Little Rock witnessed a tale of two events last week that says a lot about the troubled state of American politics.

At the first event, voters incensed by two months of chaos in Washington gathered at the First United Methodist Church on Center Street downtown, filling every pew in the 750-seat sanctuary, as well as the balcony and the choir seats behind the pulpit. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood around the edge of the sanctuary and at the back of the church; more than 100 people were turned away.

The energy, and the anger, at this town hall meeting were palpable, as speaker after speaker talked about the impact President Donald Trump and adviser Elon Musk and their minions are having on Arkansans from all walks of life — veterans, children with disabilities, Medicaid patients, farmers, immigrants and scientific researchers.

Meanwhile, eight blocks away at the Capital Hotel, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman, who were both invited to the town hall, were instead rubbing elbows with donors at a high-dollar fundraiser for Cotton’s reelection campaign that featured Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a smattering of Stephenses and Dillards, with a Rockefeller thrown in.

It cost $1,000 to mingle, $7,000 to dine, and $10,000 to be on the host committee. To thwart would-be protesters, the location of the fundraiser was only disclosed to ticket holders, although details started to leak on social media in the hours before the event.

Given that Cotton, Boozman and Hill’s own in-person town halls have become as rare as a duck-billed platypus, organizers of the Second Congressional District town hall had little expectation that any of them would accept their invitation. (Hill’s scheduler said he was “not available to participate”; Boozman and Cotton didn’t respond.) Organizers left empty chairs for all three just in case.

“You are here because they won’t do their job,” said Chris Jones, the 2022 Democratic candidate for governor, who moderated the event. “It ain’t that hard. There are only a few things you need to do. One of them is to provide a check on the madness that is coming from the executive branch.”

There is, of course, nothing that requires French, Cotton or Boozman to meet in a public setting with their constituents, except perhaps a sense of duty that should go with the elected offices that they hold. Had they attended last week’s event, they would no doubt have gotten a rough reception. People are ticked off.

But that’s part of the job. If you seek public office, you shouldn’t be able to hide away from the public you represent because they make you uncomfortable. And you should represent, and be answerable to, all of your constituents, not just the ones who voted for you or agreeably nod their heads at everything you do.

Alas, Arkansas’ congressional delegation has little political incentive to engage with voters in an uncontrolled public setting. Hill is relatively safe in a racially gerrymandered district; Cotton and Boozman have little to fear in a very red state. They seem to believe they can disregard angry voters with impunity.

Perhaps they’re right about that, although it was notable at the town hall that the crowd gave one of its most vigorous ovations to Marcus Jones, the retired Army officer who ran against Hill last year, after he pushed back against Musk’s targeting of veterans’ programs, which is increasingly becoming an albatross around Republicans’ necks.

“Our veterans swore an oath, and when we did, we wrote a check. And that check could be up to the cost of our own life,” Jones said. “And part of that bargain is the government would take care of us. And the Trump administration is causing our nation to turn its back on that promise.”

In addition to a lack of incentive to endure public scrutiny, Arkansas’ congressmen may have a more pressing reason to avoid voter engagement, rooted in their political timidity in the face of the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party.

For instance, Hill, to his credit, has been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Imagine, then, if someone at the town hall had asked him whether he supported Trump’s attempt to humiliate Zelenskyy, cut off support for Ukrainian freedom fighters and align U.S. policy with the Kremlin.

He could not answer that question honestly without generating headlines that would anger the MAGA base. So it’s easier just to avoid getting the question.

Likewise, Boozman is a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and has made supporting veterans a key part of his legislative career. But if someone asked him if he supports plans by Musk’s DOGE operation to cut 80,000 positions from the Veterans Administration, which will compromise services to veterans, he’d have to choose between honesty, sycophancy or evasion. Easier, then, to play hide-and-seek.

The list of difficult questions for our congressional representatives goes on and on. Do they support staff cuts at the National Park Service that will affect services at the Buffalo River and Hot Springs National Park? Representing a tornado-prone state, do they support firings at the National Weather Service, which helps keep us safe? Or at FEMA, which helps us recover after disaster hits?

What is their view on kneecapping life-saving research at UAMS, the University of Arkansas and Arkansas Children’s Hospital through cuts to National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funding? On eliminating the Department of Education that insures educational access for disabled students? Or stripping the Little Rock-based aid group WinRock International (established by Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller) of funding by dismembering USAID?

How do they plan to protect Arkansas farmers from the damage caused by Trump’s tariffs? Or the jobs of folks at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Camden who make missiles being sent to Ukraine?

If our congressmen expressed any doubt about Dear Leader and his unelected billionaire sidekick, there would be hell to pay. It would also raise another thorny question that they wouldn’t want to answer — if you oppose these actions that are harming Arkansans, then why aren’t you doing more to stop Trump and Musk?

On the other hand, if members of our delegation actually support chaos, mindless budget cuts and indiscriminate firings, shouldn’t they be willing to defend them in public? Where is the courage of their convictions?

The essence of representative government is that the people we elect should represent us, engage with us, and listen to us. When they refuse to do so in service of their own political survival, it has a corrosive effect on democracy, as voters who don’t feel listened to, or represented, grow increasingly frustrated and angry.

Our congressional delegation has shown no sign that they give a hoot about that frustration and anger. We should not expect them to turn up anytime soon to answer questions in an environment where they can’t control the narrative. But that doesn’t mean voters shouldn’t continue to ask their questions more urgently and forcefully — even when they’re only talking to empty chairs.

That’s what democracy looks like, to the degree that we still have democracy left.

