Arkansas Democrats get small win in tough week

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.

Too much politics

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

The Declaration of Independence specifies three inalienable rights it says are endowed by our Creator, one of them the right to pursue happiness, with government’s purpose being to secure those rights.

One way it can do that is to start the 2020 election season later.

This ugly election was a part of our lives for a year-and-a-half. Presidential campaigns have always been difficult and divisive, but this latest one uniquely tore a hole in the fabric of our society, and I’m not sure how it’s going to mend. Consider that President-elect Donald Trump announced he was running on June 15, 2015, while Hillary Clinton announced her campaign two months earlier, on April 12. The first of many Republican presidential debates – the one where Trump and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly first got into it – was August 6 of last year. The Iowa Caucuses were Feb. 1, more than nine months before the election, while Arkansans held their primary only a month later.

The idea of starting all of this again in only two-and-a-half years is unbearable at the moment, and truly not necessary. Americans are supposed to keep a watchful eye on their government, but too much politics isn’t good for anybody.

Most other democracies don’t do it this way. Elections occur when they are called, or when a party exits a governing coalition, or because of other such reasons. As a result, campaigns occur over a period of weeks, not years. Earlier this year in Great Britain, the prime minister voluntarily left office because he believed he had lost too much support after the Brexit vote. He was not disgraced, and there was no constitutional crisis; his party simply selected his successor. Within days, he was moving out of #10 Downing Street and she was moving in.

That kind of thing can’t happen in America. Our system was designed to have elections occur at regular intervals, and the writers of the Constitution didn’t take into account how powerful political parties would become or how much money would be involved. In 1787, the media was composed of printed newspapers, while discourse happened face to face, not on Facebook.

Constitutional change is needed, but that can take years. In the meantime, voluntary steps over the next four years can make the 2020 election cycle less divisive. Candidates can announce their intentions whenever they want, but let’s have no debates until 2020. The Iowa Caucuses should be moved to March 1 and the rest of the season compressed into a tighter period. Arkansas, which moved its own primaries from May to March 1, should permanently move the primaries back to May and never look back.

For this to happen, Americans will have to force the action. Politics is a free market economy, which means that if there’s a buyer, there will be a seller. This campaign season has been a boon for the news networks, which have seen higher ratings and therefore more advertising revenue. But what’s good for CNN and Fox News isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us, and so when the networks dangle the 2020 race in front of our faces in 2019, we should turn the channel or turn off politics completely.

This doesn’t mean Americans should stop caring about our democracy – it just means our attention should be focused more effectively. Instead of creating a market for another political circus in 2019, let’s pay more attention to the participatory processes of government, such as what laws and policies are enacted, and then save the campaigning and the debating until 2020.

A never-ending election cycle does not create a better democracy, and apparently a lot of Arkansans agree. On Tuesday, 70 percent of them voted for an amendment increasing county officials’ terms from two years to four, meaning county judges and sheriffs can actually spend time doing their jobs rather than putting up yard signs every two years.

So let’s appreciate the fact that we elect our leaders – but how about we give this a rest for a while, OK? The next presidential election is in 2020. Let’s keep it there, and use that extra time for more appropriate pursuits, including the one for happiness.

Focus on changing systems, not people

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

Brent Dove of Rea Valley, state director of the Convention of States, said something really smart or at least interesting about the effort he leads in Arkansas – that it will gain momentum when people realize how little the election changed.

The Convention of States is a national effort to use a provision in the Constitution’s Article V allowing states to call a convention to amend that document.

All 27 of the Constitution’s previous amendments have been initiated through Congress, but Convention of States organizers believe the changes they want – term limits, a balanced budget amendment, a limit on government’s power – will never happen that way.

Every constitutional amendment faces an uphill battle, and this process would be a cliff, which is why it’s never happened in American history. Thirty-four states must approve an identical resolution and then send delegates to the convention, and then a majority of the delegations must agree to proposed amendments, and then 38 states must approve those amendments.

Eight states have approved the resolution. In Arkansas, it failed in 2015 in a Senate committee, but supporters will introduce it again in 2017. Former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican, told about three dozen Arkansas supporters Nov. 1 that the goal is to increase the number of states passing resolutions and build pressure on Congress to enact changes before the convention even happens.

It’s going to be tough to get 38 states to agree on anything these days, and that includes the Convention of States’ goals. The resolution would advance policies that are undeniably conservative in a country that is split in two and, if anything, moving left. Moreover, since its creation, the group has faced opposition from conservatives who fear a rogue convention that radically alters the Constitution – as if anything really radical would ever gain the approval of 38 states.

