While unusual, the move
to separate out appropriations for a constitutional office as done earlier
this week in Louisiana’s House Appropriations Committee is not, as defenders of
Democrat Gov. John Bel
Edwards allege, unconstitutional, or even uncouth.
At the request of Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry, the
GOP-controlled committee removed references to the Department of Justice in the general appropriations
bill HB 1
and instead tucked these into a separate HB 105. Further,
the separate bill contained instructions giving Landry the authority to make
cuts in any fashion within the department should revenue shortfalls occur
during the fiscal year. In response, Democrats on the committee as well as
Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne opined that
they thought handling appropriations in this fashion did not comply with the Constitution.
But nothing in the Constitution disallows such an
approach. Art. III
Sec. 16 declares that the Legislature produce a general appropriations bill
“itemized and shall contain only appropriations for the ordinary operating
expenses of government, public charities, pensions, and the public debt or
interest thereon.” It then allows that “All other bills for appropriating money
shall be for a specific purpose and amount.” As such, HB 105 appears to meet
this standard – as do the several other appropriations bills other than the
general one typically passed each year, for the legislative and judicial
branches and ancillary expenditures.
Such is his eagerness to impose upon Louisianans a
program that costs
too much and delivers badly that Gov. John Bel Edwards
wants to expedite Medicaid expansion by grabbing
eligibility data from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That
shortcut only would compound the mistake.
While his administration plans on this and other
tactics to try to get people into the system for a Jul. 1 start, it also touts
this move as a way to launch expansion more quickly and more cheaply, as in
Louisiana SNAP qualifiers not already part of Medicaid theoretically also meet
the same test standards to receive its expanded version. However, to do so
risks wasting taxpayer dollars beyond the inherent characteristics of the
program and population it serves, because of the error rate involved with SNAP
dollars.
Misleadingly, the Pres. Barack Obama
Administration tries to create the
impression that improper payments amount to just 1.3 percent of the total.
Yet it derives that figure not from a calculation of eligibility, but from the
vendor fraud rate without
explaining why it equates the two very different things – the former
assesses whether the actual users of SNAP benefits should qualify legally,
while the latter looks at stores’ illegal sale of SNAP benefits for cash or
other ineligible items. In fact, as detailed in a General Accounting Office report,
the federal government really has no idea of the fraud rate from benefits going
to ineligible people, but evidence suggests that to be at least triple
the erroneously-cited figure.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards
continues to dance faster to avoid the landmines, but it seems inevitable that
soon he will touch off one dealing with human life that will contrast negatively
his actions with his words.
During his gubernatorial campaign, Edwards
succeeded in making a sufficient portion of the voting public believe that he
was conservative enough on social issues to obscure his garden-variety leftism on
most others and get himself elected. To anyone who listened he alleged his
Catholicism informed his views on these issues, asserting as a man of faith he
followed his religion’s doctrines on such matters as when life began and the
evil of abortion – despite his statement when contemplating a run for Congress in 2006 that “Abortion is the freedom
of choice, between the appropriate parties and their higher power.”
But now as governor he has to put his money where
his mouth is, and legislation carried by social conservatives will put him to
the test. Interestingly, bills that have the effect of curtailing abortion that
go much farther than Louisiana ever has since the U.S. Supreme Court
interpreted the Constitution to mean that states could not regulate the
gruesome act have sprung up this session, despite that there would have been no
question of their acceptability in previous years given the unimpeachable
pro-life views and actions of former Gov. Bobby Jindal.
If you want an illustration of the shortsightedness
and stupidity of Gov. John
Bel Edwards’ policies, generally speaking, check out oyster shucking.
The New
Orleans Times-Picayune ran a feature
on a day in the life of working at an oyster processing plant. The industry
pays a couple of bucks above minimum wage, although high producers can earn
more, to a workforce almost exclusively foreign – legal immigrants brought in
under a seasonal guest worker program, because almost no American citizens will
work the job. At the facility profiled, of those citizens who do, they significantly
underperform compared to the foreigners.
Perhaps paying higher wages might attract more
Americans to the job, which takes a narrow but necessary skill set to develop,
or make them more reliable: the company in question says that the American
workers miss many more days of work than do the legal immigrants. At the same
time, raising wages too much more, asserts the company, would drive up costs
significantly in the labor-intensive industry and price out fare that includes
oysters from most buyers.
