Donna Hutchinson

Donna Jean King Hutchinson (born August 23, 1949) is a Republican former member of the Arkansas House of Representatives from District 98, which includes part of fast-growing Benton County in Northwest Arkansas. A resident of Bella Vista, she was initially elected to the House in 2006 and assumed her position in January 2007.

Family background A member of the Blackfeet Nation,

Her son, Jeremy Hutchinson, is a former state representative who has served since 2011 in the Arkansas State Senate from a district in Little Rock. Timothy Chad Hutchinson, Jeremy's twin brother from Springdale, previously served with his mother in the state House. The twins were born in 1974 in Kansas City, Kansas. A third son, Joshua Luke Hutchinson (born 1978) resided in 2013 in Keller, near Fort Worth, Texas, and was formerly a resident of Rogers, Arkansas. Tim Hutchinson, Donna Hutchinson's former husband, from whom she was divorced in 1999 after twenty-nine years of marriage, served from 1997 to 2003 as the first Republican U.S. senator from Arkansas since 1879, two years after the close of Reconstruction. In 2000, a year after the divorce from Donna, Tim Hutchinson married in a private ceremony his former staffer and state director, Randi Fredholm, who is fourteen years his junior. She had left Hutchinson's employ in 1998 to attend law school. Hutchinson asked his sons not to attend the wedding out of respect for their mother. He called the collapse of his first marriage an "intensely personal thing."

In 2002, Tim Hutchinson was unseated by former Democratic state Attorney General Mark Pryor. Tim and Randi Hutchinson are employed by the Dickstein Shapiro firm, he as senior advisor and she as an attorney, and the couple resides in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2012, Hutchinson ranked 89 percent on the Arkansas Freedom Scorecard, which measures the votes cast by legislators in regard to issues relating to economic freedom, educational reform, "good government," personal liberty, small government, and tax/budget policy. Only ten members of the House at that time ranked higher on the survey than did Hutchinson.

In 2010, Hutchinson sponsored legislation to ban K2, a synthetic drug often likened to marijuana. K-2 is placed on materials such as incense that are dried and smoked.

In her last election in 2010, Hutchinson defeated an Independent, candidate, Jim Parsons, by a wide margin. she was succeeded in a reconfigured District 98 by fellow Republican John Burris of Harrison in Boone County, previously the representative from District 85.