CORRUPTION, POLITICS, AND THE ART OF HEALING

I may be sleeping in the dog house for revealing this, but my wife has a medical fascination with grotesque pimples, boils, etc. She is not alone. “Dr. Popper” has 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube. Her videos commonly get more than 20 million views, and now she has her own TV show. I don’t get it, but for my wife and millions of others, it is entertaining and informative.

This somewhat unpleasant topic does provide a useful illustration for the corruption we recently uncovered in our State government.  A boil is a bacterial infection of the skin that if untreated will grow and fester over time. Boils are disgusting to behold (stay with me here, I’m going somewhere with this), but never more so than when they are treated and drained.

Our State was controlled by one political party for 138 years. Over time, accountability and transparency disappeared into a vacuum that reached its pinnacle during the Clinton administration here in Arkansas. Corruption permeated the entire system. Without some adversarial tension, without oversight, the path of least resistance, succumbing to temptation, became the norm.

The stench we are now experiencing is evidence that the system that created and sustained the boil of corruption has been lanced. Arkansans have responded with understandable revulsion. The healing process appears ugly, and it stinks, but it has begun. While perfection in unattainable, we would be fools not to learn from the painful experiences we have endured.

Unlike Dr. Popper’s fans who find value in the information she provides; the citizens of Arkansas experienced the revulsion of corruption without any compensatory benefits. If there is to be an upside to our recent governmental moral failures, it must be in our individual and collective responses. We let our guard down once and suffered a regrettable but predictable consequence.

I am reminded of an incident years ago. I met the brother of a good friend who had warned me, as an attorney, that his brother had “no use” for lawyers and politicians. When we shook hands, this stranger I had just met wiped his hand on his jacket. It was done in jest, but the gesture was not lost on me.

We know that power and money invite abuse. The neighbors we serve know that politicians and lawyers are often around both. It’s no mystery why constituents are angry, pundits are cynical, and partisans attack opportunistically with a broad brush. Dishonest players in State Government stink up the whole system and make us all seem guilty by association.

Recently I opined that “no one was benefiting from being in Little Rock.” It was my admittedly clumsy way of saying that in my experience, I have not found the legislators in Little Rock to be routinely corrupt.  Most are simply decent people trying to make a difference. Sadly, the dishonest few cast a shadow over all the rest.

These recent scandals do show us that honesty is not enough. The air of power and money that public servants breathe requires more than honesty. It requires a diligence that looks for signs of trouble. Politics is a minefield that can obliterate the most honest among us.

With the help of God, I am personally resolved to go beyond “merely” being an honest man. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. As public servants, we must be proactive. Civility and collegiality are important, but we must never forget that our first loyalty is not to fellow legislators. Our allegiance is to the standards we profess, the people we serve and the Constitutions we swear to uphold.

Andrea Lea, Auditor of State, Endorsement

I’ve witnessed Bob live out his convictions in the midst of immense pressure and stand strong on conservative principles while the political storms raged. I’m confident Bob will continue to stand strong for the conservative values we as Arkansans hold so dearly. I was proud to call him a house colleague but I am even more proud to call him my friend.

End the violence, not our freedoms

Very few events in our society produce the emotional reactions that school shootings elicit among us. Murdering innocents is something that ordinary people like you and I cannot relate to. Like a drowning victim, we seem to thrash about wildly trying to find the answer to our question: how do we save our children from a repeat of this horror?

We feel a compelling need to “do something now.” Our federal and state constitutions task government with the responsibility of apprehending criminals while protecting people and property. It seems logical to ask, “what can government do?”

Many people argue that if guns are used to perpetrate the violence, removing the guns from society would remove the violence. This narrow focus in the search for answers might be sufficient if we lived in a different world where men were angels, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, we do not.

As a legislator who believes in the value of our freedoms, I ask, how can we reconcile our solutions with the unalienable right of self defense? To get good answers, we must ask good questions. While we may ask what government cam do, we must also ask what we, private citizens, institutions, and organizations can also do. I believe the longterm answer we seek requires a fundamental societal change, not an increase in government.

