OPINION

Aug 27, 2023

by John Brummett | August 23, 2023 at 3:00 a.m.

Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Shawn Womack, a combative partisan Republican as a young state legislator decades ago and now the wannabe Antonin Scalia of Arkansas, posted the photo on social media.

He did so as if it was a good thing.

He was in full supreme-justice regalia, by which I mean his robe. He was there with Joseph Wood, the newly elected--and Sarah Sanders-chosen--chairman of the state Republican Party. The lectern had the GOP logo on it.

Womack wrote that he was proud to have been invited to swear in Wood.

To swear him in? To be what? To do what?

Wood had just been hired as the leading partisan Republican political advocate in Arkansas. What did a Supreme Court justice and a solemn state government-administered oath have to do with that?

For the record: Judges are supposed to be nonpartisan in Arkansas. For the further record: A state party chairman is a private partisan political job requiring no state-administered oath.

Did the oath require that he faithfully fulfill the duty of saying "woke" and "indoctrination," so help him God?

Not being with Fox News, which funnels state Republican communications with Arkansans, I didn't get any response to my question about the wording of the oath, either from Womack or state Republican headquarters.

I asked Grant Tennille, the state Democratic chairman, which of the Supreme Court justices had sworn him in. He said none had.

What happened in Tennille's case was that the Democratic State Committee hired him to private employment as chairman of the partisan political party. The hiring was sufficient to get him started to work. He was not, as apparently is the case with the Republican chairman, anointed to a role seemingly merged with state government.

"Not even trying to pretend anymore," failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Jones posted on social media in reference to the solemn state occasion of Womack making some kind of official state investiture of a private political appointment.

Actually, the Arkansas Blog informed me on Twitter that the same thing had happened before. Associate Justice Barbara Webb, wife of former state GOP chairman Doyle Webb, was pictured swearing in Cody Hiland as state GOP chair in October 2022.

So, follow me now: Hiland is currently on the Supreme Court, appointed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, who then named Wood state GOP chairman to replace Hiland, which brought Womack through the revolving door connecting GOP headquarters and the Supreme Court building so that he could imply the aegis of a solemn state oath to make a Republican political agent's private hiring sound more substantial than it was.

We all know there is great pretense in the supposed nonpartisan virtue of judges. I can tell you the politics of nearly any judge you can name. But the pretense at least shows a modicum of respect for the principle of detached justice. To drop the pretense is to get in your face, which is unbecoming for a justice of the Supreme Court.

The best I can figure is that Republicans were down so long in Arkansas that they intend to make up lost time with their control now, to the point of flagrantly and blatantly blending their party and their state high court.

Some on the right say it was the other way around for decades with overwhelming Democratic control of Arkansas. But that's not quite right.

"Democrat" over those decades in Arkansas was largely a nominal and neutral word. It encompassed people of all philosophies and partisan leanings. In those days we tended--with some notable exceptions--to elect better and less overtly political Supreme Court justices.

Once we tended to speak in near-reverential tones about judicial dignity, judicial decorum, judicial detachment and judicial temperament.

The idea was to assure people--or at least attend to the appearance--that they could get a fair shake from a non-prejudiced decider when they ventured with their grievances into the American system of justice.

The vaunted Blue Hog blogger, lawyer Matt Campbell, beheld this photo of a party chairman's swearing-in by a state jurist and promptly filed a complaint with the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission that he regrettably predicted wouldn't amount to anything.

But I think it'll amount to a lot when the commission perfunctorily dismisses the complaint, confirming that our Supreme Court and our Republican Party are the same thing. Or nearly that.

Just wait until next year when Barbara Webb gets elected chief justice.

Imagine the invitation: "Chief Justice-elect Barbara Webb invites you to her investiture at noon Wednesday at state Republican Party headquarters."

I can only imagine it because there's no way I'm getting invited.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jb[email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Print Headline: OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Not even pretending anymore

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