Dubious claims litter "news" piece on GOP

The incremental transformation of Louisiana’s political culture apparently has prompted some nose-growing at the Baton Rouge Advocate.

So far, 2020 has seen the first steps towards reversing nearly a century of acquiescence to oversized government. There have been others: a brief flare snuffed out quickly when Democrat-then-Republican former Gov. Buddy Roemer first came into office, then several years later under GOP former Gov. Mike Foster reversal occurred on a few specific issues such as education, and only a few years ago Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal mounted the most serious effort on a broad front, but one left incomplete.

But this time differs in that conservatives now hold every minor statewide office and command majorities in the Legislature, Public Service Commission, and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The last redoubt of the old order is the Governor’s Mansion, and it has seen its power wane to the point that it has lost control of the policy-making agenda that reduces it to revanchist defensive displays.

LA senators' virus fiscal bills fatally flawed

A number of fault lines have ruptured among Louisiana conservatives concerning a potential bailout of state finances as a consequence of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, reaching up to its highest elected federal officials.

Almost every state imposed some kinds of economic restrictions since the middle of March, and even those without these or those that had issued relatively relaxed and/or short-lived strictures have been affected by larger trends, such as the dramatic slowdown in air traffic, falling capital markets, and fear of virus transmission in the public. Combined, such dynamics have sapped revenue-producing mechanisms for states, costing them an as-yet untold amount in the aggregate.

This has led to a debate over whether the federal government, which already has apportioned $2 trillion to fight effects of the virus, should have its taxpayers pony up more to bail out state and local governments. And Louisiana’s two Republican senators have taken a leading role in this, to the consternation of many conservatives.

Delayed LA reopening shaped by politics

Declaring what all the data had indicated two weeks ago and what then seemed obvious to all objective observers except those under his authority, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards let more of his people go.

Monday, Edwards announced he would lift a number of restrictions encapsulated in several proclamations made by him over the past two months that brought large swaths of Louisiana’s economy to a halt. He outlined the contents of a proclamation he said he would issue later in the week, which would apply statewide at week’s end.

This came despite a pattern of data that largely replicated that of two weeks ago, when Edwards declared that because some regions in the state allegedly were not showing improved metrics the whole state had to continue to suffer under the bans. The conclusions drawn from that data as well were suspect, given that areas of the state under concern showed in terms of cases improvement and those deemed not troublesome actually showed increased incidence of cases.

Official bad budget news may prompt reform

It’s confirmed: Louisiana’s budgetary quagmire created by an economic shutdown related to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic is not as bad as expected for this fiscal year but worse for next fiscal year.

The Revenue Estimating Conference recognized a $123.1 million reduction in general fund revenues, which may be spent on a variety of things, from the last forecast of 13 months ago for this fiscal year and $867.5 million for next year. Another $239.5 million fewer is projected for dedicated funds, which go to specific purposes, for this year and $165.1 million fewer for the upcoming year.

A couple of weeks ago, I pegged the fiscal year 2020 downdraft at around $550 million, but Republican Pres. Donald Trump and a Republican-led Congress salvaged matters. Their 2017 legislation that cut federal income taxes meant Louisianans deducted lower federal tax payments against their state income taxes, resulting in higher collections than forecast even into 2019 of over $200 million. As well, the increased number unemployment insurance payments, which are taxable, with as much as 15 percent of the workforce drawing these and supercharged by the across-the-board federal $600 monthly bonus through July also will boost these collections.

Rogue GOP senator imperils LA tort reform

There’s a fox in the henhouse of Louisiana Republican effort to implement tort reform, state Sen. Louie Bernard.

Maybe a missed red flag was that Bernard, who spent most of his working life in government, won election as Natchitoches Parish clerk of court six times, up through 2011 as a Democrat. Or that as clerk of court he rubbed elbows with a lot of personal injury lawyers. Or that trial lawyer and Democrat former state Rep. Taylor Townsend, one of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ top campaign finance bundlers, gave to the limit to Bernard’s Senate campaign, as did Townsend’s uncle party powerbroker Democrat former state Sen. Don Kelly, and also their law firm as well.

The payoff began last week when Bernard cast in committee the only GOP vote for Edwards-backed insurance regulation, positioned as faux tort reform, that actually would raise the cost of Louisiana’s already ruinously-high vehicle premiums. The next day, he proved his anti-reform vote was no fluke.

Edwards loses with failed faux reform bills

A win for Louisiana automobile ratepayers turned into a loss for Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.

