Democrats in Arkansas have picked up ten House seats across Northwest Arkansas, Central Arkansas, and Jonesboro.
This gives the minority party 30 seats to the Republicans 70. Even the mathematically-challenged folks (like me!) will still notice that 30 is less than 51, which would be the majority. So why are Democrats and pro-governance Republicans so excited? Let’s get into it.
Types of Law in Arkansas
For simplicity’s sake, let’s divide legislation in Arkansas into three buckets in terms of numbers required to pass it.
The first bucket is what you usually think of when you think of legislation. Things like changing how doctors get licensed, or altering criminal penalties for certain crimes, or repealing the state’s extreme abortion ban require just a bare majority in the legislature. Fifty-one votes in the House and18 in the Senate gets it done!
The second bucket usually relates to nit-picky procedural stuff, and it requires a ⅔ majority (67 in the House, 24 in the Senate) vote. This includes things like voting to decide whether to end a session or extend it, passing emergency clauses, and taking up non-fiscal bills during fiscal sessions. The Democrats would only need to pick up a few votes in the House to hit that number, and in a Republican caucus of 70 that’s paying attention to a nationwide shellacking of their party, that might be easier than it’s been in years past.
The final bucket contains appropriations bills – what agencies get money and how much they get. Appropriations bills need a whopping ¾ votes to pass, which in the House means 75 votes. This means not only do Democrats now have the numbers to influence what goes into appropriations bills, they have a margin. They could conceivably let a few members vote the other direction for some reason or another without losing the caucus’s leverage.
Nationally and at the state level, one of the legislative branch’s most important functions is “holding the purse strings.” Executive branches can’t do anything without being able to pay for it, so the framers of both the state and federal constitutions made sure different branches of government held those powers. For the first time in around 15 years, both parties have a say in how the state will spend our tax dollars.
Why Supermajorities are Bad… For Both Sides
The thing is, even for the side in power, supermajorities still create the conditions for poor governance.
The minority team obviously gets the short end of the stick here; their power gets reduced to hoping enough folks on the winning team will work across the aisle, occasionally slipping in harm-reduction legislation, and hoping for enough defectors from the other team that they get some leverage on vanishingly rare occasions.
But why is a supermajority bad for the majority team, too?
First, from a philosophical point of view, they mean democracy doesn’t work properly. Governor Sanders won reelection with around 53% of the votes, but there are far more than 53 Republicans in the House. None of our federal delegation, despite half the state voting for “not Republican”, are… not Republican. If democracy should represent the people it governs, then Arkansas is doing a poor job.
Second, from a practical standpoint, supermajorities create the conditions for poor governance because the opposition doesn’t have any power to force compromise. The supermajority gets to do whatever it wants, even if what they’re doing is objectively bad policy. They aren’t forced to listen to opposing viewpoints.
Let’s take the LEARNS Act. When Sanders rammed it through the legislature in 2023, Democrats in both chambers warned about ballooning costs, unaccountable use of monies, and the negative impacts it would have on public education.
Four years later, those concerns have been proven correct, but they were ignored in 2023 because of the supermajority. Now we’re four years in the hole on LEARNS, and Sanders’ new budget asks for yet another massive increase to LEARNS funding.
Supermajorities hurt the whole state because debate and compromise limit lawmakers’ mistakes. When a party feels that it doesn’t have to compromise to pass pet projects, concerns aren’t heard and legislation becomes worse.
Now, with the House supermajority broken, Democrats can hold up appropriations bills in return for getting legislation passed. They could also attach funding for chronically underfunded programs that their constituents like. They can, conceivably, check the worst impulses of the extremists in the legislature and work hand-in-hand with other, more reasonable members to pass legislation that will actually improve Arkansans’ lives, and we can all finally stop asking the question, “What has your government actually done for you?”
It’s good for Arkansas that the weaker side has just a bit more leverage at the table now. Arkansans will have to wait and see what that leverage does.
