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.

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?

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

Here’s how Arkansas state politics really works: a disconnected majority often matters far less than a passionate few.

Certainly, the majority matters – particularly on Election Day. That’s when 1.1 million out of 3 million Arkansans went to the polls in November and cared deeply about who won the presidential race but not always some of the other races, including state legislative ones.

Once the campaigning ends and governing begins, Arkansas state politics becomes more about very concerned groups – “stakeholders,” they are called – who know those legislators well and lobby them on their particular issues. Hang around the Capitol when the Legislature is in session, and you’ll see 135 legislators and a governor being influenced by a relatively small number of lobbyists attending committee meetings and really paying attention on behalf of their groups – those groups usually being composed of ordinary Arkansans with legitimate concerns, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Their arguments often will carry the day.

And that leads us to guns at Razorback games.

It all started when Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, introduced a bill that would have allowed college faculty and staff with a concealed carry permit to carry guns on campus. His logic was that they could deter crazed killers from targeting the campuses and, if necessary, shoot those killers if the campus police took too long to arrive. The bill was strongly opposed by the colleges and universities and by a small band of red-shirt-wearing moms, but it passed the House easily and was amended in the Senate when Gov. Asa Hutchinson and some senators decided it needed a training requirement of 16 hours.

That’s when Arkansas’ most powerful group of passionate true believers, the National Rifle Association, stepped in. Arkansas is a pro-gun state anyway and so are all Republican legislators and many Democrats, but many NRA members believe Second Amendment rights are basically absolute, and they’ll base their votes entirely on that issue.

In other words, they’re passionate, which matters a lot. The political reality is that while each House member represents 30,000 constituents and each senator represents 86,000, what they’re most worried about are their party primary voters: 3,000-6,000 in the House and 10,000-14,000 in the Senate. Many legislators desperately want an A rating from the NRA because anything less might draw a primary opponent or cost them hundreds of votes – enough to make the difference.

As a result, the final bill, passed into law, went much farther than the original. In fact, it allowed anyone age 21 with a concealed carry permit and eight additional hours of training to carry a gun not just on college campuses but almost anywhere, including the State Capitol and Arkansas Razorbacks football games.

I haven’t seen a poll about that, but I suspect the majority of Arkansans are pro-gun but would be uncomfortable with that mixture of 70,000 people, youth, alcohol, frustration and firearms. But what the polls say about a particular issue often means little, anyway. What matters is not if a large majority of voters disinterestedly share an opinion. What matters are who cares, how much, and what they’ll do about it. Gun rights supporters care a lot, and they vote.

The story moved into the sports section and made national news. On Tuesday, the Southeastern Conference joined the conversation, saying the new law might negatively affect the Razorbacks with recruiting, officiating and, ominously, “scheduling.” When that happened, opinions across the state became less disinterested.

Legislators were then in a no-win situation between guns and the Hogs. A bill was written that would exempt sports stadiums along with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the Arkansas State Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility. That bill passed the Senate and then, on Thursday, the House despite the NRA’s objections, but legislators know their votes will be remembered.

Even a passionate few, or a passionate many in the NRA’s case, don’t get everything they want. Still, the general rule remains: On any particular issue, a passionate minority will have far greater influence than a disconnected majority, and legislators will continue to listen to those who are speaking.