Reaction so far to the Top 10 legislator list: Not bad, people say, but Sen. Bryan King shouldn’t have been there, and instead, at 10th, I should have put either Rep. Darrin Williams of Little Rock, who helped kill bad bills, or Sen. Johnny Key of Mountain Home, an often-overlooked reasonable Republican.

Probably so. I was determined to pry King in there for reasons I am having trouble remembering

I think I just wanted to irk people. But I do that naturally enough.

Some legislators are mentioning the idea of polling themselves to see how they would select a Top 10. I wish they would do that. It would be interesting to compare.

I will not do a Bottom 10 because, after you list Jason Rapert, Bob Ballinger and the two Meekses, you get into a kind of mundane general badness.

Worst delegation: Conway. No contest.

Here are some related awards just for kicks:

Best lobbyists — The Mullenexes.

Best on-line reporter — David Ramsey.

Best multi-platform reporter — Roby Brock.

Best bureaucrat — Andy Allison.

So they vote this morning and it’s all on the line.

Will we use federal Medicaid money to extend private health insurance and give poor people coverage, save hospitals and realize budget savings for the state resulting from the vast shift of people from a direct government program to a privatized one?

Will we thus have enough surplus to fund higher education projects and local projects or will we need to reserve those millions for the unchecked costs of status-quo Medicaid?

Will the session essentially succeed or essentially fail?

I don’t think any of that is even remotely overstated.

Yesterday’s test vote — which is what it was — probably was really 72-28, not 69-28. Rep Mary Lou Slinkard, Republican of Gravette, voted “present” and is said to be a “yes.” Rep. Stephanie Malone, Republican of Fort Smith, was not in the chamber for some reason. Speaker Davy Carte made her chairman of Rules; she’s a Carter person. She’s a “yes.” Representative Ann Clemmer of Benton knows to vote “yes,” but is all twisted around worrying about her planned Republican primary challenge to Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson and people in her district such as that guy bloviating against Obamacare last night at a town hall at Saline Memorial Hospital.

To achieve the requisite three-fourths majority, you must get three of the 28 voting “no” yesterday to vote “yes” today.

There’s Rep. Randy Alexander of Springdale, an arch-conservative who looks me straight in the face and says publicly that he supports the private option and knows it to be best, and that he will speak to that effect on the floor if given the opportunity, but that he has not had sufficient time to engage his constituents to make the case, and needs two weeks.

Alas, that goes to the old argument. I say, and I know, that our representative democracy is about constituents choosing a representative to master issues and decide on them and then account to his constituents and try to lead them, and to get voted out next time if the voters chose. It’s not about being hostage to constituents you know to be uninformed and misapprehending.

Otherwise let’s just do robo-polling into each district and get a superficial majority view and do away with any thinking middle men.

What good is a man’s representation if he can’t rely on his own good judgment and leadership?

There are three — Reps. Terry Rice, Jonathan Barnett and Skip Carnine — who are thought to be huffy about this or that, such as that Davy Carter pried the speakership from Rice and that Barnett couldn’t pass a bill diverting general revenue to highways.

You’d hate to see smart and humane policy lost to pettiness.

I go over the list of 28 “nays” and I think I see two others, maybe three, who conceivably could change.

There’s one — I won’t call any names — who’s just as slippery as can be.

The changes presumably would come from higher education lobbyists and other public lobbyists leaning on people not to leave the treasury without some special-project money.

Today should be a day of high drama at the Capitol on the private option unless House Speaker Davy Carter doesn’t have the votes and doesn’t let the appropriation run.

These appropriations bills can be run and rerun, you know.

One dynamic in this extraordinarily intriguing issue is that right-wingers like Reps. Nate Bell and Randy Alexander don’t want to vote “yes,” which they believe to be the right or at least best thing, until they can go home this weekend and explain themselves at town hall meetings where they feel confident they can be persuasive that the private option is better than doing nothing with the Affordable Care Act coming and Medicaid itself in need of reform.

The other dynamic is that supporters of the bill fret that they lose votes over the weekend if everybody goes home to get shouted at by right-wingers about implementing Obamacare.

Meantime, this is interesting, advanced last night with stellar reporting and analysis from the Arkansas Legislative Digest: Rep. Bruce Westerman, House GOP caucus leader and a sponsor of the private option until removing his name the other day, came in late Thursday with an amendment adding text to one of his shell bills, HB 1965.

It looks like he stands ready to move with it if the 75 votes cannot be achieved.

His bill is much like the private option except: It’s a darned sight more conservative and it demands more concession from the federal government. DHHS would have to give Arkansas a complete waiver from any and all regulations. The private insurance for poor people would have to include “independence accounts,” sort of expanded health savings accounts that recipients could use for education, job training and health care.

I suspect he gets a little too demanding — a lot too demanding — with the feds. Medicaid dollars into individual accounts that could go for something other than health care?

It plays better to the Tea Party grandstand, but it is probably impractical to the point of self-sabotage.

It doesn’t strike me as a viable fallback.

I’m told by a couple of people who ought to know that there are about 70 votes for the private option appropriation in the House of Representatives.

