Campaign finance clarity achieved by eliminating limits

While a Virginia-based public interest group argues for a slight change in Louisiana campaign law that it says would rectify an unconstitutional situation, a different change would moot the whole point and make state and local elections that much more transparent.

The Freedom Through Justice Foundation asked the Louisiana Board of Ethics to issue an advisory opinion that it stop enforcing the state law that limits individual contributions to political committees that make only independent expenditures concerning candidacies (meaning that they do not donate money to campaigns nor coordinate activities with them). The Board correctly said it could not do anything regarding this $100,000 limit over a four-year period to a committee since it lacked jurisdiction over the law, it merely enforced it.

This group now could bring suit in state court, where it bases its objection to the decision in Speechnow.org v. Federal Election Commission, which involved federal law.

Panel product may provide impetus for needed reform

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and forces sympathetic to beneficial change in Louisiana’s higher education may be getting the upper hand despite previous defeats, as the results coming from a panel dedicated to reviewing higher education policy indicate.

Last year, a bold higher education reform package was proposed by Go. Bobby Jindal, but his legislative allies found it tough sledding. After the failure to merge the worst-performing college campus in the country with another a couple of miles down the road also not performing well, the steam seemed to escape from other efforts such as streamlining the duplicative governance boards and more rational distribution of merit scholarship aid through the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students. In the end, tinkering at the margins to shunt a school out of one system and into another and giving temporary, limited authority for schools to set tuition in exchange for promises of more efficient performance constituted the extent of progress.

Establishment of a Governance Commission to study higher education policy came as one of the consolation efforts, and, from the recommendations it has forwarded, helpfully might build momentum to getting going some of those efforts stalled in the last Legislature. Most controversially, it recommended that the Constitution be amended to strengthen the role of the Board of Regents relative to the four system boards, three for baccalaureate-and-above institutions and one for community and technical colleges.

Online education plan has conceptual, symbolic problems

Besides the issue of scope of mission, a question of whether Louisiana resources should support somebody with questionable associations and agendas needs weighing regarding the Southern University System’s request to expand dramatically its online education offerings.

System Pres. Ronald Mason unveiled a proposed partnership involving a company called EOServe, which has assisted several other historically black universities and colleges to establish a national online presence. The idea is that Southern become a “brand” in the area of online education that could compete with for-profit providers that would provide a stream of revenue, even after EOServe takes it cut, especially important for the cash-strapped Baton Rouge campus, which declared financial exigency last month.

This has raised concerns among the Board of Regents, with Commissioner of Higher education Jim Purcell questioning the plan.

Black legislator power declines, not black voter opportunity

Even if black voters in Louisiana accept a false premise, this mistaken policy agenda need not relegate them to near-absolute political irrelevancy if sufficiently motivated or open-minded.

As the latest round of state elections confirmed, if we equate power of black interests with the proportion of black legislators and whether their partisan allegiances lie with the majority party, black lawmaker influence in the American South would be low, as pointed out recently by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research center to study public policy as it relates to black Americans. It turns out that most of the 318 black legislators in the south, the highest number in history, belong to parties in the minority in their statehouses.

Yet this does not necessarily condemn interests of black people to the whims of “conservative whites [who] control all the power in the region” who enact “legislation both neglectful of the needs of African Americans and other communities of color (in health care, in education, in criminal justice policy) as well as outright hostile to them,” as the report ignorantly hyperventilates. Such a view entirely misunderstands that all people’s interests, regardless of skin color, at the most basic level are universal and that conservatism addresses them better far than any alternative.

Power gone with shoe on other foot for LA House Democrats

With elections now finished and Louisiana House Democrats finding them in a minority for the first time in over a century as a new Legislature heads towards its organizational session, speculation turns its new leadership. With the biggest question apparently settled, it now is time for Democrats to dream big in the hopes of avoiding the nightmare of their reality when it comes time to handing out committee assignments and chairmanships, and the policy implications that come from that.

