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It’s back
to the drawing board for Slidell and its anti-panhandling ordinance, as
both flaws in a decision negating the measure and in the city’s procedures for
enforcing it allow for a retooling and a retry into its becoming constitutional.
Earlier this week Eastern District of Louisiana Court
Judge Lance
Africk sided with the American Civil Liberties Union challenge to the law.
It requires those wishing to engage in begging to obtain a temporary, free
license good for 72 hours, during which time the city can perform a background
check on the applicant, and unless certain information comes to light such as a
felony conviction in the prior two decades, the city must award the permit that
includes an identification badge of the individual worn during expression in
public.
Africk’s ruling
argued that the ordinance would not be content-neutral since it treated begging
differentially than other forms of expression, and that Slidell could not
hurdle the high burden of proof necessary to justify its regulation. In
particular, he noted that similar forms of speech the city regulated for
interests of public safety, peddling and solicitation, had less onerous
registration requirements, and even an exception to any registration for the
latter if it involved political and religious views. Thus, given the number of
complaints about and declining number of arrests for panhandling over the past
couple of years, Africk asserts this does not present compelling enough
evidence that the Slidell approach addresses a public safety problem.
So, the Louisiana Legislature is out of session –
any kind – and thus it cannot threaten to take more of what we earn. That won’t
last.
With a modicum of tax increases – and also
factoring in a second straight year of paying June Medicaid bills in July,
hence pushing these into the next fiscal year not covered in the budget about
to launch – that means from current spending levels the state faces a deficit
of around $1.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, as a number of temporary taxes
roll off after June, 2018. Use of tax increases to deal with this would require
a special
session as regular sessions in even-numbered years can’t process tax
increases.
That makes such an extra session inevitable, for
Democrats from Gov. John
Bel Edwards all the way down to the party’s legislators stubbornly refuse
to consider tax reform, that might alleviate the mismatch of money to priorities
that makes fewer funds available than could be for genuine needs, as something
independent from tax increases. Further, concerning the increased taxation
they doggedly insist the citizenry must suffer, they dictate this must come on
income and progressively.
If Republican state Rep. Thomas Carmody didn’t plan
on nailing shut Elio Motors’ coffin, he could have fooled Caddo Parish.
Democrat
Gov. John Bel Edwards
recently signed
SB 107 by GOP state Sen. Bodi
White that unambiguously would prohibit bulk
sales of motor vehicles in Louisiana without a dealer’s license. State law
promulgates a long list of qualifications necessary, such as one has a fixed
location with adequate space, that the dealership has a positive effect on the
economic well-being of the state, and specifies what it sells. However, statute created an exception
to a violation of direct sales for “operating a dealership” without defining “dealership.”
SB 107 changed the language to grant an exception only to “an existing,
licensed, and franchised motor vehicle dealership.”
The
Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association stumped for the amendment to the bill
to facilitate these changes, trying to fight the tide of deregulation in car
sales that continues to spread. The extra costs forced upon them through
regulation that they must pass on to consumers puts them at a competitive
disadvantage to the direct sales model that more and more states have
legalized. Having government protect them by disallowing such sales only can
stave off this threat to shrink the impact of their business model.
You win some and you don’t lose some describes the
fate of a couple of meaningful bad bills from the Louisiana Legislature’s 2017
regular session.
Much discussion that session revolved around an
unnecessary hike in the gasoline tax, which eventually went nowhere. Motorists
didn’t need such a measure because over the past two years the state already
proved that by boosting such spending by tens of millions of dollars.
That happened as it stopped
diverting money paying for state police operations, which constitutionally allows
up
to 20 percent of gas taxes to go towards that function. The same
can happen for sloughing off money to local government and subsidizing roads
and facility operations for which users can pay, to use instead for roads work
that benefits the state as a whole.
The
maturation of Louisiana’s politics, the incomplete evolution of which has kept
the state behind the curve, still appears unfulfilled.
At
this time last week, it appeared the state’s political culture had reached
an inflection point. The state’s political class seemed willing to bridge the transition
from revenues driving policy to the reverse when the Legislature appeared
poised to budget below forecast revenues as a means to prevent shortfalls. A
week later, such hope turned out premature.
Yesterday,
by the barest
of margins, a revolt by Republicans-in-Name-Only allowed a budget
amendment to go through to spend all the money available. House leaders had
argued for holding back tens of millions of dollars as a hedge to prevent
budgetary deficits. If actual future receipts in the upcoming fiscal year
suggested hitting predicted marks, then the Legislature would have made the sequestered
money available.
This is what you get when you start carrying
around a mock severed head of the president.
