Jindal thwarts lemming's political ploy at taxpayer expense

If lemmings could understand human language, as you watched them run towards the cliff you could run with them, trying to reason with them, telling them if they would just stop and look at the evidence and think about it, they’d hightail it in the opposite direction. But because they are lemmings, because they feel they should be making that dash regardless of the truth that awaits, they wouldn’t stop. Which is why if she could choose to be an animal, state Sen. Karen Peterson would feel right at home as a lemming.

Peterson, a staunch ally of Pres. Barack Obama, recently took command of Louisiana’s Democrats in a state where the embattled Obama remains extraordinarily unpopular and the party unusually inert. She pledged to take the party even further to the political left, its steady drift in that direction already having weakened it, mimicking the actions of Obama at the national level.

As a legislator, this session she signed on to the usual moonbattery as is her wont, but one of her sanitized obnoxious ideas actually made it all the way to the governor’s desk. Her HB 577 came in as a related measure to her HB 568, which was based upon the sham that structural imperfections in society and economics discriminate institutionally against women by forcing them to be paid less than men for comparable work, limited in this bill to government positions. Through careful, valid research this myth long ago and repeatedly has been disproven.

HB 568 predictably went nowhere as a result, but HB 577 was an attempt to try to score propaganda points derived from this falsehood nonetheless. It was to set up a study commission concerning some vaguely-defined “wage disparities between men and women in certain public sectors” that would find “factors” alleged to cause this, address “consequences” of the presumed problem, and then invite “action, including … legislation” intended to fix the assumed problems.

HB 577, then, served as a sanitized version of HB 568 which itself in concept allied with  Obama’s latest tactic designed to distract from his record, the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” which would make it much easier for suits against employers to sue for discrimination in pay on the invalid bases already identified as such through research. The tactic in all cases is to try to promote as an election-year ploy a (to date unconvincing) narrative that somehow Republican candidates (despite a number of them being women) for federal office are against women.

The indirectness of HB 577 in connecting it to this more radical idea allowed it to pass out of both chambers, but with the commission proposed to begin work in August, it could have provided some ammunition for Democrats in federal elections (although given their extraordinarily weak position in Louisiana it seemed highly unlikely anywhere enough to make any difference) but also in regards to state politics potentially for years ahead through any recommendations that could find their way into legislation. In the process, it managed to obtain a judgment of no fiscal impact from the Legislative Fiscal Office, because it would rely on existing staff at the Louisiana Workforce Commission and the cooperation of other agencies, key to flipping enough of the more easily-cowed Republicans in the House to approve, after one failure, the conference report.

But then Gov. Bobby Jindal called that fiction to prevent political points from being scored at taxpayer expense. He received from the LWC its judgment that the extra work entailed would cost $300,000 extra over the 18-month predicted lifespan of the bill, and vetoed it on that basis. Of course, this sent Peterson into dyspepsia (the written statement version here), but the ranting obviously serves its political purpose.

Besides the matter state parsimony, Jindal wisely saw this as a wasteful measure in search of a nonexistent problem. However, its real value to Peterson and her ilk was to follow slavishly the Obama Democrats by its mere presence, with it getting so far a bonus – all the way over the electoral cliff. Lemmings must be directed towards the sea, and Peterson and others are more than happy to follow the leader despite the wrongheadedness of his ideas.