Where the convention gets it most right is the idea, voiced by Dove, that at this point in history, systemic change is needed.

The country’s political systems have evolved in ways that the Constitution doesn’t address, making it no longer a “living document” but instead an ignored one. The Constitution did not envision parties; clearly, partisan politics is how the system works. The Constitution’s checks and balances aren’t functioning properly because the humans who serve in Congress have too much allegiance to their party and not enough to their branch. The writers of the Constitution did not envision elected office would be a gigantic, full-time, sometimes lifetime industry based on legalized bribery, I mean campaign donations. The Constitution correctly gives Congress the power to tax and spend but has no provision requiring the numbers to eventually come into balance. Therefore, it rarely happens.

It’s time to reset the nation’s constitutional framework so that it can be relevant again – for example, so that it takes into account the now-obvious fact that political parties inevitably exist in a democracy. Either we can turn around the political system’s train and make it align perfectly with the Constitution’s original text, or instead, we can build new tracks and send the train to a destination it can actually reach.

Besides, very deep holes in the nation’s founding document have been filled before. It originally left out freedom of speech and religion, it allowed slavery, and it made it possible to deny African-Americans and women the right to vote. So I think the republic will survive a spirited debate about term limits.

Dove said that if 34 states can agree to the resolution, then at least that conversation can occur. While I have some doubts about whether the group can achieve its goals, I’m ready to have that conversation. It does matter who won on Tuesday, but systems usually change people more than the other way around. So after 18 months of talking a lot about what’s wrong with the people, let’s talk about tweaking the system.

In praise of being naive

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

Somewhere there is a perfect spot on the spectrum between being naive and being cynical, and humans should try to find that perfect spot. But humans err, so err on the side of being naive.

I write that in the face of the most cynicism-inducing election of my lifetime. And I’m apparently not alone because a deep cynic would say that voting itself is an act of naivety, and yet Arkansans and people across the country are lining up at the polls to do it anyway.

Keep in mind that, regardless of what you think about this year’s choices, at least we had them: for the nation’s chief executive, for lawmakers and for local officials. For more than a year, two rich and powerful people who want to become even more powerful have been required to traverse the country as part of the world’s most challenging job interview. Arkansas voters this year also have a direct say in the governor’s powers; in how long county officials stay in office; in how much debt the state can incur for economic development; and whether marijuana should be used legally for medicinal purposes. True, my vote did not count for much. But it counted exactly the same as everyone else’s in Arkansas.

Giving an average citizen this kind of say is rare in world history but not so rare in today’s world, in large part because of the example set by the country where God let me be born. That’s pretty cool, which is why, even in the midst of all the cynicism of A.D. 2016, just about every polling machine was occupied at my early voting site in Benton, and why, afterwards, a family stood outside the polling place snapping a photo of their son who must have voted for the first time. They all looked pretty proud, but I guess they were just being naive.

Believing a New World would offer religious and economic freedom? You might call that naive. So was believing that freedom was worth fighting for. That self-government was possible. That former slaves and the children of slaves could participate in a society with former slaveowners and their children. That a railroad could be built across a country and a canal dug between the oceans. That wars could be won on foreign shores, and democracy was possible in far-off lands. That a man could land on the moon – in less than 10 years, no less.

It takes a certain naivety to do these things; it certainly doesn’t happen through cynicism. Cynicism is inherently an attitude of powerlessness and inaction, which is why cynics do not grow many successful businesses, plant churches, begin charities, or start movements that change things for the better. Cynicism is self-centered and fearful, and it assumes the worst of people to the point of gross inaccuracy. It’s incompatible with achievement and service because why try to achieve if seen and unseen forces doom you to failure? And why serve if you are only going to be taken advantage of? True, there are some very rich cynics today. But a lot of them only got that way by appealing to others’ cynicism.

Yes, naivety can lead to disaster, because it’s based on trust, and sometimes trust is misplaced. But better to trust too much than not enough. After disaster, a naive person can still “stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools,” as Rudyard Kipling wrote, because he trusts those tools.

I’ve heard it said and implied many times this year that, if either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins this election, then the country will not survive.

But such deep, pervasive cynicism is far more dangerous than the outcome of one campaign. It leads to the kind of “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” attitude of the old Soviet Union. In the United States, structures are still in place that will limit the damage either Clinton or Trump will cause. But a cynical people quits trying, which can’t be overcome.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure there’s going to be another election in four years, and we can all give it another shot. Call me naive.

If it is broke, do fix it

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.