With the imprimatur of Gov. Bobby Jindal, state Rep. Chuck Kleckley appears poised to assume the speakership, jumping current Speaker Pro Tem and recent GOP convert (in label only) Joel Robideaux. The latter has complained about his fate but, unless he pushes the speaker’s matter to a vote that would embarrass politically Kleckley and Jindal, he could well hang onto his spot.

Regardless of Robideaux’s fate, created will be a situation to which Democrats seem resigned, the only two full-time jobs in the chamber being in Republican hands.

Thanksgiving Day, 2011

This column publishes usually every Sunday through Thursday after noon (sometimes even before; maybe even after sundown on busy days) U.S. Central Time except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Independence Day or Christmas or New Year's when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, there are six of these: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas.

With Thursday, Nov. 24 being Thanksgiving Day, I invite you to explore the link above.

LA Democrats' big spending prevented bigger GOP gains

If Louisiana Republicans are looking for the main reason explaining why they could not grab more legislative seats in the six majority-white House districts that had runoffs this cycle and the eight that allied organizations targeted with some kind of Democrat incumbent running that got resolved in the general election without a GOP win, they only have themselves to blame by letting state Democrat organizations and their officeholders past and present beat them in tactical funding decisions.

The common perception of Louisiana Democrats as a party was it was a joke for being unable to find one serious candidate for statewide executive office this past election cycle. But when it came to the legislative level, its strategy of selecting a handful of seats to protect largely blunted the less precise, more bludgeoning approach Republican leaders expected to prevail.

Given the demographics, in all six runoff contests Republicans should have been favored.

Disingenuous remarks show LA Democrats don't get it

Listening to the legislative leader of Louisiana Democrats reveals all you need to know about the self-inflicted wound the party has perpetrated on itself to place it close to irrelevancy in the state. Besides missing the point and accusing its rival of doing exactly what it did, this silliness also avoids understanding the largest lesson from the recent legislative elections.

Hearing state Rep. John Bel Edwards’ remarks about the election, one would get no sense that the Democrats now trail the Republicans in seats in the House by 58-45 and in the Senate by 24-15 because they are wrong on the issues. No, it’s because influential Republican politicians like Sen. David Vitter campaigned on tactics, designed to tie Democrat candidates to unpopular national policies, of “race baiting and Obama hating” that were rejected by voters past a certain point. Naturally enough, there’s nothing true about this in explaining why some Democrat incumbents were able to hang on to win reelection, as with one exception those who did try for it were defeated.

But the one who lost was not targeted by the GOP, rather defeated by another Democrat in a manner where race as an issue may have made the difference.

Judge Landrieu not on deceptive rhetoric, but his actions

No sooner was the body of 2011 state elections getting buried than Democrat New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu began his 2015 campaign for governor, launching the first iteration of a strategy he hopes will break the Republican stranglehold they now enjoy on the statewide executive offices.

If any lesson in electoral politics has become clear over the past two election cycles in Louisiana, it is that, unless your constituency is in a poor urban area or a backwater, you cannot run and win office as a liberal Democrat for a state office, especially of the statewide executive kind. Landrieu realizes this and so has commenced testing a theme that tries to promote him as a centrist through a kind of misdirection, by offering extreme interpretations of what both major political parties stand for and then positing that he rejects both in favor of consensus and the practical. He launched this in a speech at a New Orleans meeting aptly enough sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

By doing so, he practices two different kinds of deception.

GOP wins small, education reform big, in 2011 LA elections

If you’re a Republican reformer in Louisiana, the end of this state election cycle ought to elicit from you two cheers.

Reviewing results from the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, it’s conceivable that results for reformers could have gone better, but not that much over what actually did transpire. With a sweep of the runoffs by reform-friendly candidates, including the most aggressive of them all, incumbent Chas Roemer in the Sixth District, over the most retrogressive reform opponent running, the eleven-member board, which includes three gubernatorial appointees, now has an overwhelming reform majority with eight solid votes. Two others can be counted upon to lend a hand from time to time, leaving just one isolated establishmentarian representative after having dispatched three such incumbents and one retired.

In the short run, this means it makes likely the hiring of Recovery School District chief John White as the permanent state superintendent.