Giving thanks for foster kids’ caseworkers

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

While most of us this week will enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with our families, 5,200 children in Arkansas also will be fed a meal – but not by their parents.

That’s the number of children who are in the state’s foster care system, and it’s risen by more than 1,000 since 2014. According to Department of Human Services Director Cindy Gillespie, the system “truly is in a crisis.”

What’s happening is not so much that more children are entering the system, though they are, but that much fewer are leaving it.

Gillespie and her Division of Children and Family Services director, Mischa Martin, say a major cause is a declining number of front-line caseworkers who work with children and their families, biological and foster. In Arkansas, they average 28 cases apiece when the national standard is 15.

Caseworkers, who earn about $31,000 a year, are working a lot of overtime in a high-stress, high-stakes job. They walk into extremely difficult, unsafe family situations where parents are drug addicts or abusive, or both. Then they walk out carrying a kid, or dragging several, for whom they must find a place to stay that night. Sometimes, that involves long hours of making phone calls – surely one of the most stressful and heartbreaking sales jobs ever. Then they work with the biological family so their children can return. Meanwhile, they’re monitoring the children in their temporary home. They’re also spending too much time driving, making copies, and doing other work that doesn’t directly involve efficiently taking care of kids.

Naturally, turnover is high, so we have a corps of hardworking, dedicated, understaffed, underpaid caseworkers who in many cases are either burning out or learning on the job. Because of that, they’re less capable of achieving the ultimate goal, which is reuniting as many kids as possible with their newly equipped biological parents.

According to Gillespie, this is more than just a problem for the Division of Children and Family Services, which is in charge of foster children. It’s a problem for the entire Department of Human Services, a sprawling agency that handles many programs for struggling families. So for four months starting in May, she regularly convened the entire agency’s leadership in a “war room” environment to consider strategies. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has asked many other state agencies to be as lean as possible, has proposed $26 million next fiscal year to hire 228 additional staff members, including 150 caseworkers. Pay increases are also being considered, as is instituting a second shift so caseworkers aren’t working all the time.

Meanwhile, DHS is working with private organizations like The CALL in Arkansas to recruit foster families who can give children a temporary home – days, months or longer – until the biological parents are ready to raise their children again. Those homes are where many of those children will spend their Thanksgiving this year. There are currently 1,641 such families, along with 274 therapeutic homes for more serious cases, and the agency is hoping to increase those numbers to 1,749 and 350 by August 2017.

As long as I can remember, there’s been a big debate about whether government can do anything right. This is something government must do right. Children should be separated from their parents only when absolutely necessary – when those parents are strung out on drugs, in prison, physically or sexually abusive, or neglectful. Unfortunately, in a state with 3 million people, that’s going to happen sometimes. In those circumstances, someone must take the kids away and then assume responsibility for them, at least for a while. That’s probably going to be the state of Arkansas.

So yes, Gov. Hutchinson, if you’re going to spend my tax dollars on anything, spend them on this. Hire good people, and pay them enough that they’ll stay on the job and get really good at it. Of all the reasons for families to be separated on Thanksgiving, an inadequate number of caseworkers is one of the worst ones.

None of this is meant as a criticism of those caseworkers, who wade into situations the rest of us avoid to help kids and families in a crisis. On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful they’re there, and I’m thankful that, assuming the governor gets his way, there soon will be more of them.

Related: Trading an empty nest for a full house.

Every county is purple

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

For the second time in five elections, the winner of the popular vote was not elected president, and that’s OK, we’re told, because look at this map showing the United States is a sea of red counties with a few blue islands. What would happen if those blue people’s votes in California counted as much as everyone else’s?

No chart or graph ever tells the whole story. The problem with these maps is that they perpetuate this binary view of the world that dominates our political discourse these days. They imply that everyone in a blue county is blue, and everyone in a red county is red. The truth is that there are red voters even in the bluest of the blue counties, and vice versa, as well as yellow voters and green voters, too. Every county is purple, just in different shades.

So now we know that a million fewer Americans voted for President-elect Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton, just as Al Gore won 540,000 more popular votes than President George W. Bush in 2000. After two centuries where it usually worked out that the winner was the one preferred by the most Americans, the opposite has happened twice in the last five elections.

If you’re OK with that, it may be because you’re just glad it’s over and because Trump won fair and square playing by the rules. Football games are won not by the team gaining the most yards but by the team scoring the most points. His victory is entirely legitimate.

But if you’re OK with it simply because your team has benefitted by those rules two out of the last five elections, remember this: What goes around can come around, and it easily could be the other team that benefits next time.

Defenders of the Electoral College say it protects small states, but in reality, it favors larger swing states where the most votes are. The Electoral College’s winner-take-all format in all states except Maine and Nebraska means many states are so safely red or blue that candidates ignore them. A candidate can win by one vote each in 11 big states and not even be on the ballot in the other 39 and still be elected. After the primaries, the two major party candidates never came to Arkansas because they knew Trump would win it. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Moreover, the Electoral College herds voters into that binary red-blue mindset, marginalizing third party and independent candidates who might have something important to say.

Now there are calls to abolish it, mostly by Democrats, and replace it with a popular vote. If that were the case, in a very close election, the entire country would look like Florida in 2000. We’d all be picking through ballots one by one looking for hanging chads, or filing lawsuits saying electronic ballots were hacked.

Instead, let’s make the Electoral College better – to more accurately reflect the fact that the entire country is composed of different shades of purple instead of only red or blue. Instead of assigning electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, the number of votes should be increased in each state and then assigned proportionally.

Instead of Arkansas awarding six Electoral College votes, it could award 60 and divide them according to the results. Under that scenario, Trump would have won 37 votes, Clinton would have won 20, the Libertarian Gary Johnson would have won 2, and Evan McMullin would have won 1. Meanwhile, Trump would have won Electoral College votes in California and New York instead of those big states automatically going to Clinton. Maybe the two would have had to visit all of these places instead of camping out in the swing states.

I voted for McMullin, but give credit where credit’s due. Trump did what this column is all about: He saw purple where everyone else saw blue. Pennsylvania and Michigan had voted for the Democrat in six straight elections, while Wisconsin had voted Democrat seven elections in a row. Trump went up there and grabbed those votes – 107,000 more than Clinton between those three states, and that was enough to win him the presidency.

I just think the system would be better if it encouraged candidates to seek votes in reddish-purple Arkansas, too.

Related: A better Electoral College.

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.