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

One of Gov. Sarah Sanders’ first decisions after her election in 2022 was to undo part of the state government reorganization put in place by her predecessor, Asa Hutchinson. Instead of appointing both a cabinet secretary for the Department of Public Safety and a director of the Arkansas State Police, Sanders gave both jobs to the same man, Mike Hagar.

Thus, Hagar is both a political appointee serving at the pleasure of the governor and a career law enforcement officer commanding state troopers. He is, in essence, his own boss, and as DPS secretary, also oversees the Department of Emergency Management, the Arkansas Crime Lab and the Arkansas Crime Information Center.

What’s happened in the two years since shows why Sanders may have made this choice — and why it’s proven to be a bad idea, with the potential to get even worse.

Last year, Sanders inveighed Hagar’s prestige as the state’s top cop to lobby for changes in the Freedom of Information Act to smother in secrecy details about how money is spent for her security and travel. Only an eruption of public outrage on both left and right kept her from gutting the law entirely.

Col. Mike Hagar, right, Secretary of Public Safety and Director of Arkansas State Police, answers questions about Sen. Bart Hester’s Freedom of Information Act bill during a Senate committee hearing in September 2023. At left is Allison Bragg, Secretary of the Department of Inspector General. (Photo by John Sykes Jr. /Arkansas Advocate)

Even more disturbingly, she has involved him in her relentless quest to demonize undocumented immigrants for political gain, which went spectacularly sideways when dash cam video of a state trooper’s encounter with a Guatemalan driver showed the incident was not as Sanders and Hagar characterized it.

She also dragged Hagar into her ongoing dispute with the Board of Corrections over control of the state prison system and has taken to using state troopers as props at events that are overtly political.

“I’m sure none of the troopers in the Arkansas State Police want to spend one minute standing behind a governor at a press conference,” says Rogers attorney Tom Mars, who was state police director under Sanders’ father and has expressed alarm at her politicization of the agency.

Sanders’ FOIA changes concealed from the public at least $3.85 million of spending during her first year in office, along with another $1.2 million in federal COVID relief funds that legislators allowed Hagar to use for security enhancements based on a vague, two-paragraph request. Hagar has insisted that the spending is necessary because of the unique security threats Sanders faces, but he also won’t reveal any details about threat assessments used to justify spending more than $5 million.

As the most polarizing and controversial governor since Orval Fabus, Sanders no doubt has more extensive security concerns than her predecessors, and there have been two cases of people having been charged with threatening her (a Rogers man was found mentally unfit to stand trial; a Fort Smith woman got 2 1/2 months in jail.) But Arkansans — and our legislators — have good reason to be skeptical when the governor’s office and Hagar ask us to just trust them.

First, the claim that disclosing details of the governor’s travel threatened her security — which no previous governor had made — emerged only after Hagar was sued by blogger Matt Campbell for refusing to comply with FOIA requests that unearthed evidence of questionable spending, including an 11-minute flight in the state police jet between Rogers and Fayetteville. Hagar balked at fulfilling those requests long enough to give Sanders time to call a special session to try to take a chainsaw to the FOIA.

And remember also that this is the same governor’s staff who paid a $2,500 consulting fee to two of her friends to buy a $19,000 lectern, and then spent months trying to cover it up.

Sanders has also roped Hagar into helping her bang one of her favorite political drums: the widely debunked claim that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a crime wave.

After a state trooper got into an altercation in July with a Guatemalan national on I-49 near Rogers, Sanders fired off a news release accusing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of “creating the worst border crisis in history” and saying that a “criminal illegal immigrant is in custody and off the streets.”

Hagar was quoted in the release — identified in his law enforcement role (state police director) not his political role (DPS secretary): “It’s even more disturbing that this suspect is an undocumented, illegal immigrant from Guatemala. That shows another level of lawlessness that will not be tolerated.”

But dashcam video raised so many questions about the trooper’s conduct, and ASP’s explanations of it, that the Benton County prosecutor dropped all felony charges against the driver, who was tasered 13 times and shot in the head. His attorney is now gathering information for a possible civil rights lawsuit.

The video clearly shows that the driver didn’t understand English; pushed on that point, Hagar said that if he were in Germany but didn’t understand German, “if a German police officer starts giving me directions, it’s going to be obvious that I just need to comply.” Left unexplained was how someone complies with commands they don’t understand.

Think about the message this sends to Hispanic Arkansans or visitors, or people who don’t speak English. Or the message it sends to state troopers, tasked with dealing with diverse populations, about the attitudes of their superiors. Sanders is a politician who can employ xenophobia for political effect. We should demand better from law enforcement.

Mars, who considers Hagar a friend and believes he’s doing an otherwise admirable job leading the state police, had a similar experience with political interference, resigning as state police director in 2001 when he was called on the carpet for rebuffing a state legislator’s attempt to interfere in a criminal investigation.

Mars had a lucrative private law practice to fall back on; Hagar has spent his entire career in the state patrol, and “I don’t think he has a choice,” Mars said.

So where else might this lead? In Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida — which the Sanders administration frequently uses as a policy template — state police have been used to investigate thousands of voters for unsubstantiated fraud claims, question voters who signed ballot petitions supporting legal abortion and were even sent to Texas to round up migrants outside their jurisdiction.

Mars says he’s not concerned that things will go that far in Arkansas, but he adds a caveat that should give us all pause: “I don’t think Gov. Sanders has any limits as to what she would consider doing to promote her anti-woke GOP agenda if she thought she could get away with it.”

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on Facebook and X.