Are Louisiana elected Democrats getting it together?

Although seemingly unrelated, a couple of events happened last week that showed, finally, both major political parties in government in Louisiana are trying to act like, well, political parties.

The Republicans started it months ago by electing party officials who were willing to take a stand on traditional Republican principles of smaller, more efficient, and less corrupt government. Leader Roger Villere more than once has taken the Democrat gubernatorial administration and others of their elected officials to task when they act contrary to these ideas.

Even elected officials got into the act, with the Republican Delegation discussing the merits of opposing any tax increase.The latter was important because such increases in most cases require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and after the 2003 elections the GOP had better than one-third of each chamber. In fact, since the 1974 Constitution went into effect, the growth of the GOP has been slow but quite steady (click on the images below to get larger representations; there are two separate ones divided by black):

Superior organization beginning first with the minority is frequent. Since they are the minority, they have more to gain by organizing while the majority has the luxury of numbers to continue in power. Eventually, the majority realizes too much power is slipping away too quickly, and that activates it to start its own organization campaign.

Democrats in office seem to have realized this, with their organizing of their own delegation within the Legislature. But another manifestation of this came with their Senate vote on SCR 25 which argued against the Electoral College in favor of a popular vote for determining the presidency. Both arguments have their merits, but SCR 25 particularly was provocative because it invoked the 2000 election and said the results of that election showed “the will of the people as expressed through popular vote can be thwarted in the electoral college.”

But, with the exception of state Sen. Bob Kostelka, the GOP senators were asleep at the switch at this jab and voted for it. There’s little excuse for this inattentiveness since the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee had reviewed the bill and even amended it; particularly its lone Republican committee member Sen. Jay Dardenne should have been on the lookout and/or alerted his colleagues about the resolution (it was there plain as day on the agenda).

If in fact these events show increasing attention being paid to party in the Legislature, this would augur for an increase in legislative power relative to other parts of state government, particularly the governor. The more personality gets removed from the policy-making equation, replaced by party, the more professional will be the Louisiana Legislature, and the better able it will be able to fend off encroachment of executive informal power in our system of state government.