Ernest Dumas, who’s been covering the Arkansas legislature for half a century assesses this year’s group in the new monthly print issue of Arkansas Times. Verdict:
Yielding to the enduring impulse of legislature watchers, one is moved to declare the 2019 Arkansas General Assembly one of the worst, if not the worst, of modern times, owing to the simple volume of conspicuously unconstitutional, discriminatory, punitive and regressive bills flowing through both legislative bodies.
History may offer a better perspective, because the governor seems to have a subtler eye for appearances than his soldiers in the legislature and may restrain some of their baser instincts. Democrats, as everyone knows, are now powerless in a government that, root and branch, is solidly Republican.
But we can make this judgment without reservation: The great political realignment, begun in the South in the 1960s, is now complete in Arkansas, as it is in the nation.