It needs 75.

Close. Tantalizingly.

Somebody could always go wobbly overnight or in the next few seconds. This is a hard vote for conservative legislators with the Koch brothers’ agents hounding them.

It will be interesting to watch roll calls, both on the majority-needing enabling bill Thursday and the appropriation Friday.

I have gleaned that some of the Republican holdouts are not, in fact, the most extreme conservatives whose opposition might be expected, but, actually, a few of the less extreme ones who are close to Rep. Terry Rice and were going to be in leadership positions in his speakership.

This, sadly, may have an unattractive personal element.

You will recall that Rice thought he was going to be speaker of the House — because he’d lined it up contingent of a Republican takeover — but that Rep.Davy Carter decided the badly divided House needed a center-out speaker that could engage Democrats, meaning himself.

So he executed a late-entry defeat of Rice.

And there are resentments. Lingering.

And there may be some people who would just as soon see the session fail so that certain people — Carter and his wing man John Burris — won’t be winners.

Just something to watch in the “no” votes on the roll calls.

The Senate Revenue and Tax Committee is scheduled to meet privately today with House Speaker Davy Carer to try to work out  a hundred million dollars in tax cuts.

It happens, I’m told, even as Gov. Mike Beebe is having considerable success blocking tax-cut agreement altogether unless the private option expansion with Medicaid dollars is passed.

“He knows how to pick people off at just the right time,” a plugged-in Republican legislative source told me.

“If you didn’t have this governor, we’d have done $300 million in tax cuts already.”

Beebe disengaged? Weakened by the Republican majorities? Not so you could tell it lately, I’m advised.

Everything is perilously fluid right now with legislators huffy about the private option, tax cuts and, as ever, their little play-pretties for local projects from the General Improvement Fund.

Reportedly, Senate president pro tem Michael Lamoureux assembled all 34 other senators in the quiet room yesterday and implored them to settle down and take the nervous edge off and compromise because, otherwise, nobody would get anything they wanted.

I guess it’s possible this session comes to a crash landing next week — no three-fourths majority for the private option, no tax cuts because the governor will have picked off a few votes and Republicans can’t agree on the form of them, then passage of a hasty Revenue Stabilization Act and General Improvement Fund that nobody will much like.

I hope not. The private option is important, and it becomes more solid as savvy consensus policy the more you study it. It’s worth a hundred million in tax cuts, even if, alas, the rich folks get most of them.

What would harm the cause of long-term Republican control of the Legislature is not over-reach on abortion or guns, but an inability to govern.

It’s such a strange time at the state legislative session, with thoughtful bipartisanship confusing everyone.

I’ll have more on this in tomorrow’s newspaper column. But I wish to post here on Monday morning to set the stage for this dramatic last week of this historic session.

Genuinely conservative Republican legislators — Jonathan Dismang, David Sanders, John Burris — have designed a nationally  noted private insurance option to Medicaid expansion. They sell the plan as the most logical conservative way  to deal with the inevitable disaster of Obamacare.

I support their private option as the most logical political way to achieve Obamacare’s objective of universal health insurance that extends public subsidies to the poorest people.

The decision rests with conservative House Republicans who must buy into the private option in sufficient numbers to achieve a three-fourths majority vote for an appropriation.

And every time I presume to write or speak of what I believe to be the truth — that the private option gets us to Obamacare  – the insiders backing the proposal implore me to please stop saying that. I’m going to kill it, they say. Hard-right conservatives cannot abide such a characterization, they say.

Among other points, tomorrow’s column will enumerate genuinely conservative elements of this private option — planks for which I must happily hold my nose.

But the cosmic story is the threat of partisan polarization achieving full Washington-style dysfunction in Arkansas.

When one side likes a bill for its reasons, the other needs to be able to like the bill for entirely different reasons without rejecting it because the other side likes the bill.

It is possible that the bill both achieves Obamacare and does so by the most responsible and effective conservative means available in the face of a new federal law’s inevitability. That everyone is right. That everyone wins.

Or is everyone winning no longer a desired political outcome?

Here is link to Talk Business where you can find on the right-hand side a video of Roby Brock’s interview with me yesterday on this being the best of legislative sessions and the worst of legislative sessions and how all the standout performances have been on the Republican side unless maybe you count Gov. Mike Beebe, whose image we may need to chisel on Mt. Magazine.

Wednesday was a massive day at the Arkansas General Assembly. So massive as to be decisive, one would think.

The Human Services Department released a peer-reviewed actuarial consultant’s report that found:  This Republican idea for an alternative to expanding Medicaid in Arkansas  — that is, using the same federal Medicaid dollars to buy private health insurance for Medicaid-eligibles — would  (1) be cheaper than doing nothing and (2) reap more long-term savings than would be the case with simply expanding Medicaid.

Counter-intuitive? More than a little bit.

Doing nothing would make the state susceptible to the usual match for thousands of citizens now eligible for Medicaid but not signing up, but who probably would sign up due to the fanfare of the Affordable Care Act when it takes full effect in 2014.

It also would leave a giant gap of poor Arkansans conspicuously without health insurance, neither Medicaid nor the new health care exchanges. Their costs would be uncompensated, costing the state government and private hospitals.

