hardball, they can change the rules or just ram a tax cut through a different committee. Or they could just let the Democrats have this one. Some Republicans aren’t so sure the state needs much of a tax cut, anyway.

For the foreseeable future, this is the kind of thing Democrats will have to do if they want to remain relevant because it’s going to be tough for them to win at the state level outside of the Delta, Little Rock and Fayetteville. In many parts of the state, Democratic-leaning candidates will have to do what Republican-leaning candidates used to do, which is run for office as a member of the other party. Or they can run as Democrats and lose in hopes of building the party to fight another day – perhaps one a long way off.

Regardless, they’ll have to content themselves with the notion that there are more important things than numerical majorities. They’ll have to use their position to advance their favored legislation knowing many voters probably won’t give their party’s candidates a chance as long as they have a “D” by their names.

It’s not necessarily fair, but it’s how Republicans had to operate for 150 years, and it wasn’t fair then, either.

If it is broke, do fix it

Elections, Legislature, Politics, State government

Hand with ballot and boxBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansans opposed to medical marijuana, casinos and/or to limiting jury verdicts in medical cases are probably pleased that the Supreme Court invalidated all three of the proposals.

Still it’s probably not a good thing that ballots are cluttered this year with four citizen-led initiatives where the votes won’t count for three of them. The only one that survived was another medical marijuana proposal.

If there’s anything in state government that’s broken, it’s the citizen-led ballot initiative process. Citizens submit a proposal, sometimes based on narrow self-interest, that gets approved by the attorney general. They raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and collect signatures that are approved by the secretary of state. The campaign begins. And then opponents sue over the same ballot titles that were approved by the attorney general and over the same signatures that were certified by a small army of secretary of state employees. By the time the Supreme Court makes its decision, it’s October and the ballots have already been printed. In the medical marijuana case, citizens had already started voting.

That initiative was invalidated because the Court said too many signatures had problems – some of them quite technical, such as listing a post office address rather than a residence. In her concurring opinion on the medical marijuana case, Justice Courtney Goodson complained that Act 1413 of 2013 left her no choice but to invalidate.

“The petition here failed to satisfy the onerous demands of the Act, even though there is no allegation that the signatures were invalid in any other way. The result is that the wishes of the citizens who signed the petition in good faith are being discarded, and the right of the people to pass judgment on the proposal in the voting booth has been lost,” she wrote.

Senate President Pro Tempore Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, the leader of the Senate, said Monday that he expects the Legislature to take steps to mend the process when it meets next year.

Legislators are allowed to recommend three constitutional amendments every two years, and did so this election cycle with measures that would let the governor keep his or her powers when leaving the state, extend county officials’ terms to four years, and allow the state to issue bigger bonds for major economic projects and allow cities and counties to fund Chambers of Commerce. Those are still on the ballot.

Dismang says the Legislature may self-impose a limit of two amendments, one from the House and one from the Senate, and that one of them could address the state’s broken ballot initiative process. That proposed amendment, which voters would see in the 2018 election, would reset the time frames for collecting signatures and require an earlier decision by the Supreme Court, at least before the voting begins. As part of the same effort, the Legislature will try to clean up the technicalities that led to some of this year’s problems.

Dismang doesn’t want to create an environment where there are more constitutional amendments – as opposed to initiated acts like the invalidated medical marijuana proposal. An act has only the force of law and can be changed by the Legislature. An amendment is the permanent law of the land.

In fact, he says it’s too easy to amend the Constitution now. Aside from the Legislature’s potential three amendments each two years, the citizen-led process makes it possible for well-funded individuals to institutionalize their own self-interest. The casino amendment would have granted a permanent constitutional monopoly to three casinos owned by two out-of-state individuals or their assignees, meaning it would have lasted through generations. One of those casinos would have been operated by the Cherokee Nation, which donated $6 million to the effort. It didn’t happen, but it could have, and he’d like to make it less likely.

The truth is that Arkansas’ Constitution is kind of a mess. While the U.S. Constitution is brief and broad, the state’s is sometimes painfully detailed and specific. Constitutional amendments should be timeless and should spell out the permanent duties and roles of government, like whether the governor keep his powers when out of state, and not set policy or make certain things legal or illegal, like medical marijuana. Those should be spelled out in law, which can be changed at any time to fit changing circumstances.

So whatever the fix is, let’s hope it results in fewer, better, broader amendments, and ballots where every vote counts.

Related: Where your vote really counts this year.

The ‘What the Heck’s Really Going on Book’

Legislature, Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Rep. Doug House, R-North Little Rock, metaphorically calls it the “What the Heck’s Really Going on Book,” and the thing about that book is that pages are handed out only one at a time, and not necessarily in order. A while back, another page was torn out and handed to him.

“I was ready on the Personnel Subcommittee to start cutting (state) employees,” he said. “And the staff pulled me off to the side, and they said, ‘Mr. Representative, you can do what you want to. That’s what your job is, but understand something: If you do not have more employees coming in, that’s how we fund the public employee retirement system. You stop that inflow of new employees and payments they make, you bankrupt that system.’”

So state government’s labor force won’t be cut much because current and new government employees’ retirement contributions help pay for retired government employees’ benefits. That’s what the heck’s really going on.

Here’s what else is really going on: That “balanced budget” that the state produces every year through a mechanism called the Revenue Stabilization Act – it’s not really balanced.

