Answer to closed primary problems: more of them

The semi-closed primary is not a problem for, but a prime solution to fix, Louisiana’s lagging policy-making system.

In its session, the Legislature will vet a couple of bills to remove from the closed primary roster Board of Elementary and Secondary Education contests. Currently, all federal offices plus the multiple executives of BESE and the Public Service Commission, plus the Supreme Court, fall under the semi-closed primary system (“semi” because true closed primaries don’t allow unaffiliated voters to choose a party’s primary in which to vote, which gets tricky given the jurisprudence involved). That means all local, state legislative, state single executive, district court, and appellate court races remain under the blanket primary system.

Proponents of this small rollback argue for it by saying BESE elections are the only ones on the year-before-presidential-elections calendar by which all other state non-judicial elections except the PSC occur, which creates an extra set of elections with additional costs and could confuse voters with no other blanket primary races on primary election days (the remainder of the bunch all occur during even-numbered years at the state and federal level where only closed primaries are). But this is a backwards way of considering the issue. It’s not that BESE closed primaries add cost and may confuse, but that the extra cost should absorb all state races as well in replacing the blanket primary system for all contests at every level with a closed primary of some kind.

Legislator wants to make youths dumber still

As the world moves on from myths of the past, one Louisiana legislator keeps trying to move the state backwards, to the detriment of its citizens’ health.

The latest attempt from Democrat state Rep. Candace Newell in HB 373 would create a pilot program that legalizes recreational marijuana. Essentially, it allows the legal dispensaries of medical marijuana to set up separate shops to sell weed for any use. It’s just the latest variation on several tries over the years she has backed to do what almost half of the states have done, legalize pot in some fashion.

Of course, the rules surrounding medical marijuana in Louisiana are so fast and loose that the herb almost already is practically legal for casual consumption, but this approach at least would remove the charade and hassle of getting some kind of medical authorization for its use (not that marijuana has almost no valid use as a medical treatment of some kind). Fortunately, recently legislators have begun to push back, with some help from Congress, but hardly successfully.

Facts, logic doom simplistic CCS argument

A Louisiana legislator recently delivered a spirited defense of lightly-regulated carbon sequestration, but omitted the bigger picture that significantly weakens her argument.

Republican state Rep. Jessica Domangue had a piece in The Hayride that made a subsidized economic argument for carbon storage. Essentially, she asserted that additional regulation on storage – such as having local option on whether to allow it, restricting expropriation of/expanding compensation for land used, placing additional restrictions on pipelines to transport it, or even outright bans on storage or transport, with all of these ideas encapsulated in almost two dozen bills that the Legislature will consider this session – would hamper the ability of transporters and storers of it directly or indirectly to take advantage of tax credits that cover in part the methods of capture and thereafter to take advantage of stringent environmental regulations promulgated in Europe that will provide a market for it. This is done through a credit scheme, where the storer certifies the capture and a carbon producer can buy or register the credit to stay under the limits that then allows sales to Europe.

In other words, she argues that free money is there for the taking, in the form of the tax and carbon credits, offset only by the costs of impounding and storing carbon, typically in what are called “pore” spaces (usually fairly deep) underground. Making it harder to consummate the deal, as these bills would do, impedes this extra economic development.

Generally, Landry speech promises more of same

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry didn’t say much specifically about how he would get Louisiana to go where he wanted, but when he did, he didn’t mince words.

At the start of the 2026 Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature, Landry delivered the annual State of the State speech that governors give. Much of it reflected upon past actions of the Legislature in the past year that he had supported which produced desirable results.

He lauded the state’s rapid rise in education rankings, which in part happened through the efforts outside the direct forces of Landry and legislators through the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education efforts and those of Superintendent Cade Brumley. He lightly emphasized that increased of the GATOR educational savings accounts at a higher level, as he has budgeted, would expand choice and accountability to keep the momentum going, but perhaps knowing this was a heavy lift he didn’t get into rebuttals to criticism of the request.