Arkansas elected officials reflect on achievements as session comes to a close

Arkansas Republicans celebrated the end of the legislative session Wednesday, touting policy victories on issues such as education, maternal health, youth technology use and cutting taxes.

At an afternoon press conference, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders praised the leaders of each chamber for managing “personalities” within their conferences. The first-term Republican governor also individually named legislators who sponsored key legislative measures, such as eradicating “woke” ideology from universities in the state, adding more requirements to “end petition fraud” for constitutional amendments, and passing what she described as “the most significant economic development legislation in decades.”

“This session has reinforced that Arkansas’ conservative majority is delivering on our promises to the people of this state…for too long, our government has been enslaved to powerful special interests — not anymore,” Sanders said. “We do not work for them. We work for the people of Arkansas.”

Democratic lawmakers, at their own press conference, took the Republican supermajority to task for “out-of-control spending on misguided policies,” power grabs and the seepage of divisive national politics into Arkansas policymaking. Six members of the Senate and 19 members of the House are Democrats.

Speaker of the House Rep. Brian Evans, R-Cabot, called the session a “resounding success,” while Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, said the results from this year’s session showed that the state is “not always at the back of the pack.”

Sanders touted bills that aligned with many of the goals she outlined in her January State of the State address, such as cracking down on what Chinese nationals and businesses are able to do in the state.

“We will put enhanced penalties on violent criminal illegals and make sure our state is not a safe harbor for violent illegals,” Sanders said. “We will continue our record as the toughest state in America on our communist Chinese adversaries, banning them from owning land, partnering with our cities or selling merchandise to state government.”

Talking about some of that legislation, House Minority Leader Andrew Collins, D-Little Rock, said national politics crept in and poisoned “what used to be a proud Arkansas tradition of independence.”

“Cookie-cutter bills from national right-wing think tanks chipped away at the popular punching bags of today — DEI, immigrants, China and LGBT people. …In most cases these bills are mostly for show, red meat for a national audience, but they will have harmful consequences for real people in Arkansas,” Collins said.

Sanders listed a variety of other Republican victories, such as amendments to Arkansas’ Social Media Safety Act, and bills targeting Big Tech and pharmacy benefit managers, but there were some defeats. For example, a bill that would have criminalized lobbying for certain foreign entities like China, part of a broader package of China-related legislation, failed multiple times in the Senate this week and ultimately failed to make to the governor’s desk.

“Today isn’t just about one bill, it’s about the people that we serve and standing up to the powerful special interests who try to stop us,” Sanders said. “We went after Big Tech companies exploiting our kids, big drug middlemen manipulating drug prices, big government subsidizing junk food at the taxpayer’s expense, lobbyists working for adversaries like China, woke faculty trying to indoctrinate our students, and the far-left that wants to coddle dangerous criminal illegals that threaten our elections with petition fraud.”

During her State of the State address, Sanders made known her desire to reform higher education this session the same way she’d done with K-12 education with the LEARNS Act in 2023.

The Arkansas ACCESS Act made significant changes to higher education, including prohibitions on excused absences for political protests and the collection and reporting of DEI-related information for institutional accreditation purposes. The legislation also permits faculty performance reviews to result in the removal of tenure status and will allow for the incorporation of a return-on-investment metric in the higher education funding model, among other things. 

Republicans also pushed through a bill that banned students from using cellphones in schools — another Sanders priority — and amended the Educational Freedom Account Program to limit how much money participants could spend on things like extracurricular activities and travel expenses.

Sanders and Republicans lawmakers made the ballot petition process a priority during the session, passing multiple bills that opponents say are a direct assault on the people’s right to direct democracy.

Collins called the bills affecting the petition process “the most egregious power grab of the session” and a “full-on assault on direct democracy.”

“Republicans have made it nearly impossible to exercise your right to petition to get something on the ballot,” he said. “We will soon regret snatching away the people’s right to petition.”

The Little Rock Democrat said power grabs were one of the most consistent themes of the session, “usually coming at the expense of the people of Arkansas.”

“ACCESS eliminated, shrank and kicked community stakeholders off boards, centralizing power in the governor,” Collins said.

“One legislator tried to force Arkansas PBS and the State Library to comply with his demands. When the State Library Board didn’t agree, the Legislature fired the entire board,” he said. “Countless bills were introduced to micromanage cities, counties, state agencies and school boards, as the emboldened Republican supermajority apparently decided it wasn’t enough to do their jobs, they needed to do everybody else’s job too.”

Free school breakfast, maternal health Medicaid, school cellphone ban all become Arkansas law

Republicans and Democrats also achieved wins working across the aisle, passing legislation to  to improve maternal health and make breakfast free for all students.

“In a bipartisan compromise effort, we, alongside Sen. [Jonathan] Dismang and Sen. Clarke Tucker, made Arkansas the first state in the South to offer free school breakfast to every single one of our students,” Sanders said.

At their press conference, Democratic leaders also highlighted the bipartisan effort on free school breakfasts now Act 123.

Evans said that Arkansans should be proud of the legislators they sent to Little Rock, praising members of his conference for “putting politics aside” and contributing to a successful session.

Democrats remain defiant

Senate Minority Leader Greg Leding of Fayetteville said that despite the long odds against Democrats in both legislative chambers, they were still able to “score some meaningful wins,” both in terms of legislation they were able to stop and legislation they passed. 

He singled out freshman Sen. Jamie Scott of North Little Rock, whom he called “one of the most thoughtful, compassionate leaders” in the Legislature, and first-term Rep. Jessie McGruder of Marion for their work on maternal health issues and early voting.

Leding highlighted the united work of all legislative Democrats in helping Republican opponents derail a $750 million appropriation bill intended for a new 3,000-bed prison in rural western Arkansas.

“Regardless of what you think of the need for a prison, it’s clear that that plan for Franklin County is wrong,” Leding said.

Collins cited the prison as part of the budget-busting theme of the session.

“The message was clear from the very beginning of session, Republicans were going to bust the budget on no-limit private school vouchers and a misguided billion dollar-plus prison in Franklin County, and there wouldn’t be much left for anything else. And that’s exactly what happened,” he said. “While Democrats and others rejected prison spending for now, that bill is coming due.”

Going forward, Collins said Democrats will continue to push for the issues they made a priority at the beginning of the session in January: education; health care, especially maternal and mental health; and democracy.

Vetos

After both press conferences were finished, Sanders’ office announced she had vetoed two items: a bill that legalized the delivery of marijuana or the purchase of it from a drive-thru, along with a line-item veto eliminating the salary for the director of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity.

“This session I championed Arkansas ACCESS, my plan to make college more accessible for all and get indoctrination out of college classrooms,” Sanders wrote in her veto letter to Hester and Evans. “Arkansas will not waste nearly $200,000 in taxpayer dollars on DEI administrators who promote woke nonsense.”

However, it is not clear if the institute is still functioning. A search of UALR’s website turned up results for strategic plans that referenced the institute last year, before ACCESS was passed, but when clicked on the webpages appeared to have been taken down or moved. A search of UALR’s directory did not appear to return results for anyone directly employed by the institute.

When asked for comment, a UALR spokesperson said the position was vacant and the university had not planned to fill it.

Sanders said she vetoed House Bill 1889 because it would have “expand[ed] access to usable marijuana.”