Hazard to health: Minority rule
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rkansas is not the only state to fool around with minority rule, but killing health insurance for 100,000 or so citizens next month will push the state far into the vanguard of states that have experimented with it. Giving a small minority absolute power over how the government will raise and spend taxes seems dangerous, doesn’t it? Well, the history of minority rule is as woeful as you would expect it to be. Either nine of the 35 members of the Senate or 26 of the 100 representatives can stop almost any of the hundreds of government spending programs, and it looks like nine Republicans in the Senate will do exactly that with the federal program to insure the state’s poorest workers and their families. No other state allows a fourth of one house of its legislature to dictate how the state will spend its money. Since the adoption of Amendment 19 in 1934, no appropriation can become law unless it gets the votes of 75 percent of both houses, unless the money is for Confederate pensions, checks to bondholders, education or highways. Those exceptions can be funded by the simple majority that passes
OPINION
other acts, including laws that can take away your life, liberty or property. But the other 600 or so spending bills can ERNEST be killed by as few as DUMAS nine of the 135 lawmakers. If the legislature at its fiscal session next month does not reach the huge majority needed to continue using federal money to pay health insurance premiums for the working poor, it will be because nine or 10 senators united to show that they were against President Obama and his health insurance law. Blocking the expenditure of hundreds of millions of federal dollars on health care for Arkansas people won’t save the state a dime and it will plunge the state budget into deficit and hospitals all across the state into crisis. If that seems spiteful and witless, it applies to the whole history of Amendment 19. Let’s return to 1932, when the nation repudiated President Hoover’s pinched fiscal policies, which people believed deepened if they had not caused the depression.
Partying like it’s 1999
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ov. 8, 2016, remains more than a thousand days away, but the 2016 race for president moved into a decidedly higher gear this week. At its party meeting, the Republican National Committee established its calendar for the key early nomination events and moved toward selecting its convention site. The “super PAC” that was central to President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 — Priorities USA Action — lined up clearly behind the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton and the nation’s paper of record carried a long-form piece titled “Planet Hillary” on the complex campaign-in-waiting (with a heavily Arkansas flavor) for the 2008 Democratic runner-up. Finally, key Republicans began trying out a 2016 line of attack on the former first lady and secretary of state centering on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. It is a throwback script that shows that the Republican Party learned little from the battles of the last years of the 20th century. Focusing its attacks on the Monica Lewinsky case not only created a backlash against the GOP then but it also was crucial to the rise of Hillary Clinton’s political career. To try it once again shows just how devoid of creative ideas the modern GOP is and
what a challenging opponent Clinton represents. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, perhaps the biggest benefiJAY ciary of the GOP BARTH 2016 nominating calendar that combines states where his father has thrived in recent years with South Carolina, got the Lewinsky chatter going in responding to questions about whether Mike Huckabee’s quickly-infamous “libido” comments are indicative of a broader problem for his party in reaching out to women voters. After babbling about how well the women in his life are doing professionally, Paul quickly pivoted to Lewinsky. “Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, ‘Republicans are having a war on women?’ ” said Paul on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” When host David Gregory asked if the Lewinsky matter should really play a role in evaluating Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate, Paul said that the former secretary of state should be judged on her own merits. But he then connected her to her husband anyway, saying, “Sometimes
Hoover got only 12 percent of Arkansans’ that on March 1, 1935 federal relief to Arkanvotes. But the same year they elected a new sas would end if it did not bear some of the governor, who promised fiscal policies that load like other states. Fearing mobs when all the relief ended, would make Hoover look like a socialist. Arkansas was the poorest and most a panicky Futrell recalled the legislators. debt-ridden state, tied for last in per-cap- “We’re sitting on a powder keg,” he told ita income but first in per-capita public debt. them. They enacted a passel of new taxes, Arkansas had invested heavily on road and including a 2 percent sales tax on necessibridge building with borrowed money but ties, and the appropriations to spend them. the floods of 1927 washed them away, and Since then, a small band has occasionthe state borrowed again to rebuild them. ally held an appropriation hostage to the 75 Although it had the nation’s worst schools, percent. A senator from Marked Tree got his the state was left with no money for edu- pals to block money for the state Pharmacy cation. Board until it dropped sanctions against his So Marion Futrell promised that if druggist. South Arkansas senators stymied elected he would cut taxes and slash spend- the prison appropriation until Governor ing by 50 percent. He got only 44 percent Bumpers fired the reformist prison director of the votes but that was enough. hired by the previous Republican governor. He kept his promise. He and the legis- Bumpers refused but the guy quit to keep lature cut spending by 51 percent so that the prisons open. virtually all the state’s meager tax receipts A clique once blocked the appropriation went to pay bondholders, Confederates and for executive, legislative and judicial offices, a few essentials like patronage government but the speaker pronounced it a “just debt employees. Futrell thought spending was of the state,” like bondholders, so it was the cause of all suffering so to prevent future allowed to pass by a majority. Legislative spending and taxing he got the legislature in leaders might try that with the Medicaid 1933 to refer Amendment 19, which allowed appropriation. as few as nine legislators to defeat spendOr else include a pension in Medicaid for ing or to block increases in existing taxes. descendants of the Confederate hero David Bewildered, only half the people who went O. Dodd, which would make it important to the polls in 1934 voted either way on it, enough that a majority could pass it … and but it was ratified. even the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette would President Franklin Roosevelt announced endorse it. it’s hard to separate one from the other.” The next day, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough picked up the line of attack, “[I]f Hillary Clinton attacks the Republican Party’s … treatment of women and disrespect for women, and suggests they’re misogynists … it does seem to be a fair question to ask right now, a few years out, does the media have a responsibility to say, ‘Well, let’s see what happened when you were in the White House, and how women were treated when you were in the governor’s mansion and the White House?’ ” For the 24 hours that followed, Fox News looped the images that became iconic throughout the scandal and brought in talking heads to “analyze” the role of the Lewinsky scandal on 2016 politics. What those who want to talk about the events of the late 1990s anew forget is how well Hillary Clinton performed under the pressure of that scandal and how reminders of it only benefit her politically. Unquestionably, the Lewinsky affair was personally scarring to the first lady. But, politically, it was an event that sent her to stratospheric heights (to borrow imagery from the controversial New York Times Magazine cover article), setting the stage for her candidacy for the U.S. Senate from New York and all that has followed. In polling just before the 1996 re-election of her husband, Hillary Clinton was viewed favorably by less
than half of the voting public (49 percent favorable and 43 percent unfavorable); in contrast, Elizabeth Dole was seen as favorable by nearly six in 10 voters with only a quarter viewing her unfavorably. But, as the scandal broke and Hillary Clinton showed public grace under the pressure of the events, her public persona grew (topping out at 66 percent in a February 1999 Gallup survey). It was from that base of popularity that Clinton began her successful Senate campaign. In 2008, as best analyzed in Anne Kornblut’s “Notes from the Cracked Ceiling,” the Clinton campaign consciously downplayed gender issues until late in that primary campaign. All signs are that a 2016 campaign will be different and that Clinton will emphasize the historic nature of her candidacy and the symbolic and substantive benefits for American women (and society as a whole) that would accompany her victory. Part of that argument will, of course, focus on GOP foot-dragging on the Violence Against Women Act, opposition to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and, yes, concerns about required contraceptive coverage. It appears many Republicans will not be able to hold back from trekking back in time and focusing anew on Lewinsky. There also is little doubt a veteran Clinton can play her role in any revival of that docudrama with aplomb. www.arktimes.com
JANUARY 30, 2014
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