Arkansas Constitution

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The Arkansas Constitution is the governing document of the U.S. state of Arkansas. It was first adopted in 1874, shortly after the Brooks-Baxter War; these two events together marked the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas, two years before the disputed 1876 presidential election ended it completely.

[edit] Controversy

Section one of Article 19 of the Arkansas Constitution effectively establishes a religious test that most constitutional lawyers believe to be unconstitutional under the United States Constitution. This section states:

Sec. 1. Atheists disqualified from holding office or testifying as witness.

No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.

It is commonly believed that Article Six of the United States Constitution bans such qualifications when it states, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." It is rarely enforced, since it would almost certainly be thrown out if challenged in court.

[edit] Unique provisions

Though right to work laws are common in southern states, Arkansas' right-to-work provision is Constitutionally guaranteed (only Florida and Oklahoma have similar constitutional provisions).

The Constitution also contains several archaic provisions concerning appropriations that have led to absurd results:

It takes a three-fourths majority of the legislature to pass almost any appropriations bill; nearly all of the exceptions to this rule have been defeated by time, inflation, or exceedingly narrow judicial interpretation.
A "general appropriations bill" for funding constitutional offices must be passed each session before any other appropriations bill.
Then, a separate appropriations bill is required for each individual agency; thus hundreds of separate bills are required to pass appropriations for state agencies.

The most extreme example of this was in 1989, when the general appropriations bill failed to gain a three-fourths majority, but was declared passed under an exception for "just debts of the state". The Arkansas Supreme Court disagreed and declared every single appropriations bill of that session unconstitutional; this meant the legislature had to return in special session to reenact them.

Ironically, though, appropriations are not really the state budget in Arkansas; that is enacted near the end of the session, when the Revenue Stabilization Law, which provides the mechanism for distributing the state's revenue (even general revenues), is amended to reflect the actual budget. Any appropriation that isn't funded by the Revenue Stabilization Law is essentially null and void.