A gunman
took dozens of shots at several Republican Members of Congress, staffers, and Capitol
police this morning, striking Louisiana’s Rep. Steve Scalise and other individuals. The members had congregated
for baseball practice in an Alexandria, VA park for the upcoming annual charity
match between members of the two major parties. Scalise
appeared not seriously wounded.
Improbably the incident, which ended when the
police detail subdued the alleged shooter after an exchange of dozens of shots,
had nothing to do with politics. GOP Rep. Garret Graves, having spoken to
several people involved at the scene or briefed on the incident, said the
suspect approached the field, specifically asked of the party affiliation of
the team, and only then began firing a rifle with a magazine. (Oh, by the way, Virginia
law prohibits the use of such guns in populated areas, particularly mentioning
parks and Alexandria. Yeah, that example of gun control really discouraged that attack.)
Graves opined that he thought overheated rhetoric
relayed in the media had, at least indirectly, contributed to the incident. He stressed
that the inflamed passions he believed behind the event found stoking across
the partisan spectrum.
Perhaps, but any sentient, attentive individual would
acknowledge, since the 2016 elections that resulted in complete GOP takeover of
power in Washington, that visceral expressions about the unsuitability, if not
conveying outright hatred, of political figures has emanated predominantly from
the political left and very often aimed at Republican Pres. Donald Trump.
The incident where a cut-rate comedienne on video paraded around a faux,
bloodied head of Trump represents just the tip of the iceberg; there are theater
productions alluding to his murder, open
admissions of hatred of him and justifications made for political violence,
and a rush
of bogus “hate” crime claims attributed to Trump’s presence and the electoral success
of conservatism.
Indeed, it appears that the apparent shooter, who
subsequently died from injuries sustained during his attack, loathed
Trump. Scalise, as the third-ranking Republican in the House, is seen as
one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress and shared in his skepticism of
catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, in which the believed assailant passionately
believed.
Haters will not stop being haters, but at least
the mainstream media can reconsider the ways in which it facilitates such views,
in coverage
decisions and the propriety
of remarks from their commenters. A little
more balance from a media overwhelmingly negative about Trump also might
help. Leftist
political elites in the media, popular culture, and politics additionally
could lend a hand in tamping down on the extreme rhetoric.
Graves’ call for civility merits heeding by all,
but clearly most pertinently applies to the political left. Today’s sad event shows that
particularly liberal elites must take greater responsibility to ensure they act to foster a
climate of respect in disseminating political information and participating in political
debate.
I
f Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
wanted to avoid political defeat on Louisiana’s budget, he managed to set
himself up to make it more inevitable and worse.
The regular
session ended without operating and capital budgets, as a direct result of
Edwards’ allowing his handpicked Senate leader Republican Sen. Pres. John Alario and the governor’s ally
Democrat Senate Finance
Committee Chairman state Sen. Eric
LaFleur to refuse any negotiations with the House of Representatives on the
fiscal year 2018 general appropriations bill. The House wanted to hold back a
little over $200 million as a hedge against disappointing revenue forecasts
that have led to regular mid-year budget cuts over the past decade, while the
Senate wanted no sequestering.
This led to the Senate trying to cram its version
down the throats of the House, with its Democrat allies a mere 15 minutes
before session’s end trying parliamentary maneuvers to bring it, without review
by the House, to a vote in that chamber. Throughout, egged on by Edwards, his
allies in charge of the reconciliation process refused to budge even as the
House was willing to halve essentially the amount of dollars to set aside. This
attempt represented nothing more than a bloodless coup on government spending,
trying to foist a product Edwards and minority Democrats preferred over the GOP
majority’s choices.
Democrat Sen. Karen “Pottymouth” Peterson strikes
again, illustrating the bankruptcy of ideas within her political party.
Until the past year, Peterson merely had earned a
reputation for boorish behavior while performing her senatorial duties. In
particular, and perhaps explaining why she captured the state party chairwoman’s
role, no matter how innocuous and nonpartisan a bill she could find creative
ways to inject partisanship into it, using her questioning/filibustering as a
means to bash whatever Republican appeared to have a bee in her bonnet at the
moment or the GOP agenda in general.
B
ut she
took it to another level of vulgarity last fall not long after the election
of Republican Pres. Donald Trump
when she declared herself offended at a colleague’s birthday cake. The
confection, in the form of a bikini-wearing woman poking fun at the advancing
age of the birthday boy, she declared obscene and rudely hacked it up. She then
engaged in her own obscenities by cursing at that colleague and making wild, unfounded
claims that she had seen a cake representing female genitalia present as well.
