GOP Governor Shows Rare Spark of Human Decency

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Governor of Arkansas, a Republican by the name of Asa Hutchinson, has the necessary bonafides to foster an expectation of unwavering conservative actions in his role as the state's supreme political leader.  Hutchinson did, after all, grow up on a farm just outside of the small northwestern Arkansas town of Gravette - the same community that gave us the hillbilly oaf who posed with his feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk on January 6th - and he has a degree from the less-than-illustrious Bob Jones University.  (Though to Hutchison's credit, he has now recast his personal history to claim being a "native" of the more populous and urbane Bentonville (home of the Walmart Waltons), and casts his education as being a graduate of the University of Arkansas School of Law.

After a couple of decades as a trial lawyer, Asa managed to get himself elected to Congress to fill a seat being vacated by his older brother, Tim Hutchinson, when the older brother ran for, and won, a seat in the US Senate.    Asa used his congressional perch to meet and hobnob with national political players, and he was able to insert himself into George W. Bush's inner-circle where he became the first undersecretary of Homeland Security and Administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency.  He claimed the mantle of Bush's "drug czar."  In 2014 Asa Hutchinson returned to Arkansas politics when he won the state's governorship.  He won a second term in 2018 and is now officially "termed out."  He will leave office in January of 2023.

Because he is "termed out," and there are not any obvious political openings for him in Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson may have more freedom to chart his own course than other politicians who constantly have to check the political breeze before giving their opinions on anything.  Hutchinson, who regards himself as a conservative - and with good reason - has nevertheless already gone on the record stating that he will not support a Donald Trump run for President in 2024.

This week he took that he took that moderate conservative persona out of the closet again when he surprised many by vetoing an anti-transgender healthcare bill that had overwhelmingly passed his state legislature.  Conservative news outlets and right-wing demagogues had been particularly vehement over the past several months in demonizing transgender youth through stories about restrooms and sports teams, and bills were cranked out by various redneck legislatures to protect the integrity of sports and toilets - but the Arkansas bill went much further and addressed the medical care of transgendered youth, a move that Governor Hutchinson labeled as "overreach" and well beyond the point where the state should stick its nose.

The bill that the governor vetoed blocked doctors from providing transgendered youth with medical care such as puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and transition-related surgeries - treatment plans that are arrived at through the consensus of the patients, their parents, and medical providers.  Hutchinson, who said that he would have signed a bill that simply blocked sex-reassingment surgeries, felt the detailed bill that the Arkansas legislature passed was too extreme.  He said:

"While in some instances the state must act to protect life, the state should not presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human, and ethical issue.   This (bill) would be - and is - a vast government overreach."

Governor Hutchinson vetoed the anti-transgender healthcare bill on Monday with the stated expectation that his veto would be overridden by the legislature - and it was - on Tuesday.  

Reason had prevailed for a day.