Ailing municipalities in Louisiana have caught
the eye of the Legislative Auditor, but need to grab greater attention from policy-makers.
Recently, the Auditor began publicizing a list
of 18 such cities, towns, and villages. It doesn’t include a half-dozen
that already have had or will have the state take over their functions precisely
because of an inability to pay bills or to provide services. This posting reflects
the increasing
number of entities that have run into trouble.
While municipalities that make the unfortunate
grade fell prey to a number of factors that put them in fiscal peril, almost
all of these are self-inflicted. The only one that isn’t, more than trivial depopulation,
among these two dozen applies in only half of the cases.
Even as Louisiana’s 2019 state elections fade
temporally, imprecise analysis continues to obscure its larger electoral
patterns and consequences.
A previous post
dispensed with the notion that Louisiana followed a supposed national trend of
suburbs indiscriminately lending support to Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’
narrow reelection. That view presupposed that some suburbanites converted their
voting preferences.
However, as previously noted, whatever new support
Edwards picked up came disproportionately from the changing demographic
composition of some state suburbs, almost exclusively Jefferson Parish.
Compared to other less mature suburb parishes, Jefferson had substantially higher minority population while its median household income tracked
more to the state average than the higher number seen in most other suburban
parishes.
The slim hopes of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards to
advance his agenda in a second term became even more microscopic if one media
outlet’s story
is accurate.
The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that
enough votes have lined up behind Louisiana state Sen. Page Cortez to make him Senate president
for the next four years. No other independent source has confirmed this yet,
nor has Cortez himself.
If this comes to fruition, it will mark the first
instance in decades of the chamber electing its leader without gubernatorial
interference. It did, midway through Republican former Gov. Buddy
Roemer’s term, replace Roemer’s backed leader with one of its own choosing supported
by Democrat former Gov. Edwin
Edwards who would defeat Roemer two years later.
So, did Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy finally
step off the ledge this time?
Last
week, Kennedy provoked commentary on two national media appearances. In the
first, he said that the Ukraine may have sponsored hacking of former Sec. of
State Hillary Clinton campaign computers. In the second, he said he had
misunderstood the question to be one of general election interference, that he
never meant to say Ukraine backed hacking, and that he would stand by a characterization
that the Ukraine did try to interfere in that 2016 election.
This clarification brought partisan attacks from
the media, both nationally and in the state, long on assertion but short on
factual basis. In essence, meticulously compiled investigative journalism
reports which never have been refuted (although recently one of the original reporting
media outlet tried to downplay the information by relying
heavily on semantics) support Kennedy’s stance.
Welcome to the big time, Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy, and
all the liberal media slings and arrows that come with that.
Those who have followed Louisiana politics for the
past two decades know Kennedy as an entertaining quote machine about a range of
subjects (some not always directly connected to the policy aspects of his job)
that resonated well with the state’s public. In part because of that, he could
have sent Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
back to Tangipahoa Parish courthouse politicking with ease in this fall’s
elections.
But in his two years in Washington, the national media
have picked up on his quotability and he receives attention out of proportion
to his status as a very junior senator. Probably no freshman garners as much airtime
on national networks as does he, with the possible exception of Missouri’s
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
Paint political phenomena with too broad of a brush
and your risk erroneous analysis, which some observers did regarding Louisiana’s
2019 gubernatorial election.
In the wake of incumbent Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards narrow
win over Republican Eddie Rispone, some analysts identified voting patterns in
suburbs as a key. Rispone easily dispatched Edwards in rural parishes in winning
40 of the state’s 64 parishes, while Edwards countered with an overwhelming victory
in Orleans (New Orleans) and comfortable wins in East Baton Rouge (Baton Rouge)
and Caddo (Shreveport).
Given that Edwards outlasted Rispone by only around
40,000 votes, it might appear that “suburbs” made the difference. Jefferson
Parish, just west of Orleans, gave four-sevenths of its vote to Edwards, and in
East Baton Rouge, where about half the population doesn’t live in the city, Edwards
took two-thirds of those ballots.
In two years’ time will occur perhaps the most
lasting single consequence of Louisiana’s 2019 state elections, reapportionment.
By the end of 2021,
the state must have districts drawn representing Congress, both chambers of the
Legislature, the Supreme Court and courts of appeals, the Board of Elementary
and Secondary Education, and the Public Service Commission, using the 2020
census data released at the end of that year. In all likelihood, this will
occur by special session sometime in 2021.
Redrawing districts happens through the regular legislative
process: a bill which must reach majority votes in each legislative chamber and
gain gubernatorial assent defines these boundaries for each kind of government
institution. If vetoed, two-thirds majorities override.
