Strong LA gov canard distracts from real reforms

What a few candidates for Louisiana governor, as well as state politicians and the public must understand, is that any perception that the state’s chief executive has a lot of power that needs clipping really means curbing the formal powers of all of state government.

Because it is a stubborn fiction that Louisiana’s governor has a vast set of powers granted him by the Constitution. Instead, as the latest if a bit dated (2009) version of a long-running assessment of relative gubernatorial powers among the 50 states reveals, the Bayou State’s chief executive at best comes in among the middle of the pack. Among other things, term limits, widely dispersed executive powers with many out of his hands entirely, limited budgetary authority, and an elected judiciary circumscribe his ability to make policy in an extensive and unconstrained fashion.

Thus, when at a recent gubernatorial candidate forum Republicans state Rep. Richard Nelson, Treasurer John Schroder, and former gubernatorial chief of staff Stephen Waguespack all said they would try to circumscribe the power of the office, they traded on a canard. Nelson and Waguespack mentioned the state’s fiscal system that places too much emphasis on centralized revenue sources and redistribution to local governments, while Schroder targeted a related issue, the governor’s ability to veto state capital outlay funds to local governments as an enticement for legislator cooperation with his agenda.

But these aren’t examples of specific formal powers only possessed by the governor. In the former instance, that indicts the entire fiscal system and power relations among the different branches of government and between its levels. For the latter case, that addresses checks and balances formally written into the Constitution.

All the mythology about the Louisiana governor’s power has sprung up because the cult of personalistic politics and organizations surrounding them acted as glue holding together, rather than having work independently and potentially against each other, or checks and balances. Assigning so much faith to leaders and conveying that power through machine politics historically has been a defining feature of state politics since Reconstruction, and peaked about a century ago.

Yet this has eroded immensely since, and particularly in the past quarter century. The explosion of access to information and news, partially as a result of rising education levels but mainly from the information revolution magnified by the Internet, and this advance in educational attainment with greater knowledge also has encouraged more ideological thinking among voters. Now, it’s not enough to be a good old boy preaching social conservatism and generic liberal class warfare in a news environment that increasingly interjects national issues into state and local politics; instead, voters want to know where the money goes, why so much gets taken, who the favored constituencies are to get it, and otherwise what special interests receive what privileges.

With a more independent electorate, governors have lost the ability the exert authority over legislators. The greatest legacy of departing Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards will be by his clinging so fiercely to the old way that he largely will have delegitimized it, set against a legislative majority and other state executive officers elected under the new norms. With a largely failed agenda over eight years – few of his priorities became policy with the exception of growing government (and that mainly because the Legislature the year before his election foolishly authorized the governor to expand Medicaid) – because of legislative resistance and from other quarters as well, such as GOP Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry (another gubernatorial candidate) defeating him often in court and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education mostly refusing to reverse accountability measures, among other things, this established a future model of constrained gubernatorial power exertion when other institutions fight back rather than go along and get along.

Pushback likely will increase. For example, referring to Schroder’s complaint, legislators simply can start overriding line-item vetoes, having under Edwards instituted an expectation that veto sessions will occur – or with better regular session planning, can overturn vetoes then. And one lingering source of gubernatorial power, appointment powers to the myriad of boards in state government, has devalued in recent years as sources of campaign cash become more varied and more tied to ideology rather than transactional benefits.

Of course, reducing state government power by, for example, deregulating many occupational qualifications that would render many boards unneeded, points to the actual method of decreasing gubernatorial power: reduce the power of state government in general and the governor’s will follow. Historically, governors have been “powerful” mainly through informal means because other parts of government allowed them to be so. It’s not a powerful governor that should concern Louisianans, it’s a powerful government that takes too much and redistributes too much and dictates too much well beyond a need to protect individuals vulnerable not from their own actions. Decentralization of and disempowering the state is what needs desperately to change.