Meantime, it’s been conventionally assumed — and written confidently by me — that it would cost more to buy private insurance for able-bodied poor adults in the prime of life than to pay their actual medical bills through Medicaid.

Not necessarily, says this report, based on a decade’s projections of what will happen with private insurance and what would happen with Medicaid.

There are assumptions and unknowns, of course. But these are actuaries and their job is to account for those.

All credit — seriously — goes to a few young Republican legislators — Jonathan Dismang, David Sanders, John Burris, primarily — who studied this issue and determined that doing nothing was not a viable option.

We’re down to this: House Speaker Davy Carter and Senate president pro tem Michael Lamoureux need to come up with enough Republican-philosophy tax cuts, meaning for high-income people, to keep their restless Republican caucuses sufficiently satisfied to go along grudgingly with something that adapts and enacts an element of Obamacare rather than rejects Obamacare outright — which is what many of these Republicans promised in their campaigns to go to Little Rock and do.

I’m told by high sources that I’d be less critical of these tax cuts if I knew the stakes and appreciated the delicacy.

I’m told by high sources that Davy Carter deserves a hug, not angry words about how he plays both sides against the middle.

Thank goodness somebody knows how to play both these sides  against a middle, I’ve been advised

A hundred million dollars in high-income tax breaks to extend fully subsidized health insurance for the poorest people — well, it’s a negotiation.

I think there will be a book to be written about this later. Not that anyone would read it.

My Sunday column analyzes the tyro right-wing Republican Legislature’s sad if remarkable dominance of the old maestro, Mike Beebe.

There’s a metaphor about dogs and pups and nipping and growling.

It’s about Medicaid expansion and tax cuts.

Now we might be able to add the steel mill.

Yesterday legislators received the executive summary of one of two consultant reports on whether it is a good and prudent deal for the state — as the Beebe administration proposes — to use Amendment 82 to sell $125 million in bonds to deliver the money over time to a steel mill near Osceola that proposes to invest $1.1 billion and employ more than 500 people at wages averaging $70,000 a year.

It’s a “super project,” the state’s first.

Alas, these kinds of semi-socialist undertakings — state taxpayer non-equity investments in otherwise private projects — are the norm anymore at least in your needier Southern states where education and quality of life don’t seem to be enough.

The executive summary says, if I might summarize and paraphrase liberally, that the Arkansas Economic Development Department’s projections are possibly too rosy because someone unexpected might enter the steel manufacturing industry and production might not always be as bountiful as expected and the state might not get as much in taxes and economic performance as the department says and that might make the cost-benefit ratio decidedly less appealing.

I had been unaware that consultants’ reports were hedged like that to near-pointlessness, but I’m advised that they routinely are.

Anyway, legislators, especially Republicans, were buzzing that, man, this may not be a good deal.

There are no guarantees in life or business. And there are, in fact, two great risks here.

One is that the state invests in this project and the project goes sour and the state can’t get all its money back. Egg on face. Poor old Arkansas, taken for a ride, unable to win for losing.

The other is that the state turns this thing down and it goes to Mississippi and becomes the most thriving steel operation in the world. Poor old Arkansas, unable to win for losing.

So I put out a tweet last night saying it would be a “remarkable story indeed” if the state turned down this project.

House Speaker Davy Carter, trolling on Twitter, replied — “In what way?”

I told him it would be remarkable as an economic and political action — poor state turns down promised big jobs — but not necessarily wrong. Just remarkable.

The interesting thing to me is that he seems to be interested in what the reaction would be if it gets turned down.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which Beebe fights for this. I don’t see him fighting for much of anything and he has been rather dispassionately matter-of-fact about how, hey, this is the Legislature’s call.

It’s also unclear whether it would matter much if he did fight.

Oh, and I should mention: The existing and well-subsidized steel operation in the area, Nucor, is lobbying hard, as you might expect, against the taxpayers giving $125 million to a competitor.

In my blog post yesterday, and to be repeated in my column already submitted for the Voices page Thursday, I share that exchange with Gov. Mike Beebe.

I asked if he had decided to accept $100 million to $150 million in Republican tax cuts and he said not any $150 million and then I said that seemed to mean he had accepted $100 million and then he said “I didn’t say that.”

So let’s update: I’m told today by sources that Beebe has said in meetings that he has decided to accept in tax cuts . . . wait for it …. $100 million.

That’s assuming we do the GOP”s private-option Medicaid innovation.

I think my Sunday column is going to be on a subject I will not  enjoy exploring.

It’s that Beebe’s leglslative mastery came in the culture he grew up in, a nominally Democratic one that put a premium on practical compromise, but that the new culture facing a cohesive and energetic Republican majority has exposed his weakness for the new world.

Basically the Republicans have led him around on a leash on Medicaid and tax cuts.

Just a fact.

He’s had a 48-member Democratic House caucus with which to work some leverage. But he hasn’t even attempted much in that context.

Maybe this is just a fine old dog who really is not interested in learning any new tricks to adapt to these nipping pups that have invaded his pen.