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While political party weakness reverberates throughout
Louisiana’s immature political system – witness
the House speaker election – the majority Republicans in the Legislature
can reduce the self-infliction in how parties govern themselves.
At present, the state creates a two-tier system
for a recognized party’s governance. If a party can claim at least 30 percent
of the state’s registrants, it must elect to the governing state central
committee one male and female member for each House district, or 210 total.
Otherwise, it can set up the composition of the SCC however it likes (except
that if it is the party of the governor, he or his designee has a seat).
The change to the law that released all but
Democrats out of this straitjacket came over three decades ago, when Democrats
held a solid majority of registrants and Republicans not many. Two decades ago,
the GOP only claimed 22 percent, but now have 31 percent.
Many conservatives in Louisiana may have felt
disappointment of the victory
of state Rep. Clay
Schexnayder over state Rep. Sherman Mack,
both Republicans, for
the position of House speaker. Whether that puts a significantly moderate
stamp on the chamber for the next four years, dimming the already-dusky chances
of significant reform legislation, tax relief, and spending restraint until
2024, as
previously noted depends upon the raw material Schexnayder has for
committee assignments and chairmanships.
Mack gained backing from a number of unapologetic
conservatives in the chamber, which would have guaranteed the most important committees
have conservatives helm them and almost all committees would have unambiguously
conservative majorities. Whether Schexnayder wishes to pursue the same course,
if he largely sticks to the ones that brought him to the dance he won’t quite
have the same resources.
Not that it’s impossible. For all the
hand-wringing the political right may engage in over the outcome, where Schexnayder’s
winning coalition contains a majority of Democrats, among the GOP members who
have served through at least a couple of regular sessions in the past four
years, there’s not a vast difference between the blocs.
Protector of conservatism or wolf in sheep’s
clothing? Louisiana will find out upon the election of Republican
state Rep. Clay
Schexnayder as Speaker of the House.
The election made history as for the first
time the body nominated only Republicans for the job, with Republican state
Rep. Sherman
Mack also having his named entered. But it displayed continuity with the past when
the winning candidate secured more voted from Democrats than from Republicans.
Schexnayder prevailed 60 to 45, with all Democrats
on his side. Two-thirds of Republicans voted for Mack, including about all of
the party members with well-known conservative credentials. Mack also had drawn
public support from two highly-placed GOP elected officials also viewed as
solid conservatives, Atty. Gen. Jeff
Landry and Sen. John
Kennedy, the leaders of a conservative PAC that had donated to the
campaigns of many of the Republicans present at the vote.
Today the Louisiana Board
of Regents for Higher Education emulated academia when its mandarins
encounter a substantial decision that will trigger controversial change – it
punted.
Sounding like students who didn’t realize the
gravity of an assignment and so didn’t start working on it until too late, enough
members of the Board said they wanted more time to complete the task. By
consent, they put off dealing with changes to the implementation and
enforcement of admission by exception rules until next month.
This started a couple of years ago when unilateral
changes made by Louisiana State University Baton Rouge saw the proportion of its
admitted students not meeting entrance standards promulgated by the Board go
above its permitted four percent limit. The
exceptions cohort graduated at a significantly lower rate, bolstering the
argument that they should have attended other state universities with lower
admissions bars.
Louisiana looks set to lose a key actor in its
struggle to provide a quality education to its children.
State Superintendent of Education John White will
resign after just over eight years on the job. He has served longer than
any appointed superintendent, and the longest since the four elected terms of Shelby
Jackson that ended in 1964.
White has earned his departure, since he found turbulence
in his job almost from the start. Actually already part of the state’s
educational scene as superintendent of the state’s Recovery School District
which then existed only in New Orleans when given the state’s top job, he had a
mission to implement long-reaching reforms passed into law only months into his
tenure, changes bitterly opposed by many in an educational establishment and its
allies who had overseen over the decades Louisiana’s plunge to the bottom.
Louisiana has a chance to correct a mistake it made
two decades that could rein in electricity price increases.
Last
month, the state’s Public Service Commission voted to study the impact of
forthcoming rate increases. These appear guaranteed as the generating infrastructure
of investor-owned utilities, specifically the state’s largest supplier Entergy,
has aged, necessitating large-scale replacement. Legally, utilities may pass
these costs over time to consumers, from residential to industrial.
A consortium of two dozen large industrial users,
which altogether use a substantial amount of the state’s power, maintain that
the conversion would increase rates by 50 percent. They have argued they should
have the choice to leave the monopoly system historically favored by the PSC,
which locks in a provider to a customer. Entergy in 2018
provided 79 percent of all power for industrial use.