The uncharted waters that the Republican Party
encounters with businessman Donald Trump
as its presidential nominee will have an impact on Louisiana races down the
ballot.
No major party ever has nominated someone without
any experience in government office. All without any elective experience, or
appointive experience to the executive or judicial branches at the state or
federal level, served in high-ranking military positions. Even the least
politically-experienced nominee, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, served a
few months in Congress almost a quarter of a century before receiving his
nomination by the Democrats.
Trump’s success largely comes from frustration
that many Republican voters have from Democrats in office who, with increasing
success and brazenness, have transformed the country away from the fundamental
principles behind its founding, and with Republicans officeholders seemingly
unwilling to stand athwart of this sellout. Seen foremost by many as a
successful businessman whose blunt style and win-at-all-costs attitude,
reinforced by his celebrity status, this ultimate outsider status gave him
cachet as someone so alien to current officeholders who themselves seem so
alienated from the many that he has the greatest capacity to disrupt a system
increasingly seen as detached from the people, if not corrupt.
Louisiana increasingly grapples with its ability to
offer capital punishment and its policy-makers debate the death penalty’s
efficacy, to the point that even some
past supporters of it now question it. Yet the data used to argue against it
discount the restorative power of the penalty, a salutary feature of it
illustrated by a recent, if unfortunate, event in the state.
Over the past couple of years, executions
nationwide have slowed to a turtle’s pace as ideological opponents of capital
punishment have influenced makers of the drugs used in the lethal chemical injection
process not to make these available to states wishing to carrying out
sentences. This reduced a rate already at a crawl as over the decades
increasingly aggressive appealing of sentences has grown, although that has
received a boost from technological innovations, for example which make DNA
testing for potential innocence more available. And that has resulted in some
reversals, which makes that exercise worthwhile and less likely to happen in
the future as more criminal trials access this technology from the start,
leading to fewer future mistakes.
But this desirable dragging out of sentence
commission produces an unfortunate side effect, now compounded by the undesirable
sitzkreig strategy of ideological
opponents, of making capital punishment less effective as a deterrent. Research
indicates that the death
penalty saves lives by deterring murders, but only when it has consistent
application. The start-and-stop, uncertain nature that it has taken on in
recent years diminishes this effect, and in part highlights opponents’ strategy
that if they can make the concept of this punishment take on that nature, that
kicks out a prop to the argument favoring its maintenance.
No Louisiana lawmaker quite merges inarticulateness
and incoherence as well as does Democrat state Rep. Barbara Norton,
but she also recently managed to throw intemperance
if not hypocrisy into the mix.
Known for asking the House
to honor (and subjecting it to listen to) her godson’s obscene music output,
and notable for her unconventional use of grammar, Norton expanded her
reputation with her response to last week's rejection of HB 101 by
the House’s Committee
on Administration of Criminal Justice, on which she sits.
Her bill would have required movie theaters, at
their own expense, to install and monitor metal detectors, which also would
entail additional personnel costs. After about 10 minutes of video presentation
and opening remarks by her, and a few minutes of questioning and an amending to
make an exception for holders of concealed carry permits, Republican state Rep.
Tony Bacala
said the end product would create a false sense of security. He pointed out
that theaters that voluntarily did this in other states had trained personnel,
and moved to defer the bill involuntarily.
It seems that doing the mundane as part of his job
doesn’t satisfy Lt. Gov. Billy
Nungesser. Whether that merely remains consistent with his political career
to date and/or signifies ambitions to elevate his position by one notch remains
to be seen.
To say the lieutenant governor has next to no
relevant policy-making power and that performing the formal duties of the
office delivers little political excitement overstates the position’s
importance. In both of his runs, his previous in 2011 unsuccessful, Nungesser
made clear he envisioned the post much more expansively than did statute and
the Constitution.
That he would adopt such an attitude perhaps seems
inevitable given his eight
years at the helm of Plaquemines Parish. Elected in the wake of the
hurricane disasters of 2005, one disaster after another plagued the parish
through his eight years. He really rose to fame after the oil spill disaster of
2010, with a couple of bad storms mixed in, by his bombastic,
shoot-from-the-hip style in pleading the parish’s case to statewide and national
audiences for restorative assistance.
