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.
But 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.
This uncouth display reflected the decades-long crackup that liberalism has experienced as its policies became visible failures, which led the electorate to put in office record numbers of Republicans at the state level and to keep Congress in the hands of the GOP for most of the last quarter-century, with only Democrat presidential candidates competitive. As history and analysis has shorn liberalism of intellectual respectability, Democrats have become increasingly shrill in making emotive appeals, the only base remaining for leftism.
Last week, she upped the ante. Even as the Louisiana Senate has a solid GOP majority, in his efforts to lick the boots of whoever sits in the Governor’s Mansion Republican Sen. Pres. John Alario appointed Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ predecessor as the party’s House of Representatives caucus leader, Democrat state Sen. Eric LaFleur, as head of the Senate Finance Committee. As such, when the Senate passed the operating budget HB 1 with $200 million more in spending than the House, Alario tabbed himself, LaFleur, and another Democrat on the committee – which has a 2:1 Republican advantage in members – state Sen. Greg Tarver, as the Senate members of the conference committee.
Pushing Democrat preferences through the committee served as one prong of the strategy to pass the HB 1 version they wanted; the other entailed several Democrat senators heading over to the House in the final moments of the session to pressure House members to supplement various House Democrat procedural strategies to bring this version to a successful vote on the House floor. Peterson participated in this gang.
Their remonstrations grew quite vocal; so much so that GOP state Rep. Dodie Horton, who prior to her election served as the legislative aide to former state Rep. Henry Burns, asked them to keep it down so she could hear the chamber’s business. Peterson replied by profanely telling her to be quiet – only days after she had co-sponsored a resolution expressing support that legislators “in your language seek unity through compromise and consensus rather than fostering division through anger, invective, and harsh rhetoric; and refrain from disparagement of others and from criticism that is not constructive.”
Yes, Peterson can’t help it, despite after pledging to follow a regime of civil discourse, because she is such a leftist ideologue. For an informed person to believe in liberalism today requires abandoning reason and surrendering to emotion, and that encourages uncouthness in pervading all aspects of her political existence.
As a result, the GOP House caucus called for her removal of her chairmanship of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee and the state Republican Party has asked that she resign her party position. Expect none of that to happen, as the descent continues of Louisiana’s political left into a politics based upon unreason, railing ever more demonstratively against reality.
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