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The Fourth Quarter (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

Well, it’s finally here: the fourth quarter of the strangest year any of us can remember. In the United States, anyway. Even 2001 — which my husband’s “traditional” college students don’t remember — was going along like normal until Sept. 11, despite the previous November’s presidential election having been so close that the Supreme Court ultimately stepped in.

Last week I presented my arm for a flu shot at the office. The nurse who was about to give me the injection asked how I was doing. “I’m still a little dazed from that debate last night,” I said. He then told me about a tweet he had seen: “Canada must feel like they live in an apartment above a meth lab.” (Chicagoan John Fritchey tweeted that in June, but he correctly attributed the joke to the late Robin Williams.) I love a good analogy.

So much is going on that it’s hard to keep up. I avoid making predictions because I’m almost always wrong, so I’m going to comment on some things that have been sloshing around in my brain.

► There is absolutely no constitutional reason the U.S. Senate majority can’t confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court in record time. I know of no serious political or legal commentator who suggests that there is. But it absolutely is an exercise in dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Senate Republicans in 2016 said, en masse, they believed that eight months was too close to a presidential election to even consider a justice nominee from the duly elected president and insisted that voters should have a say. They did not say voters only deserved a say when the sitting president was their political opponent. But now they are desperate to seat a new justice, even as votes in the presidential election are already being cast, specifically because they don’t want voters to have a say on this appointment.

There was a time when I would have been surprised that Republicans seem delighted that their party conspired to lie to We the People about its true position on election-year Supreme Court appointments. I’m still shocked, but no longer surprised.

► In 2009, French Hill — then a Little Rock banker with whom I had a professional acquaintance — saw in the newspaper that my son had achieved the Eagle Scout rank, and he sent an incredibly kind, handwritten letter of congratulations and encouragement from one Eagle to another. That impressed me a lot and was a factor in my decision to vote for Hill when he ran for Congress in 2014.

His opponent back then, former North Little Rock Mayor Pat Hays, was running some attack ads that I thought were misleading to the point of being dishonest. I thought I would be better represented by an Eagle Scout in the House majority than by a disingenuous member of the minority.

Six years later, U.S. Rep. Hill has been making attacks on his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Joyce Elliott, that are uglier than anything that disgusted me from Hays. Blasting Elliott for voting for a cellphone tax was only viable because Hill’s campaign specifically omitted the fact that the tax — designed by Republicans, supported by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and approved almost unanimously by the Republican-controlled Legislature — funds 911 service.

But that was child’s play compared to the Facebook ad and mailer that photoshopped a picture of Elliott — a schoolteacher by profession and an African American by birth — at a rally for public education in a way that left the clear implication that she was a scary Black person who hates law and order.

Now I ask myself: Is French Hill the trustworthy, courteous and kind Eagle Scout I thought he was? He’s no longer in the House majority that was part of my decision-making process in 2014.

► That scoop the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had a week ago Sunday on documents missing from the Student Support Services program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville was one of the most baffling mysteries I’ve ever read.

The director of the SSS, a program that provides federal grants to low-income and first-generation college students, submitted her resignation in July 2019, then entered the offices on a Saturday evening with another woman, a dolly and a stack of collapsed banker boxes. Two hours later, the women left with the dolly and “what appeared to be four full banker boxes,” according to a report by auditors who reviewed campus police video footage.

Oh, she also bought a shredder.

Now files for hundreds of program participants are missing, the former director can’t seem to tell auditors where to find them, and the UA may be on the hook for $1.5 million in federal funding provided to students in the program.

The biggest mystery? Why the Democrat-Gazette didn’t name the woman in the middle of this mess. So I will: Tajhma “Taj” Cobbs.


Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.
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