Deja Vu All Over Again

June 16, 2025: Can inactive members vote?

It’s deja vu all over again! Do inactive Party members have the right to vote on Party affairs? The Republican Party of Arkansas (RPA) recently banned more Party members over a previously approved policy the state GOP then summarily reversed, amounting to another slap-down of Republican county committee members who had dared to lead the 2024 State Convention Rules changes the RPA nullified last year.

All four elected state District Chairmen and the Chairman of the state county committee chairmen’s group properly submitted a Rules change to the RPA that “provides clarity and consistency to county committees across the state concerning inactive members” — after the RPA has ridiculously decided to reverse its own rulings and precedent for many years stating that inactive members were ineligible to vote on Party affairs.

In typical fashion, the RPA has now refused to add that properly submitted requested Rules change item to its agenda for the Party’s 2025 Summer State Committee meeting (not open to the public or nonvoting members) on Saturday, June 21.

This ongoing intra-Party war echoes that TDS disease we see among Democrats: if MAGA voters support an issue, the RPA’s knee-jerk response is to try and cancel not only the issue but also the grassroots voters/members who promoted it. This destructive and absurd behavior has been especially intense under Governor Sarah Sanders, who publicly remains totally silent on these matters while her political appointee RPA Chair Joseph Wood oversees the political blood-letting they obviously believe will benefit the Party.

For conservative voters who still believe in what RPA Rules say and what standards should mean — especially within a political party — does it even make sense to you that inactive members should be allowed to vote on Party matters? Of course not! The RPA’s contortions that twisted its earlier precedent into an anti-MAGA weapon make the intentions very clear.

We’re told the RPA’s ongoing, disingenuous tactics are now reverberating through more moderate Party members who are growing weary of party-endorsed elected officials’ lukewarm (at best) support of President Trump’s populist agenda (paper ballots, anyone?) and hypocritical attacks against its conservative voter base here in Arkansas. MAGA voters are watching to see what happens on Saturday. Will it be RPA deja vu all over again?

We appreciate your patience as we try out some different ways to show the wide range of information we wish to share with you. Go ahead and scroll down through this newsletter; there’s quite a bit here!

State

• Cost of immigration: The infamously incorrect Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says, while “roughly 4.3 million immigrants who arrived from 2021 to 2023 paid about $10.1 billion in state and local taxes in 2023” and “accounting for births and deaths, the net population gain from immigration in those years was about 4.4 million,” the influx cost state and local governments almost double that amount at “$19.3 billion in goods and services for those immigrants,” mostly for food and shelter.

• Still looking at Prison Board: A legislative committee report about the audit into the board's 2023 hiring of a Little Rock attorney aims at concerns about the prison board’s procurement practices. This week the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s injunction that temporarily stopped Act 185 and 659, statutes passed in 2023 that removed the state’s prison chief, as well as the directors of the community correction and correction divisions of the Department of Corrections, from the board’s authority and making them answerable to Governor Sarah Sanders.

• State Supreme Court tightens up: Five members of the Arkansas Supreme Court approved changes to rules for how judges and justices must conduct themselves, adding new provisions that allow “interim suspensions of judges accused of crimes or misconduct” and provide details for required “cooperation with disciplinary authorities and prohibiting retaliation. Based on an American Bar Association model policy, the new provisions were requested by the the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission. Interestingly, both Chief Justice Karen Baker and her always-supporter Justice Courtney Hudson dissented from the approvals.

  

• What $1.6 million gets you: The state’s 365 registered lobbyists spent a record $1.6 million during the 2025 legislative session — the largest amount lobbyists have spent at the Legislature for at least 18 years! Pro-PBM lobbyists Conservatives for Lower Health Care Costs Inc. spent $716,948 on advertising and telephone expenses fighting Act 624 that banned PBMs from owning associated pharmacies in Arkansas — the first such legislation in the U.S. Now Navitus Health Solutions has filed a third federal lawsuit against Act 624, after CVS and Express Scripts filed two earlier lawsuits fighting the bill.

• Another trip to Paris: Will she bring home a new lectern? Governor Sarah Sanders was set to be overseas on another trade trip to Paris and Switzerland from June 14-19, again appearing at the Paris Air Show, as she did in 2023 — the trip that spawned an FOI-fueled probe revealing questionable procurement of a $19,000 lectern that was eventually “purchased” by the Republican Party of Arkansas’ Sanders appointee Chairman Joseph Wood. Sanders’ office touts her 2023 Paris trip as facilitating Little Rock Dassault Falcon Jet’s $100 million, 800 job expansion and the new $63 million RTX manufacturing facility in East Camden.
  

  Meanwhile Dad / Ambassador Huckabee wrote this about midnight on Sunday, Arkansas time as he experiences the ongoing Israel-Iran attacks first-hand at the US Embassy in TelAviv:

  

• Gold and silver is everyday currency: We missed this during the 95th General Assembly! Act 810 (HB1918) by Representative Mindy McAlindon and Senators Jim Dotson, Clint Penzo, and Matt McKee is based on the 2023 Arkansas Legal Tender Act that states gold and silver is legal tender and repeals state taxes on its purchase, sale, or exchange. Act 810 sets up a state bullion depository, a “precious metals-backed electronic system” to allow citizens to deposit gold and silver electronically and use an attached debit card as everyday currency anywhere a debit or MasterCard is accepted.

