Despite lower turnout, Letlow forges victory

The tumultuous U.S. Senate Republican runoff between Treas. John Fleming and Rep. Julia Letlow ended not much differently than where it had started from the primary election.

After that, it looked as if Letlow could cruise to victory. Leading Fleming in percent of the vote 45-28, that left her with a sizeable advantage not needing to pick up much relative support to notch a runoff win. But a few factors should have raised alarms in her camp.

First, there would be a chunk of voters who showed up simply to boot incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy. A half-baked flipflop on the question of convicting (then former) GOP Pres. Donald Trump as well as subsequent votes backing a big-spending Democrat agenda soured especially conservative voters on him, who would make up disproportionately the party primary electorate. Further, they disproportionately likely voted for Letlow because she was seen as the more moderate of the two, but they had no real commitment to her and with a good portion of the state having nothing but the runoff on the ballot, many of these voters would disappear from the polls, giving Fleming an advantage.

Landry vetoes urge NO to get, keep it together

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry wouldn’t be much of a chief executive by Louisiana’s past standards if he wasn’t using his line-item veto clout. But this year his aim seems different.

In his first two years, Landry employed this technique of vetoing line items animated by a particular purpose. In 2024, he lopped off items that he didn’t see having a statewide purpose that went to nongovernmental organizations, and from there developed criteria by which such requests would pass his muster. In 2025, he used his pen more punitively as retribution against legislators, even of his own party, who opposed some signature pieces of his legislative agenda.

For 2026, the overall theme seemed to be to get Orleans Parish affairs in order. The regular capital outlay bill for 2024 apportioned for projects exclusively in New Orleans some $341 million (keep in mind this doesn’t have to be spent in that year or could include projects from previous years not complete, and this amount includes roads, ports, and recreation money but not for state buildings, and also accounts for NGOs and subgovernments exclusively within the parish), and its 2025 counterpart laid out $514 million (the jump mainly due to a huge appropriation to the Port of New Orleans, counted although technically in St. Bernard, as well as the airport, technically in Jefferson, counted in all years). In 2024, all three Landry line item excisions hit Orleans, for almost $2 million, and in 2025 none of those three affected Orleans.

Left fighting rearguard action against pay raises

The struggle never ends against Louisiana’s political left’s quest to expand government, as the battle over a one-time shift in education spending demonstrates.

This week, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry notched a victory towards the state providing yet another stipend for educators and support staff in public schools. It all started in 2023 when the state, rather than baking in a permanent pay hike of $2,000 for those with a teaching license and $1,000 for all other employed full-time by a local education association to the Minimum Foundation Program, instead didn’t pass a formula for the MFP but did make a one-time appropriation for stipends. The process repeated the next two years, even as last year voters turned down constitutional amendments taking money from overstuffed trust funds that would pay down unfunded accrued liabilities that could shift money to LEAs to provide these raises, and did so again this year to a similar measure.

The two rejections came from the left mobilizing voters against those items, because in essence these would devolve power away from the state in ongoing education expenses, placing more in the hands of local governments which the left sees as less reliably able to spend more money and grow government because local officials and taxpayers are more likely to hold the line on spending in many places, whereas having the money as part of the MFP put spending increases across the state on autopilot. With this electorate veto power for the moment and Landry and GOP supermajorities in the Legislature wishing to fund raises but not from the MFP that provided for less local control, Landry hit on a plan through an executive order to perform an intercessional redirection for this budget year only to provide for the hikes.

Change execution method to save public's lives

A recent series of legal rulings has left Louisiana with the need to tweak its law that ultimately saves lives.

Rulings made concerning an Alabama law that permits hypoxia as a method of carrying out capital punishment, coupled with a U.S. Supreme Court declination to review them, said that particular method of execution is unconstitutional. This would rest on Eighth Amendment grounds as cruel and unusual punishment, as in the several instances where such a method has been used, including in Louisiana where the method was added into law in 2024 and carried out last year, the inmates appeared to struggle during the process.

This represents a temporary victory for capital punishment opponents, whose strategy in the face of the constitutionality of the general concept of the death penalty is to try to declare every specific method as unconstitutional. They do this despite the fact that social science research indicates that capital punishment when consistently applied saves innocent lives – or perhaps in spite of it for ideological reasons because they know if they can disrupt the consistency then the practice becomes ineffective and then they can use that to try to attack the conceptual constitutionality argument.