The confusing
end to a bill that would create incentives for Louisiana’s local law
enforcement agencies to follow federal law highlights how the electoral
politics of Gov. John
Bel Edwards overshadowed the merits behind the bill.
In its original form, HB 1148 by
state Rep. Valarie
Hodges would have tried to prevent LEAs from failing to follow federal law
in conveying information about illegal aliens’ presence in the country. That
law requires that LEAs create no affirmative impediment to reporting
citizenship or immigrant status to federal authorities. Current policy in New
Orleans and Lafayette Parish appear to do that. The penalty would have been
restrictions on the ability to use bonding authority.
That bill Democrat Edwards
desperately did not want to come to his desk. His party’s larger strategy
has encouraged illegal aliens’ presence in order for them to gain citizenship
and vote legally or to vote illegally in the belief that they will support disproportionately
the party’s candidates. As Edwards’ successful election rested largely on a
fiction that he would not govern from the left, he needed on social issues
plausible deniability of his true ideological leanings. Having to veto this
bill would puncture any tenuous myth that he would govern largely as a social
conservative, exposing him as a full spectrum liberal to a center-right state
electorate.
Maybe because Andrew Jones’ hometown produced a
high school valedictorian who showed the electorate’s rules didn’t apply to his
political career, Amite High School’s current class valedictorian thought school
rules didn’t apply to his academic career. Just because the kid got taught a
lesson now has sent some
off to shoot the messenger.
While Gov. John Bel Edwards,
who defied electoral dynamics by having him and his leftist agenda elected in an
ideologically center-right state, and Jones graduated at the top of their
classes from the same school 32 years apart, something else crucial separated
the two: Edwards, on his way to a service academy appointment, was clean-shaven
at his graduation ceremony, while Jones, having won a scholarship to Southeastern
Louisiana University, abjured the razor. Given that district rules specified to
participate in the ceremony all males, except for those whom shaving facial
hair led to documented medical complications, had to appear without a beard,
Jones could not walk or give the valedictory address.
That did not come off well even within his own
family; his mother asked him to conform even as other relatives supported his
decision to go hirsute. However, she did get upset with the local chapter of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for using him
and his story as a means to call for the ouster of the Tangipahoa Parish School
District superintendent and some school board members. Why the group felt the
need to protest on the base facts appears baffling; its leader said the district’s
actions somehow unfairly discriminated, implicitly on race (Jones is black),
even though the personal appearance regulations seemed applied in a uniform
manner across high school ceremonies.
As senior members of his department drop like
flies, it’s become increasingly clear why Louisiana’s Department of Corrections
Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc ended up as one of the few appointees from previous
Gov. Bobby
Jindal’s administration to get the nod from Gov. John Bel Edwards to
continue in his post: because he can serve as a point person to shill for
Edwards’ tax-and-spend agenda.
Even as former warden of the Louisiana State
Penitentiary Burl Cain retired
under an ethical cloud amid charges of departmental laxity in rules that
favored the conduct of his that came under question, his son Nate Cain got removed
as warden at Avoyelles Correctional Center, and former Deputy Secretary of
the Office of Juvenile Justice (which position simultaneously reports to the
governor) Mary Livers retired
under criticism for handling her duties, LeBlanc has kept his perch. Whether
he made a grand bargain with Edwards to stump for the governor’s policy
preferences in exchange for his job, he echoes the governor's call for higher taxes rather
than find better ways of doing things that run counter to Edwards’ notions of retaining
outsized state government.
Somewhat mirroring previous testimony in the
House, to a Senate panel last week LeBlanc bemoaned the proposed 7.7 percent
cut, almost halved from the version of the state’s operating budget that began
in the House, of $39 million from last year’s spending plan for prisoners under
state supervision. He repeated that such cuts would create dangerous
conditions, said these would cause the closure of the state’s two privately-run
prisons and send those prisoners to local facilities that would overcrowd those,
and slash re-entry programs designed to reduce recidivism rates. He saw additional
revenue raised as the only solution to prevent these moves.
As the Louisiana Legislature reviews a bill to
restart an economic relationship with Cuba, policy-makers must not make the
same mistakes form over a decade ago. From the initial reaction from some senators,
it does not seem that they will avoid the same errors, but the process has just
begun.
HCR 37 by
state Rep. Patrick
Connick doesn’t ask for much, just that the state review business
opportunities in Cuba and report back to the Legislature. Actually, this means
little in that, since 2001 when federal law changed to allow food and
humanitarian trade with Cuba, business opportunities remain unaffected even
with Pres. Barack
Obama’s unilateral normalization of relations a couple of years ago. But
what it does not ask makes the difference between what the measure could do to
invigorate desirable system evolution and it becoming complicit in a propaganda
exercise that might bring some monetary benefits to businesses but do nothing
to bring the country out of its totalitarian system.
That latter outcome describes the 2005
trip made by former Gov. Kathleen
Blanco and several legislators to Cuba, then led by the Führer of
the Caribbean Fidel Castro. Blanco went there also looking for business
opportunities during the existing near-total embargo and during a
highly-publicized propaganda war between the two states. With her previous 2004
trip and this one paid for by Cuba, her demonstration of political naïveté went
from average to exceptional when she allowed Castro to accost and harangue her about
her national government, in a former church forcibly desacralized by Castro,
and then before leaving the island did not accept the request of her own
national government to meet with a Nobel prize-winner dissident.