Arkansas' newly-elected Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders — not so long ago the spokeswoman for Donald Trump's White House — has been on quite the tear in her first 100 days in office. The chosen voice of the GOP's State of the Union rebuttal. The quintessential Southern heiress and political nepotism beneficiary. The awkward Trump leftover, who was repeatedly caught lying to reporters from her former perch in the Brady briefing room.
Despite all that, and her advocacy for a number of deeply unpopular policies, Sanders is the second-most popular among newly elected governors in the latest Morning Consult poll.
Sure, it would be easy to capture her first 100 days in the series of embarrassing fumbles noted online. Consider the cringeworthy commercial she recently released, which misses the mark of anything remotely comedic by trying way too hard for a laugh — oh, and also leveraging performative transphobia.
https://twitter.com/SarahHuckabee/status/1650312411524497410
Then there's Sanders' terrifically embarrassing Instagram hype videos, featuring her pitched-down monotonous voice atop what sounds like a electronic dance track from the most painfully sober club you've never been to.
One could also mention the ongoing battle Arkansas women face as they hang on to hope that federal judges will protect them from state bills banning abortion — and, seemingly, even miscarriages. As a macrocosm of the damage Sanders is creating in the LGBTQ community, look at the state's efforts to ban trans people from accessing bathrooms. For a glimpse at the future trajectory of the state's Republican supermajority, one could even look at the absurd and impossible-to-enforce details of Arkansas' anti-social media laws.
"Saying it's the worst session ever feels trite, too flip to capture the brutality heaped on all but the wealthiest and most insulated," write the Arkansas Times' Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar.
"A pliable legislature stomped on the poor, indulged the rich and threw teachers, librarians, children and trans people under the bus, all because the MAGA governor told them to."
But amid the flood of cookie-cutter MAGA bills that Sanders has shepherded through her statehouse, the ones with the greatest potential for long term damage aren't the high-profile, hot-button bills. Rather, Sanders' keenest stabs into Arkansas' future came with her attacks on public school funding and criminal justice reforms.
Despite their eye-popping price tags, it took less than 100 days for Sanders to get her Arkansas LEARNS Act and the Protect Arkansas Act through the legislature. The first is a windfall cash-relay to private schools that's sparked calls for referendum. The second is a financial shot in the arm to the state's cooling prison-industrial complex.
From public schools to prison projects
The LEARNS Act boosted starting teacher pay from $36,000 to $50,000, but that bump came at a steep price decried by many Arkansas' teachers.The law created publicly funded vouchers — worth 90% of the per pupil funding a school receives from the state — that can be used to pay for private or parochial schools, or even home school. They're called Education Freedom Accounts.
https://twitter.com/jacksonmitchebn/status/1650967923496996867
Meanwhile, that educational freedom isn't entirely free. The new law's first year rollout is expected to cost Arkansas' general revenue fund $105 million, and its educational adequacy fund $103 million. It's also set to use $44 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds. Overall, the LEARNS Act's first-year roll out will cost about $297 million, as reported by Arkansas Online.
"I think one of the biggest things is how quickly the weight of the office hits, knowing that you are responsible for nearly 3 million people," Sanders said in a recent interview with NBC affiliate KARK.
"A pliable legislature stomped on the poor, indulged the rich and threw teachers, librarians, children and trans people under the bus, all because the MAGA governor told them to."
Some of those 3 million are students of color, though. And the LEARN Act requires the state's Department of Education to nitpick each school's policies and "materials" to see whether any include vestiges of that 2021 bugaboo, "critical race theory." The law also requires high schools to divert some students away from completing traditional high school education, ushering them instead into adult labor markets with "career ready" vocational-style diplomas.
Momentum for a 2024 statewide referendum on the law has grown alongside protests. But the state's attorney general is already signaling his opposition to letting that referendum happen.
https://twitter.com/AleHernandezTV/status/1650628683864891400
In other legislation, Sanders has threatened to decrease Arkansas public school attendance in a different way. Namely, by throwing kids in prison.
Arkansas has one of the highest crime rates in the country. Although mandatory minimum sentences have been repeatedly proven useless in efforts to bring down crime rates, that didn't stop Sanders from ushering the Protect Arkansas Act through the legislature during her first year in the governor's mansion.
Notably, mandatory minimum sentencing rollbacks had previously had a moment even in conservative U.S. statehouses, especially in states like Kentucky where statewide juvenile justice reforms saw bipartisan support. Mandatory minimum rollbacks have even shown up in places like Texas and Oklahoma, which have slowly whittled down the overwhelming costs of their bloated prison systems that drained state coffers for years.
But Sanders, whose anti-Obama tirades have become a tentpole of her political philosophy, is among the conservative figureheads still working to eager the Obama administration's 2013 progress on mandatory minimums. With help from the same state attorney general who's now looking to stymie education referendums, Arkansas lawmakers built a pro-prison bill that not only increases mandatory minimums to 85% of a sentence but also eliminates parole options.
Along with increasing mandatory minimum sentences for certain violent felonies, the Protect Arkansas Act ends credit bonding and adds 3,000 new prison cots to the state's rolls via a new $500 million prison.
https://twitter.com/Prison_Health/status/1641890607030325256
So swift has the Sanders administration been in flooding her first session with extreme bills — and so busy have her legislative accomplices been in passing them — that it may take months to completely unravel their likely effects.
If Sanders has ambitions to become a national figure in Republican politics, as she clearly does, that looks so far like an effort to combine her MAGA-world credentials with a "back to the future" paleo-GOP focus on punishing the most vulnerable members of society. In that respect, the gavel ending Arkansas' legislative session was merciful.
