By John Brummett

One thing we can try to do in this space from time to time is put a little puncture in the puffed-up, by which I mean the speaker of the state House of Representatives, 40-year-old lawyer/blogger Robbie Wills of Conway.

This will be something of a state Capitol insiders’ story, so let me go straight to what might be of general public interest: Wills has become a tad full of himself.

In fancying himself as one who will leave some kind of progressive and modernizing legacy in the House, Wills threatens the usual bipartisan or nonpartisan efficiency that has kept the place functioning reasonably well over the last decade amid an absurdly and dangerously restrictive term limits law.

He wants to remake the permanent staff of the House so that it will include an operation that puts out public information that advocates for the prevailing position of the House — propagandizes tyrannically for the majority, that is.

Heretofore the House has had this one guy, an old news media hound and an old buddy of many of us in the news business, operating in a neutral and bare-bones way. He has been giving all House members, regardless of their party or prominence or position, the same generic and basic information they need about House activities so they can report to folks back home through news releases, scripts for radio reports, basic informational speech texts and so forth.

It has been assumed that House members, adults who managed to get elected on their own, could think and speak independently for themselves, adapting this bare-bones information to their unique viewpoints and circumstances as they saw fit.

Alas, Wills has been going to these national conferences and finding out how other states do things. That’s usually trouble. Other states are going broke, but that doesn’t mean we ought to do it.

So Wills called in this information officer after hours Monday and told him he was fired.

Then Wills wrote his own rambling, many-paged news release — using “transition” as a verb, which is permitted, sadly, but hideous. He announced that the House, by which he mostly meant himself acting arbitrarily, would use taxpayers’ money to the tune of $5,000 a month to retain the public relations consulting services of a guy named Craig Douglass, who, not so long ago, was spokesman for Deltic Timber when it tried to ruin Little Rock’s water supply with lake-shore development.

Douglass’ job will be to “transition” to this new propaganda ministry.

Wills says the House of Representatives has a collective “point of view” that needs to be advocated publicly. He cites some sort of supposedly dire circumstance by which the House would pass a bill, but then the Senate would balk on the bill, in which case which the House presumably would need this public advocacy operation to defend and promote its collective position.

That’s wrong in approximately every conceivable respect. The House of Representatives, as a legislative body of 100 independent parts, is a collective disposer, a collective decider, not a collective advocate. Its job is to reveal itself not by collective institutional spin, but by taking a vote, after which it should shut up and move on to the next bill. Individual members would be free to make whatever public pronouncements they could persuade anyone to listen to.

Let’s say that Wills, as speaker, pushed through some kind of tax bill by a 53 to 47 vote. He would then presume to activate this new information office to advocate for that tax bill in behalf of all 100 members though 47 of them wanted no part of it.

What the Arkansas Constitution creates and empowers as a legislative body, needing to be contemplative and deliberate, would be transformed into yet another tired garden-variety spin machine.

If Robbie wants to advocate through a government institution with its own propaganda ministry, then he should declare his Democratic candidacy in opposition to Mike Beebe’s renomination as governor.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.