Republican Gov. Jeff Landry faces the biggest political test of his career, one that if he fails largely cancels his ambitions of becoming a transformative Louisiana chief executive, if not risks his reelection.
That is, how can he balance the interests of trial lawyers who contributed to his election against the greater part of those mainly responsible for that very election? It is a political problem that will require a political solution where one side has to win.
Landry tried to halve the baby at a recent news conference where he declared he had a “balanced” approach to tort reform. The issue increasingly has become supercharged in the state as it continues to have among the highest vehicle insurance rates among the states, with much higher rates compared to other states of similar size, urbanization, and with populations of equivalent socioeconomic status.
His problem is this stated agenda doesn’t appear to move the needle enough towards a similar legal structure among the states with lower, and significantly so, rates. His agenda conveyed broad platitudes but not the details necessary to determine whether that move is to be made. For example, he noted that he would support changing a doctrine known as the collateral source rule – a bill about which he vetoed last year – if it were more like that of Texas, but left it at that. (The Texas one actually has more in common with the vetoed bill than existing Louisiana law on the subject.)
There may be some strategic ambiguity at work here, so that as the stack of reform bills that already have been prefiled work their way through, he can have room to maneuver. That so many such bills have hit the hopper in and of itself flashes danger, in that he did little in his first year in office to address the pent-up demand of a number of legislators who ran with meaningful tort reform as a major part of their campaigns last year, rebuffing calls to have a special session on insurance.
While Landry may point to a number of bills he signed dealing with insurance in 2024, few dealt with tort reform insofar as it addressed vehicles. Further, he failed the advocate for the more far-reaching reform bills; for example, one specific reform he now says he favors, ending the Housley presumption, as legislation died on the vine in 2024 where had he expressed support for it surely would have hurtled it to his desk.
These actions only have fueled speculation that Landry remains too captive to trial lawyers who benefit from rules encouraging litigation, which is one but not the only major reason that state rates remain so high. He raked in big bucks from the trial lawyer lobby in his campaign, with one major contributor claiming Landry said that lobby had nothing to fear from him.
Fueling the perception that he has a bias towards that lobby has been his rewarding of powerful members of that lobby. For example, naming lawyer and big donor to groups supporting his campaign John Carmouche to the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, whose firm subsequently would win at the federal district court level an award of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars against Chevron on behalf of Plaquemines Parish that Landry supports – even though at one time as attorney general office his office offered to temper the jackpot justice ethos of which this case reeks, making fair game accusations that he has sold out on the issue.
All of this is coming to a head now, starting with a steady drumbeat of legislative champions of meaningful reform. Last fall, in particular GOP House Speaker Phillip DeVillier – Landry’s close ally – gave the green light for representatives to hold inter-session hearings on tort reform, which revolved mainly around items for Landry had little stomach. A star of those was an effective advocate of reform, Republican Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple, who has kept up the pressure. After Landry’s news conference, he upstaged Landry by having his own and refuting several assertions made by Landry in his.
This can only strengthen another factor encouraging meaningful reformist sentiments, public concern. A recent poll by the Pelican Institute showed insurance costs the second-most important issue to Louisianans, with a large majority seeing lawsuit abuse, downplayed by Landry in his pox-on-all-houses attitude, as a major contributor to overly high rates.
Landry’s difficulty is he cannot halve the baby in a political sense. On the one hand, it’s usually a good idea to dance with the one who took you to the ball, but on the other it increasingly has become difficult to defend that it in the light of public perceptions of insurance, reports of Landry’s coziness with trial lawyer interests, and legislators’ and Temple’s willingness to take him on over the issue.
He has to choose, and increasingly if it’s the trial lawyers, he risks alienating his base. One theory already holds this cost him his agenda of transformative fiscal reform. Yes, the trial lawyer lobby was good to him in 2023, and an aggressive reform agenda will curtail its members’ livelihoods, but votes beat even collectively large donated sums. Making his dilemma worse is while the benefits of campaign support come immediately, benefits from bold tort reform will take years to realize (only now are tepid 2020 reforms even beginning to work their way through the system) and can be confounded by extraneous events, such as an excessive hurricane season incurring huge losses to insurers that obscure in the short run quantifiable benefits of more extensive reform.
Worst of all, conservatives in particular fear that Landry’s reluctance to embrace bolder tort reform will sabotage the large of his agenda outside of this issue, which they see as the best hope to make lasting positive change in fiscal and other policies in decades. He otherwise has a legislative majority and general public support (the Pelican survey had as the top issue of concern the economy, which his defeated fiscal reform package addressed), but if he persists in wanting to die on the hill of watered-down tort reform, he may poison the policy-making pool to send much of his agenda to death.
He has come to the point where his chances for that agenda to succeed are maximized by the politically difficult decision, if behind scenes while maintaining publicly the fiction of “balance,” of lending quiet support to farther-reaching reform that won’t prevent the trial lawyer lobby from disappointment and even turning on him. Because it’s better to lose dollars than votes, and even if the lobby worked against him in 2027 the faith he will have generated among the mass electorate who put him in office will reward him with another term.
Cynically perhaps he could wait until after reelection to cut trial lawyers loose on this issue, but circumstance is that he won’t be afforded that luxury. The pent-up urgency is such that he must act, and now, in supporting, whether publicly, full-bore tort reform, or risk losing maybe everything politically.
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