Sen. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock (left), and Senate Majority Leader Blake Johnson talk during an organizational meeting in the Arkansas Senate on Thursday, November 7, 2024. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)
Arkansas Senate Republicans voted Thursday to no longer allow members of the minority party to serve as vice chairs of standing committees.
Senate Majority Leader Blake Johnson, R-Corning, presented the rule change to the chamber during an organizational meeting in which senators chose committee assignments.
The GOP holds a 29-6 supermajority in the Senate, which will remain the same in January when new and reelected members are sworn in. With all 35 members present, 20 Republicans voted for the rule while three Republicans and all six Democrats voted against it. The remaining six Republicans did not vote.
“The people of Arkansas have sent an overwhelming number of Republicans down here, and they expect them to be in leadership roles,” Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, said in an interview.
Senator-elect Jamie Scott, a Democrat representing North Little Rock in the House, told the chamber she would make speaking against the rule her first action in her new position. She called it an abuse of power for “personal gain and partisanship.”
“It lacks respect and decency for all members, and it appears to be very mean-spirited on the surface,” Scott said. “…Just because you have the numbers to do something doesn’t mean you should do it.”
Democratic Sens. Greg Leding of Fayetteville and Clarke Tucker of Little Rock both said they believed the rule change was meant to punish their party.
Leding disputed Hester’s point that unilateral Republican committee leadership was the right response to the public voting a supermajority into office.
“The people I represent are no less the people of Arkansas [and] they have sent me here repeatedly,” said Leding, who was elected to four House terms starting in 2010 and has been elected twice to the Senate since 2018. “…This really just feels more like ruling than governing.”
Tucker noted that members of the minority party in each chamber of Congress are vice chairs of all committees. He told his colleagues that the rule would make the Arkansas Senate “the single pettiest chamber in the United States of America.”
After the 2022 elections, many of the same Senate Republicans approved a rule limiting the minority party’s seats on standing committees to two. Tucker said that rule has been “the single most challenging thing about being a senator in the current political climate,” and Leding said this further made the new rule unnecessary because a Democratic vice chair “could not sway the outcome” of any committee vote.
“It’s really just a small-minded way to start each legislative session,” Tucker said about the two rules in an interview.
He and Sen. Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff were the only Democrats on the Senate Judiciary and State Agencies committees during the 2023-2024 term. Tucker was vice chair of the State Agencies Committee while Flowers was vice chair of the Judiciary Committee.
The three Republicans that voted against the new rule were Sens. Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana, Missy Irvin of Mountain View and Bryan King of Green Forest. Hickey said in an interview that he didn’t want more “divisiveness” in the Senate during what he saw as “a time of rebuilding across the country.”
Irvin and Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, were first elected to the Senate when Republicans were the minority party, and both served as committee chairs at the time. Irvin said she voted against the rule because she “wanted to be consistent,” and Dismang said he did not vote on the rule because he saw it as unnecessary.
Sen. Ron Caldwell, R-Wynne, also did not vote on the rule.
“There will be a moment in time where we will need the vote of the minority party, and I was trying to treat them fairly,” Caldwell said.
Scott will be the only new senator in the chamber in January after she ran unopposed to succeed Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock, who retired. Additionally, Sen. Fred Love of Mabelvale will succeed Chesterfield as the Senate Minority Whip.
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