Louisiana legislators seem poised to fix a curiously known omission that promises a boost to state political parties.
Additionally, it made presidential nominations and political party parish and state governance body elections also subject to this option. This means that parties can allow only those registered with the party to vote in these primaries. Louisiana would join eight other states with this arrangement.
The Louisiana Department of Education, already with its foot on the pedal, just put it to the metal.
Last week, the state’s elementary and secondary education delivery stayed on a roll, it was announced. Using the latest national test data and other sources, a consortium of higher education research arms declared that, after previously ranking first among states in reading growth and second in math growth from 2019 to 2024, Louisiana once again earned the top national ranking for growth from 2022 to 2025. Specifically, it is the only state in the nation to surpass 2019 pre-pandemic achievement levels in both reading and math as the only state to exceed those levels in reading and one of only two states nationally to do so in math.
The formula hasn’t changed that has led to this success: a back-to-basics emphasis, plus targeted interventions to shore up areas of weakness, with a reduction of regulations and procedures that interfere with teaching and pursuing proactive initiatives. This week, a lot of that came together in a new development.
Reform-minded Republicans thought attaching beneficial constitutional amendments to a red-hot Republican Senate primary election this year would push these items to victory after some similar measures met with defeat last year. But the left’s heckler’s veto won out.
For the spring of 2025, the Republican-led legislature forwarded four items to voters – the first springtime election for amendments in well over three decades. The only measures on the ballot in many parts of the state, in others sharing only with local races and items, they met with big defeats.
That happened for two reasons. First, augmented with loads of money coming from outside the state in opposition from the political left – which didn’t want to see fiscal reform that would reduce the size of government as well as blanching at criminal justice reform based on tougher measures – the left skillfully found fissures, creating mountains out of molehills, among conservatives to peel some support from them. Second, in recent years conservatives had larger turnouts in higher-stimulus elections, and for most of the state this was about as low-stimulus an election as you could get.
Conservatives had as many reasons to register disappointment as satisfaction at the results of May 16 elections.
Sure, they might be pleased at the Republican Senate semi-closed primary election outcomes. That saw incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy draw just a quarter of the partisan electorate’s vote, an abysmal showing that had him become the first reigning senator knocked out in a party primary in 14 years.
This would boost conservatives’ morale because the result eliminated an unreliable, inconsistent conservative. Intellectually lazy analysis attributes Cassidy’s failure to make the Jun. 27 runoff solely to his vote to convict GOP Pres. Donald Trump on specious impeachment charges just after Trump left office in 2021, causing a backlash among Republican voters.
Pick your nastiness colloquialism: thumbed its nose, poked them in the eye, gave them the Bronx salute, held up its index, middle, and ring finger and told then to read between the lines, lifted its hind leg, whatever, but the Bossier Parish Police Jury just did that to parish residents.
Prior to its meeting last week, the Jury, for the first time in over two years, met as the parish’s Library Board of Control. This February, it had made “appointments” to it by making as members all 12 jurors, as well as assigned as officers those positions as held on the Jury.
The matters attended at the meeting were prosaic, but the mere fact of having the meeting in this fashion was not. For one thing, the Jury didn’t have the legal authority to appoint a couple of its members to the Board because terms of previous appointees had yet to expire nor had they been removed in a public vote. More seriously, all 12 couldn’t serve because state law limits voting membership to seven at most (with nonvoting status set aside for the Jury president). Because of these inherent illegalities, any action taken (which if citizens missed the Zoom-transmitted meeting only will have the minutes, which probably will not be posted on the Internet, available for a description of those actions) therefore is legally challengeable and likely would be undone if taken to court.
Louisiana seems prepared to forgo an opportunity to use better taxpayer dollars and to reduce privileging special interests.
Increasingly, states are reeling in the ability of public unions to squeeze the citizenry and leverage those resources to increase their political power. A number recently have passed legislation to prohibit deducting dues automatically for employees, whether union members, within the bargaining unit, giving paid time off to perform union business, preventing withholding dues – locals can deduct from non-members in many states unless they specifically designate disallow that outside of infrequent windows – and to require more than a small portion of the bargaining unit to specifically approve of recertification of certification is revoked.
But Louisiana remains stuck in the past. SB 312 by Republican state Sen. Kirk Talbot, addressing parish (except public safety personnel) and school district employees, sought to prohibit collected dues from being used for political purposes, to have salary deductions renewed automatically, and to transfer government administrative costs to the union. All of these were amended out.
Those angry from having had their privilege disappear who insist on keeping themselves locked in the past will prove a mere distraction to the big question those who wish to progress to the future will have to answer in Louisiana getting right constitutionally with its congressional districts.
Last week, the Senate Governmental and Affairs Committee started vetting various bills to accomplish this, with resolution anticipated this week. This has become necessary after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the current map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because no compelling reason – that is, intended discrimination merely because of race – existed for race to be the primary element in its drawing.
This quest has upset black Democrats in particular, the most spleen-venting of the bunch being state Sen. Gary Carter. He caterwauled bitterly in his questions as a committee member, for the obvious reason that black Democrats no longer could use race as a fig leaf to draw districts favoring them but also because his uncle, Democrat Rep. Troy Carter, could have an even money chance of losing his seat with a map that had one or no majority-minority districts planned out, as opposed to the current two.
A bill heading to the finish line in the Louisiana Legislature that vetoes a heckler’s veto not only will protect law enforcement officers from abuse but also will increase the safety of the abusers.
HB 132 by Republican state Rep. Brian Glorioso would add a third part to the state’s definition of battery, joining using intentional force on another and throwing a poison or noxious liquid on another: directing sound at an injurious volume reasonably knowing that at somebody else. It only has to garner a favorable Senate vote to head to GOP Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk.
Free expression should have maximum latitude, when possible, but the judiciary recognizes limits to this First Amendment right. Colloquially called “time, place, and manner” restrictions, as long as a government restriction is content neutral, narrowly-tailored serving a significant government interest, and permits alternative communication channels, courts don’t perceive this as a constitutional violation.
The U.S. Senate Republican primary debate was informative, combative if cordial, and displayed how the candidates tried to play to their strengths.
The debate, sponsored by the Moon Griffon Show, featured only Treas. John Fleming and Rep. Julia Letlow. Incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, despite numerous invitations, didn’t attend.
The math, as most recently evidenced by the latest independent poll, has these two running neck-and-neck with Cassidy several points back. Polling suggests that if Cassidy were to make the inevitable runoff he would lose decisively to either, so it was in the interests of both candidates to attack each other in the hopes Cassidy could crest over the opponent.
It’s been over two years, but Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s reapportionment gamble looks to be paying off, bigger and bigger and wider and wider.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the 2024 congressional map drawn in a special session at the very start of Landry’s term unconstitutionally used race to create two majority-minority districts out of the state’s allotted six. The decision placed guardrails on the use of race, reaffirming that it does not have preferential treatment over other traditional principles of reapportionment in the absence of observable intent of racial animus in mapping.
That 2024 map came after a district court voided a 2022 map with only one M/M district without a trial on the merits, saying it violated the law. The Court enjoined any further action pending an Alabama case it resolved in 2023 that largely but not directly tracked the Louisiana case that also addressed the Voting Rights Act which ruled against the existing map, although the resulting judicially-drawn map eschewed doubling M/M districts to two and instead created two opportunity districts (where blacks had a plurality but not majority).