Furthermore, if our society sanctions violence and barbarism, what delusion allows us to believe that as a people we will be spared the consequences of that glorified violence? Abortion, movies that feature grotesque violence and video games where teens and pre-teens compete to murder and decapitate their opponents are either a cause or a consequence of this violence in society. It is foolishness to pretend there is no corollary between violence itself and our willingness to blatantly profit from it.

In Parkland, Fla., we saw layer after layer of government institutions radically fail the children in that school. Why? How? These are not merely interesting questions, they are essential to determining causes and solutions. Many people who want to see guns removed from our society are also victims of myths and misrepresentations from the anti-gun extremists for whom the constitution and the Second Amendment are remnants from an earlier time and are outmoded. I believe they couldn’t be more wrong.

As your elected representative, know that I will continue to seek real answers to get real results that will offer effective countermeasures against those troubled individuals who would perpetrate this senseless violence on our children. I am convinced that Second Amendment protections are compatible with well-conceived defenses that end vulnerable “gun-free” zones (regrettably perceived as shooting galleries by lunatics). We absolutely can and will protect our children and end this terrible blight throughout our nation. And, we will do it while preserving our liberties.

http://www.mcrecordonline.com/opinion/article_ff5ef082-2213-11e8-a5a5-436918accbc4.html

A transparent government is a better government

The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was signed into law by Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller (R) in 1967 and is one of the strongest protections of open government in the country. This allows the citizen to know what its government is doing so that the people can truly rule (regnat populus: the people rule – motto of the State of Arkansas). I often say that an engaged public is the key to good government and if government is allowed to hide its activities, any effort of the public to be engaged is practically subverted.

I really do believe this stuff and know that protecting our Arkansas Freedom of Information Act is a vital part of fulfilling our state motto. So why would I, or any legislator, support any exemption to our state FOIA? A good question, and one I should have to answer, or I am failing in my service to my constituents.

In 2017, the Arkansas legislature dealt with many bills that, if enacted, would provide new exemptions to the state FOIA law. Many of them were extremely broad in scope and would have done real damage to government transparency. Almost all of them were motivated by good intentions, but many of them could have had real detrimental effect on the citizens’ effort to control their government.

Many of those bills came to the committee I have the privilege to chair in the House of Representatives (House State Agencies), and most of them never made it out of that committee. Not because they were ill intended, but because of a potential for ill effect.

So, coming back to the question I should answer: why did any of them make it out of that committee?

As technology continues to develop and society continues to change, we find ourselves in a situation where the release of some information would have a far greater impact on the safety of individual citizens than the protection it provides to the public by accountability. That’s a mouthful, so let me provide some examples.

Several of the FOIA exemptions that passed this last legislative session dealt with security plans for schools, the governor’s office, State Capitol grounds, and other high risk locations – places never considered high risk targets in the past, but today could all be the target of terroristic activity. These exemptions were attempts to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

There were also exemptions that dealt with body cameras worn by law enforcement officers. One exemption was designed to protect the privacy of citizens who may be accused, but not yet convicted, and the other exemption would protect the dignity of an officer killed in the line of duty.

All of these exemptions passed into law have at least one thing in common: they were reasonable, both in scope and impact, and were designed to protect the public and their public servants.

I would argue that making these types of amendments to our strong FOIA laws actually further strengthens transparency and does not degrade it. It allows records to be made, information preserved, and citizens’ privacy protected in limited and necessary situations, without attacking the direct purpose of our FOIA laws, which is government transparency and accountability.

If we cannot make these types of reasonable alterations to our FOIA laws, the types of alterations that keep sensitive information out of the hands of terrorists and protects the privacy of citizens, we will find ourselves in a situation where the public will demand a repeal of our FOIA laws, something that no person who understands the value of government transparency wants to see.

As a bit of a post script, I would like to say, let us not allow this line of reasoning to go too far. Every proposed exemption to our state FOIA should be thoroughly vetted and scrutinized closely. It is good that the media and other citizen groups see themselves as the protectors of the act and the transparency it provides. Without this diligence, something great we hold here in Arkansas could be lost.