BC graybeards drop fig leaves at Chandler pressure

As the fig leaves fall away and the threats escalate, the battle about term limits on Bossier City elected officials has mutated from a veneer of concern over legal obligations to a process driven by reelection concerns on both sides, although opponents have captured a monopoly on hypocritical self-interest that continues to erode their political fortunes while giving Mayor Tommy Chandler a tremendous opportunity to boost his own.

This week a Council majority of graybeards – councilors Republicans David Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby who all will have served at least 12 years by 2025 – plus their pet rookie Republican Vince Maggio, in concert with their consigliere City Attorney Charles Jacobs hope to go all Cosa Nostra in their endeavor to defeat the effort to give voters a say on a three-term lifetime and retroactive limit in office. They combat a petition certified by Bossier Parish Registrar of Voters Stephanie Agee that the city charter forces the Council to approve placing such an item on the ballot by Nov. 7.

But this majority bloc resists, because such a vote of taken within the next 14 months almost certainly will pass the measure and end the political careers of the graybeards. And the excuse they try to use is the petition didn’t directly have the birth years of signers listed as stated specifically in the relevant state statute, although it did list the voter identification numbers unique to signing individuals that includes the birth year of them, providing an indirect listing that complies with the spirit of the law if not its exact wording.

Until recently, the bloc went to great pains to frame their opposition in terms of legal niceties, principally that every letter needed correct crossing and dotting or else sometime in the indeterminate future some otherwise ineligible candidate (read: any of the graybeards) would sue to get on the ballot, citing defectiveness of the petition process. However, this fig leaf cannot overcome the fact that the charter says they must put the contents of a certified petition on the ballot by a certain date or they are in violation of the charter, and they have just such a petition at hand.

Further, Chandler won’t leave them alone, pricking at them to do their duty to their public embarrassment. At the Council’s last meeting, he introduced a resolution to fulfill the charter’s imperative, which the bloc voted down but was supported by Republicans Chris Smith and Brian Hammons. So, he reintroduced it for the very next one, and he may keep doing it every single meeting as long as the Council doesn’t comply. Every time he does this, he reminds voters he will fight for term limits and gives a chance for Hammons and Smith to do the same. And every time he does this, he reminds voters that not only do Darby, Free, Maggio, Montgomery, and Williams oppose term limits, but also that they repudiate their own oaths of office requiring them to uphold the charter.

Thus, to contain the damage Chandler keeps inflicting the bloc must dispense with the chimera of neutrality it has tried to sell and instead attack the petition itself. Adding a layer of hypocrisy to its quest, at the upcoming meeting it wants to pass a resolution – which failed to make the agenda as a late addition last meeting – to ask Agee to “decertify” the petition. The resolution’s language doesn’t hide that, despite no legal judgment to verify this, it declares its request valid “due to the petition failing to meet all the requirements of Louisiana Revised Statute 18:3.”

Note that until now Jacobs and the bloc have claimed they oppose a move to put the petition language onto the ballot out of strict adherence to the law, but now they expose themselves as taking a side by asking Agee to do something for which registrars don’t have the legal authority which appears nowhere in statute. It is an extralegal process invented out of thin air that does anything but adhere to the law, but which fulfills a purely political purpose.

However, this is only the veiled threat, akin to a mobster visiting Agee and telling her something like she has a nice registrar’s office and it would be a shame if something happened to it, which she could avoid by following the bloc’s wishes (assuming it passes that resolution, which given the numbers assuredly will happen). Because another resolution on the agenda carries the threat through by empowering Jacobs to litigate against the petition, which involves suing the registrar.

Of course, the resolution in many respects is both empty and meaningless. Under the charter, the city attorney doesn’t have to have such a resolution in hand to pursue litigation, but rather it is a political gesture that carries both risk and reward. It attempts to avoid further damage to Jacobs, who has come under ethical fire for his manipulation of Council affairs at odds with the Charter and his publicly spreading false information in the course of his duties, by giving him the appearance of an imprimatur to procced, but it also puts the bloc again on record against term limits utilizing an unambiguous attempt to sabotage the democratic process.

And it would appear objectively as a futile gesture. How does the city have any standing to do this; who is harmed by having a certified petition? And because the law is silent about reversing petition certification, there’s no valid mandamus claim that government fails to do its duty. The legal gymnastics involved even to present a plausible challenge will prove challenging.

Finally, and again involving a display of hypocrisy, last meeting the bloc muscled through a call for a charter review commission that would assess, among other things, term limits. Thus, why doesn’t the majority let the vote take place, and during the campaign as a reason to vote down the measures (councilor and mayor terms) cite its allegation of invalidity and that the commission will come up with its own version of limits to correct that? And regardless of whether these pass, it can present its own version if different through the commission for voter approval (which it can guarantee through its selection of commissioners)? Why does it insist on bending and twisting the law instead?

Of course, the end goal in any legal machinations is not to defeat the petition’s validity, which ultimately seems unlikely under the spirit of the law, but to delay having to put its language on the ballot until either it becomes subject to a low-stimulus special election that provides its lowest chances of success – which means a delay of at least six months but no more than nine because national elections will drive the election calendar next year and provoke high turnout – or it gets pushed past city elections in 2025. With Jacobs’ past as a 26^th Judicial District judge, he can hope his comradeship with that bench will pay off with a former colleague producing the ruling he wants that accomplishes the amount of delay desired.

Perhaps the bloc will succeed through all of this in buying its members the chance to win another term. Yet if this victory comes, it may be pyrrhic, for the resulting bad publicity and easy explanation to voters – X number of times voting against term limits, Y number of times voting to violate the city charter, all the while looking out for their own self-interests at the expense of the people’s using taxpayer dollars – could cause the bloc members to lose the war of reelection. Aided by Chandler, who every time he twists the knife in by contrast further solidifies his chances of reelection.