JOHN BRUMMETT
House Speaker Jeremy Gillam filed curiously last week what’s called a “shell bill,” or, in this case, a “shell resolution.”
It’s a proposed constitutional amendment for referral to voters in 2018. Its heading says it addresses the process by which we propose and decide constitutional amendments and initiated acts.
It’s blank after that. The text will be filled in by amendment later.
The shell format permitted the proposed amendment to be filed by the deadline even without the details.
It was all sufficiently intriguing to prompt me to get on the phone with the speaker and implore him to give me a hint, anyway, as to his intentions.
When the speaker puts his name on a measure, it adds currency. And since the Senate and House are talking about referring only two proposed constitutional amendments this time, one each—and with the Senate appearing to have pre-emptively decided to refer so-called “tort reform” to de-value human life and destroy the separation-of-powers doctrine … well, the speaker’s shell bill, whatever it portended, might be a strong if not leading candidate for the House’s proposal.
Gillam said that, sure, he’d be happy to talk about it. He said it all went back to that time in the Capitol corridor a few months ago when I told him it was too danged easy to amend our state Constitution—especially considering that, at that point, a couple of Missouri guys had paid for canvassers and consultants and put themselves on our ballot with a proposed constitutional amendment to anoint their named corporations the casino gambling monopolists in Arkansas.
The speaker said he got to thinking about it and talking to people and going “hmmm.” There’s interest, he said.
Then, Gillam said, the speaker of the House in Ohio told him that his membership barely had time to do anything anymore other than work on complex implementing legislation for too-easily enacted constitutional amendments.
Consider the political and logistical challenge to this inexperienced right-wing legislative assembly in Arkansas in trying to construct a medical-marijuana industry from thin air as mandated by the voters in a constitutional amendment.
For those reasons, Gillam said, he told Senate President Pro Tem Jonathan Dismang that he thought he’d throw in a shell proposal to keep open the option of addressing the matter constitutionally, and that Dismang agreed that the availability of the option would be a good idea. That mattered because each legislative body must approve the other’s proposal.
I’ve been trying to remember my part. Between my conversation that day with the speaker and today, Donald Trump became the preposterous second-place president and presented an existential threat. I’ve been obsessed otherwise.
But now I recall. The casino-gambling proposal, blessedly thrown off the ballot by the Arkansas Supreme Court, set me off on a tangent about how our state Constitution was a pedestrian jumble of minutiae that didn’t belong in a supreme document that ought to exist on a higher plane than statutory laws. It should embrace guiding concepts and precepts more than policy detail.
The gold standard is the U.S. Constitution, which, by our founders’ wisdom, can be amended only if two-thirds majorities of the House and Senate vote to refer an amendment, or if two-thirds of the states get together and call a constitutional convention, and, after that, only if three-fourths of the states, 38 of them, ratify the proposal by votes of their legislatures.
I’d love to abolish the electoral college, but the arduous amendment process wouldn’t possibly allow it. I tell you that to show you how it works. A guy can’t get mad about the existential threat of a preposterous second-place president and haul off and amend the U.S. Constitution—no matter how right he might be.
In Arkansas, we permit amendments by these methods:
• A simple legislative majority of both houses refers up to three to the voters for enactment by a simple majority vote every two years.
• A public initiative in which somebody collects signatures, survives any legal challenge to its clarity or signature sufficiency, and gets enacted by a simple majority vote.
What Gillam says I accosted him about was the idea that maybe Arkansas could require some level of super-majority legislative vote to refer a proposal amendment and then some popular vote majority of greater than 50 percent to pass one.
He said he’d been talking with members about whether they’d go for something like that—and some might—and, if so, what the super-majority levels ought to be.
I like two-thirds myself, both for referral and passage, but I’d celebrate 60 percent and throw a party over three-fourths.
Gillam also has his staff gathering data on what other states do. Some require super-majorities.
Is this “shell bill” something we ought to take seriously?
Maybe, Gillam said.
No doubt its biggest liability will be that I’m for it, depending on the text to come, of course.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.