LITTLE ROCK – Arkansas legislative leaders said Thursday they don’t expect to refer any proposed constitutional amendments to voters next year after Republican-led efforts to impose new rules on courts and reinstate a voter ID law faced resistance.
A joint House and Senate committee meeting that had been scheduled next week to begin recommending proposed amendments was cancelled, and top lawmakers said they didn’t expect to put any measures on the November 2016 ballot. The Legislature can refer up to three measures to voters.
“If there was an issue that required us to refer out something to the people, I think that should be done. I just don’t see that with the current resolutions,” Senate President Jonathan Dismang, a Republican from Beebe, told reporters.
The move comes after a stalemate over efforts to address recent court rulings that overturned parts of tort reform legislation passed in 2003. Republicans who control the Legislature have called putting limits on lawsuit damages a top priority, but have disagreed on how to do it. A proposal that would have allowed lawmakers to write court rules for civil cases stalled before lawmakers two years ago after facing heavy opposition from trial lawyers.
The tort reform effort also faced resistance from the Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee, which hears amendments and is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans hold a majority of seats on the House panel.
The Senate panel’s party split also meant an uphill battle for another proposal to reinstate a voter ID law that the state Supreme Court struck down last year as unconstitutional.
Other proposals that had been filed included a measure to end the election of state Supreme Court justices and instead let the governor appoint them, and another allowing the governor to retain his powers when he leaves the state.
“We just can’t get to a constitutional amendment everybody agrees on, so we will forgo that this year for the first time in recent history,” said Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, a Republican from Cabot who chairs the Senate panel. “To be honest, the membership has expressed a concern to me that there’s no compelling reason we change the constitution every two years.”
Williams’ counterpart in the House said he was hearing similar concerns and didn’t believe there were any proposals that could clear both the House and Senate.
“It takes away from people’s time and if there’s nothing that’s ready to pass out we’re just not going to call a meeting,” said House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Nate Bell, a Republican from Mena.
(Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, broadcast or distributed.)
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