• What the FOI uncovers: Ft. Smith FOI warrior attorney Joey McCutchen, following through on how the City of Ft. Smith botched its hiring of an internal auditor who was found to be awaiting an Oklahoma trial on stalking charges, has obtained a court ruling finding Ft. Smith City Administrator Jeff Dingman guilty of concealing pertinent background check documents. Now the Sebastian County Prosecuting Attorney has asked for a special prosecutor to investigate.

• Any student, anywhere now: 2025-2026 marks the first school year that any student in the state can apply for a LEARNS voucher to attend school of his or her choice. By May, the Arkansas Department of Education has approved 36,855 applicants, including 25,569 private school students and 11,286 homeschool students. Arkansas plans to spend $277 million for those vouchers, and funding has not been depleted, per ADE spox Kimberly Mundell.

• Cleaning up the voter roll: Saline County begins a regular maintenance process to clean up duplicate and ineligible voter registrations with a postcard campaign conduced by a third-party vendor — those postcards “are not spam or scams” says County Clerk Doug Curtis. How does YOUR county complete this task that’s mandated by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993?

National

• How hard should this be? Arkansas is a core state in Alabama’s ten-state Voter Integrity Database (AVID) program that identifies duplicate voter registrations across state lines. By comparing cross-state data, AVID so far has flagged nearly 40,000 ineligible voter registrations for removal.

• Weakening the Big Beautiful Bill: Senator John Boozman’s Senate Agriculture Committee has weakened SNAP benefits provisions in the Big Beautiful Bill. Senate Republicans successfully pushed to remove the new House-passed requirements that all states pay 50% of SNAP administrative costs and scaled back by about a third the plans to have states with high errors rates pay 25% of overall SNAP benefits. Back in mid-March, Boozman joined other GOP senators (many from agricultural states) to kill Senator Rand Paul’s move to codify DOGE cuts to USAID/foreign aid; Republican Senators point out that agriculture is closely tied to foreign aid and the overdue Farm Bill has yet to be passed, which further complicates the issue of how cuts to federal funds impact the industry.

• It was deliberate: Walmart-owned Sam’s Club says it’s “reached 96% of its goal of removing artificial colors, additives, dyes and high-fructose corn syrup” from its Members’ Mark food products after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. banned synthetic food dyes as part of the MAHA movement. We wonder how this got accomplished so very quickly after Kennedy’s big announcement back in … April? Could it be that they could’ve done it all along?

• Republicans on top again: For the fifth year, Congressional Republicans won the Congressional Baseball Game; the score last week was 13-2. This year’s annual fundraiser raised a record $2.75 million for charity.

• What’s he gonna do? Congressman Steve Womack says he’s watching the Senate as its re-arranges the House-passed Big Beautiful Budget Bill:

  I’m going to support this bill because the last thing I want to do is impose a major tax increase, 20-plus percent, on the people that I represent. And there are a lot of things in the bill that I would probably change and do differently if I had the opportunity to do it. But I’m not on the relevant committees, the 10 committees that had a stake in it. Right now, I would have to tell you I’m undecided because I don’t know what I’m going to get back from the Senate. I was okay with what we sent them, but I might not be okay with what they send back.

  Womack is the only one of Arkansas’ six U.S. lawmakers who is not currently a Congressional Committee Chairman, although he does serve on 3 subcommittees, heading up the House Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.

• Sure, make Michigan “red,” Ronna! Former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s niece, is the new CEO of the Michigan Forward Network, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening the Republican Party in the battleground state” funded by the influential DeVos family.

• Not organic: The country finally realizes that “anti-ICE” riots and those “No Kings” protests held June 14 are not organic, springing up naturally from dissatisfied voters. Instead they are funded by a spider web of non-governmental entities (NGOs) / non-profit organizations who spread their federal grant money throughout their interconnected Leftist network to other, ever-changing chameleon-like groups of violent activists. One such key non-organic group here is Indivisible Arkansas. DataRepublican identifies The Indivisible Project as a nonprofit group “for which we currently have a reconstructed flow of federal grant money to entities involved in the NoKings demonstration.” Visit her website to trace the funding connections behind this coordinated nationwide effort.

Tech

• “Fragile digital future”? Did you have trouble with Gmail, Google Maps, Discord, Shopify, OpenAI/ChatGPT, GitHub, Mailchimp, Cloudflare or other cloud-based online programs/services last Thursday, June 12? Reports are “for 8 hours, the internet lost a piece of its spine all due to a failure in Google Cloud’s identity and Access management system (IAM).” The company says it corrected the global Google Cloud outage within just a few hours. But the devastating results of the single 4- to 6-hour point of failure has exposed the fragility of our global dependency on the internet.

• Odd, this ruling: The state Supreme Court has clarified in an administrative order that individuals may not willingly or inadvertently somehow introduce confidential Arkansas court documents into AI systems when performing assisted research. (One way generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT “learn” is by incorporating all data a user may submit when using the tools.) The Supreme Court’s order also prohibits individuals with with internal access to CourtConnect system from “intentionally exposing our state courts’ internal data to a GAI.” Strange the Court doesn’t bother to opine on lawyers using AI-generated language in Court briefs, after judges nationwide have been confronted with false citations and non-existent cases in their courtrooms.

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting goes back before the Congress for appropriations, and I think they’ll receive appropriated money. I don’t know how much because I’m not on that committee and I don’t really study it that closely, but I anticipate there’ll be appropriated money and that those organizations will continue to have some level of federal funding.”
- Congressman French Hill about eliminating federal funds for Left-leaning PBS/NPR
(notice he’s not saying he will vote to eliminate that funding)