By John Brummett

I took a little time on this obituary tribute to cancer-fallen Jodie Mahony because I wanted to ponder carefully one of the two points I was inclined instinctively to try to make.

The other point required no contemplation at all. It’s that sometimes, as a reporter and commentator watching legislative matters at the state Capitol over three decades, I had no earthly idea what Mahony, as a state representative from El Dorado and then state senator, was up to.

He could be the most obtuse member of the General Assembly. He’d put in a bill that would be wholly counterintuitive to his legislative history, such as his attack on certain forms of student testing. You’d ask him what the method was to his madness and the circularity of his answer only would confound you further.

Occasionally he merely seemed to be amusing himself, such as the time in 2001 when he took to the Senate floor to say that he wanted to apologize to freshman senators for ever having told them that I was a fair-minded journalist. He guffawed about that later, though I never really got the joke.

When I sat down with him to discuss his grievance, which was that he thought I’d questioned his ethics by criticizing the toothlessness of ethics rules adopted by the Senate Rules Committee that he chaired, he seemed wholly serious and altogether wounded.

What people always said was this: “That’s just Jodie being Jodie.”

Otherwise, and this is the point I wanted to allow to germinate for a few days before turning it loose, this is what Jodie was, generally speaking, his eccentricity and irascibility and notorious scruffiness notwithstanding: He was the most important state legislator of the last three decades.

He sponsored more bills and amendments. The great bulk of them had to do only with the primary responsibility of state government, which is public schooling. He was consistently progressive on education, even when he was playing some kind of game on student testing you didn’t understand.

He worked harder at legislating than anyone, in part because he had the means to do his legislating full-time and in further part because he had no other interest to get in the way of his treating legislating as both vocation and avocation.

He became the foremost authority on legislative rules and, by that knowledge, could use the process to serve his ends. His legal training led other legislators to trust his instincts on the wording and meaning of bills.

He stayed in the Legislature longer during those three decades than anyone, getting elected to the Senate after several terms in the House, then, after getting term-limited in the Senate, getting elected back to the House until term limits got him there.

Mahony also was a champion of programs for the developmentally disabled. I didn’t see this happen, but heard about its legend from the ‘70s: Conspiring with former State Rep. Julian Streett, Jodie got the Revenue Stabilization Act opened on the House floor for his amendment to add money for the developmentally disabled.

That was unheard of, you see. The Revenue Stabilization Act gets worked out by the powers-that-be behind closed doors and filed formally at the very end of the session for presumptive and perfunctory passage. To mess with it at that point is to risk a domino effect disturbing the entire delicate balance of state government operations.

Only Mahony, so far as I know, ever got it changed on the floor.

I’ve pondered for days and still I can think of no legislator more influential from 1980s until now.

Mike Beebe as a senator? He was more in control of the state Senate than Mahony ever was in charge of any institution in the Capitol, that’s for sure. But Beebe acted mostly as fixer and settler who hated messes and was content to lead others to run the internal legislative process, not drive broader public policy in the way Mahony did.

No, Mahony’s policy influence was greater as a legislator, and Beebe had to get elected governor to compete with it.

The state is better for Mahony’s having lived in it. The state Capitol will be a hollower and decidedly less interesting place for his having left it.

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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.