This week, the Senate Insurance Committee torpedoed a trio of faux tort reform bills backed by the governor, who practiced as a trial lawyer prior to election to the state’s highest office. In his campaigns , he has enjoyed massive direct and indirect support of personal injury lawyers, who use the nation’s most consumer-unfriendly laws to transfer wealth from ratepayers to themselves by foisting the second-highest average vehicle insurance rates onto drivers to fund the more and larger awards the current set of laws allows.

Louisiana Republicans have for years attempted to ameliorate this situation, and with a nearly veto-proof majority in the Legislature they have a real prospect of carrying it off this regular session. To play defense, Edwards adopted a set of bills forwarded by Democrat state Sen. Jay Luneau, a trial lawyer, as a counterweight, to posture as tort reform in competition with a slew of GOP-backed bills that address genuinely the issue.

Improve bills addressing LA spending limit

A pair of bills that address how the Louisiana Legislature deals with the state’s expenditure limit marginally improves the current method, but further alterations build a much better case for their passage into law and adoption into the Constitution.

HB 464 and HB 469 by Republican state Rep. Beau Beaullieu would amend the Constitution and amend statute to alter the formula to compute changes in the expenditure limit and set a cap at five percent increase annually, both overridden only by two-thirds votes of the legislative chambers when in session. The statute also would set the limit annually at the lower of appropriations or the previous limit with the factor applied to both. Long overdue in concept, the details need adjustment or too many opportunities exist to make the cap much less effective.

The House Appropriations Committee started that process by removing language that would allow changes in the formula and cap outside of a specific legislative instrument, leaving less room to manipulate the amount between sessions for political reasons. But further tweaking needs doing to improve the bills even more as these advance to the full House and beyond.

Edwards closes barn door two months late

It’s a classic from liberalism’s playbook: create a problem through its policy failures, then propose a harmful, drastic solution to address that. Whether consciously, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has come full circle in this way with his recent closing of the barn door two months after the horse escaped.

In this instance, the barn door was pursuing a timely test and trace strategy that would have kept blockaded a more pernicious spread of the Wuhan coronavirus – the horse. Edwards now predicates lifting or not extending further restrictions he began putting into place in the middle of March on the state’s ability to accomplish this. Despite no real evidence that certain regions of the state had experienced increased numbers of or rates of infections, last week Edwards used that excuse and what he regarded as insufficient testing capacity to continue restrictions indiscriminately across Louisiana through the middle of May.

Recently, he has said testing and tracing capacity should ramp up to make for greater ability in identifying individuals in contact with those infected and administering tests to them as well. But his newfound enthusiasm for this course seemed absent in late February, even though he had warnings and models to follow.

Democrats flail futilely against GOP majority

Let the gamesmanship begin, as legislative Democrats brought a knife to a gunfight with Republicans.

Louisiana Democrats, particularly Gov. John Bel Edwards, want to circumscribe the state Legislature in whatever way possible, because they barely muster a third of its membership. The longer they can jawbone their way into impeding the Legislature, the fewer policy defeats they will suffer.

The resistance has manifested in various forms. First, attendance for the chambers when they met, which seldom has more than a few members missing, were down considerably with just 78 of 105 in the House and the Senate had 23 of 39 (a few more would filter in, disproportionately in the Senate, as their legislative days progressed and had their names added as present). About half of Democrats played hooky as a form of protest to getting the people’s business done because they fear they won’t like the policy outputs, even as they present weak arguments to obscure that.

GOP can put Edwards on path to irrelevancy

The next month will determine whether the governorship of Democrat John Bel Edwards becomes irrelevant, or merely slides into semi-irrelevancy.

It’s over immediately for Edwards as a significant agent in Louisiana’s policy-making process if a petition to attenuate, if not overturn, his emergency proclamations regarding the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic succeeds in the next couple of days. Despite scant evidence to support his claims, last week Edwards alleged he needed to continue the series of restrictions (absent very minor modifications) imposed over the past 45 days on gatherings and business activities in the state, and issued the appropriate proclamation. This irked mainly Republican legislators, who wish to utilize state law to reverse some, if not all, of those restrictions through a majority in at least one legislative chamber.

If they pull it off, it’s open season on Edwards’ agenda from there on out. Proven impotent by majorities who demonstrated willingness to use their power, he will lose much of the informal authority derived from the office’s formal powers. For example, with this proven ability to defy what’s to stop the logrolling that produces line-item capital expenditures in budgeting from gathering majorities to hold quick veto override sessions where two-thirds votes wipe out gubernatorial line-item vetoes? Chamber GOP leaderships will tell Democrats that if they want line items in budgets, they’ll have to join in the overrides, and they’ll know they can’t depend upon Edwards to bail them out.