House has spent the past year-and-a-half researching what the state really owes. It hasn’t been easy to find out – not because things are purposely hidden, but because the debts are strewn out in different places. It’s like my desk: You can find things, but you have to look. Those debts include $1.7 billion in bonds for things like highways and the Big River Steel project, $2 billion in higher education revenue bonds, capital leases and notes payable, and $2.2 billion for “other employee benefits” – mostly liability for health insurance and also for post-employee benefits, such as unused vacation time.

Public schools owed $4.1 billion as of June 30, 2015. As with colleges and universities, the debts are technically the responsibility of the entities, not the state. But if they can’t pay, the state’s taxpayers surely would be expected to pick up the tab, House said.

Meanwhile, the state’s six retirement systems – public employees, teachers, state highway employees, etc. – had $5.95 billion more in liabilities than assets as of June 30, 2015. That would be a problem in itself, but House said the systems assume 8 percent annual growth in their assets. Maybe that’s doable in good times, but it’s now been seven years since the Great Recession ended, and eventually another will come around.

Add it all together, and the state appears to have about $16.75 billion in debts and liabilities (my math, not his). That’s $5,600 for every Arkansan – hardly the $61,000 that is every American’s share of the $19.8 trillion national debt, but it’s money owed nonetheless. While each Legislature goes through the exercise of ensuring a balanced budget under the Revenue Stabilization Act, these other instruments – bonds, pension plans, etc. – are a huge loophole.

“Congress has a balanced budget,” he said. “They spend whatever they want to, and then they go borrow the money to cover their checks … and we’re doing essentially the same thing.”

The news is not all bad. House said interest rates are low, the state’s bankers have treated it fairly, and pension plan managers are very good at what they do. Moreover, much of the state’s debt has produced valuable assets – schools, roads, educated students.

What now? House wants the state to pay off all its bonded debt within 10 years. Also, he would replace lifetime defined benefits with defined contribution pension plans where the state contributes to beneficiaries’ accounts while they’re working. Most private companies and the federal government have already made this switch.

House would like to see the state go from being a debtor to a creditor. Instead of borrowing money that it then loans to a local utility to build a wastewater plant, for example, it could lend the money and keep the interest for the general fund.

So according to the “What the Heck’s Really Going on Book,” the state is in debt, though not nearly as deeply as the federal government is. The good news is that when those pages are torn out, they can be rewritten and replaced.

The challenge is that the Legislature contains 135 authors, and state government has a lot of editors.

Private option water torture

Health care, Legislature, Politics, State government

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Voting for the private option was hard for many Arkansas Republican legislators, and every month – every dang month – it becomes harder to keep supporting it.

That’s because every month the number of Arkansans being served by the program continues to rise – past the 250,000 that was originally forecast, and now, as of the end of September, past 324,000 who are either enrolled or have been deemed eligible, or have been placed in traditional Medicaid because they were considered “medically frail.”

The private option is the health care program created by the Legislature in 2013 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act – that’s Obamacare – was constitutional but that states were not required to expand government-run Medicaid to serve individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Given the choice, most Republican-leaning states said no to a lot of federal dollars, but Arkansas said yes, with a twist: Instead of simply expanding Medicaid, it bought those folks private insurance.

By many measures, the private option has been a success. Arkansas is a national leader in reducing its uninsured population. Without it, most beneficiaries would not have health insurance, but some still would have health problems, which they would wait to address until they were very sick by showing up at emergency rooms and being treated for free. Meanwhile, the huge pool of private option customers has kept insurers in the state and competing against each other, holding down rates for other individual buyers.

But all that government-paid health care isn’t free. The federal government is sending the state $1.6 billion in taxpayer dollars this year and paying 100 percent of the cost. Starting next year, the state chips in 5 percent, a number that rises to 10 percent by 2020.

For Republicans who have supported the program, it’s been a conundrum. Most if not all would say government benefit programs invariably create ever increasing numbers of beneficiaries – which is exactly what has happened. They went against their own instincts to vote yes because Arkansas is a poor state that needed the money, and local hospitals can’t keep providing all this free emergency room care. Also, frankly, there aren’t a lot of better ideas out there. Health care is hard.

Each legislative session has hinged on whether enough legislators could be found to overcome the objections of diehard opponents. The program barely passed in 2013 and barely passed again in 2014. It survived 2015 because Gov. Asa Hutchinson promised changes in the form of Arkansas Works, his renamed version that requires higher-income recipients to contribute $13 to their monthly premiums and makes other minor changes. Hutchinson wanted more, including a work requirement, but the Obama administration didn’t agree. So he took what he could get hoping the next administration will be more flexible.

Now here we are at 324,000 counting those deemed eligible but not yet enrolled, which is 7,000 more than last month and 16,000 more than the month before that. Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie says there’s still a backlog of applications. Each month, the diehard opponents get a fresh chance to say “I told you so” (without offering much of an alternative), and each month the state draws nearer to when it must pay part of the cost. For Republican supporters, it’s like Chinese water torture: drip, drip, drip.

When the Legislature meets in 2017, those Republican lawmakers will face the same difficult choice they’ve faced every year since 2013: Keep a program that’s growing unsustainably, or … what?

Eventually, those supporters will become opponents unless the next administration gives states more flexibility. For them to keep voting yes, recipients must have more skin in the game. The rules will have to push recipients into jobs, and then into better paying jobs, and eventually out of the program entirely. And if able-bodied recipients don’t move along that path, then they’ll have to lose their benefits.

Of course, doing that – or getting rid of the private option entirely – would put us right back where we were before it existed: sick, uninsured people showing up at the local hospital seeking care, and then what should be done? Treat them for free and then shuffle the costs around, or turn them away because they don’t have insurance?

Did I mention health care is hard?