Groups oppose rule that would uncover true selves

If you throw water on a dog and it yelps, the water must be scalding to the dog. The interesting question, as in the case of the hue and cry emanating from leftist special interests over a proposed Louisiana Public Service Commission transparency rule, is why what seems lukewarm to everybody else feels radioactive to them.

At its next meeting, the PSC is expected to approve a rule requiring intervenors in cases to reveal in broad terms whether they receive funding from entities outside of Louisiana including foreign governments and if so the proportion. Additionally, money from foreign governments or entities that they control received over the past five years would have to be specified, including whether domestic donors to organizations received money from these sources. The rule would apply to any entity that comments on a case, all the way from climate alarmist organizations to corporations, including regulated utilities, who have a potential monetary interest in an outcome, including lobby groups.

It's not like this information is hard to come by. Corporations or cooperatives have to file tax forms that draw upon this information, and nonprofits, even those designated as charitable, also have to collect information on donors to satisfy reporting requirements such as indicating sufficiently large donations or determining whether they meet a public support standard to qualify as tax exempt.

Media outlet falls for reporting flawed narrative

If you’re a special interest group basing your policy preferences on bad science that needs donor dollars, you must scare people, and a Louisiana media source bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

This year, the group Climate Central put out a report alleging that summers over the past 35 years have warmed in almost all of 243 U.S. cities and that anthropogenic climate change is the leading driver in nearly all of those. Then the group, which prides itself on fronting the fable that anthropogenic causes necessarily have triggered more extreme weather such as rising average temperatures and packages this for local media, snookered the Louisiana Radio Network into swallowing this line for a story about summer temperatures in Louisiana, blaming supposedly higher temperatures on increases in carbon emissions that eventually will lead to doom.

Chasing the story was defensible, given alarmist reporting about temperatures. However, swallowing the bilge whole proved a lapse in judgment.

Monroe unwise to change mayoral veto standard

A frustrated set of Monroe City Council Democrats are advocating the gutting of the intent and purpose of the city charter because the system works.

Last week, the Council addressed a pair of vetoes issued by no party Mayor Friday Ellis. He struck a measure that would have established a constitutionally problematic procedure for addressing allegedly discriminatory statements and actions among city employees, prompted when his chief operating officer Morgan McCallister hit back at baseless accusations of such alleged statements. Another denied ordinance would have had the city annex a neighborhood, against the decision of the city’s zoning board, with questionable liabilities involving a principal whose other project is stalled by the city, discussion of which in front of another government body was what prompted the accusation against McCallister.

Council Democrats complained that Ellis had the power to create an extra hurdle for things he didn’t support – in other words, carping about a venerable and basic check and balance in American government. Democrat Juanita Woods said she was bringing a reworded version of the investigatory ordinance one of which was introduced later, and she insinuated racism lay behind the annexation veto, while Democrat Rodney McFarland said the stated basis of the veto was “lies” and made the similar comparison that the largely-black southside area of Monroe was getting shortchanged; all Council Democrats are black while Ellis is white.

Registrant totals show continued GOP momentum

It’s official: for the first time in around 150 years, Louisiana has more registered Republicans than Democrats in the electorate, with implications.

Official beginning-of-month statistics give Republicans an over 2,000-registrant lead over Democrats. Compared to the year’s beginning, the GOP has added over 12,000 voters while Democrats have lost over 18,000. As the electorate increased by around 6,000, this means that all other voters gaining made up the 12,000 or so difference.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the shift. Not even two decades ago when Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal became the first lifelong Republican to win the Governor’s Mansion, Democrats held a two-to-one advantage (and there were 134,000 fewer registrants then). That means the GOP has increased 52 percent since, while Democrats have dropped 41 percent. Even more dramatically, 65 years ago Democrats comprised 99 percent of the electorate.

Trump, markets hand win to LA CCS foes

They may have lost at the Louisiana Legislature, but concerned residents and carbon capture and sequestration foes picked up a win courtesy of the politician who backed the opponent of the U.S. Senate candidate they supported, pointing the way to future successes.

Today, the other shoe dropped when Air Products confirmed that it would abandon its so-called Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, after last year suspending continuation of work on it. The project would have produced “blue” hydrogen, meaning through a process that didn’t emit a lot of carbon. That carbon would have been sequestered around and under Lake Maurepas, which generated significant opposition from those near it including some local governments.

Such was the alarm, with fears that without any history of sustained large scale sequestration to draw upon and isolated past instances of crises in transportation rendered CCS too risky, that dozens of bills hit the Legislature this past session to restrict or prohibit CCS, including a few aimed specifically around Lake Maurepas. Legislative leaders and Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s tacit acceptance of CCS caused these to go nowhere.

Conservatism to see few gains in LA fall votes

In essence, Louisiana’s Senate, one Board of Elementary and Secondary Education spot, and two Public Service Commission posts have been settled, resulting with arguably little in the way of conservative advancement.

That’s not because Republicans won’t triumph in all of these contests come November. That basically was set in stone upon qualifying, with first the party primaries of May 16 and then the ensuing runoffs Jun. 27 setting the exact field. Who gained the respective nominations mattered to determine the advancement of conservatism.

For the Senate, Rep. Julia Letlow’s win over GOP Treas. John Fleming hardly will cause an ideological ripple, if actually regress slightly from conservatism. Her lifetime voting record is actually slightly more moderate than that of who she and Fleming vanquished in the primary and who she replaces, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, although both are to the political right roughly equidistant between centrism and perfect conservatism. Fleming’s record in Congress, by contrast, was much further to the right.

Despite lower turnout, Letlow forges victory

The tumultuous U.S. Senate Republican runoff between Treas. John Fleming and Rep. Julia Letlow ended not much differently than where it had started from the primary election.

After that, it looked as if Letlow could cruise to victory. Leading Fleming in percent of the vote 45-28, that left her with a sizeable advantage not needing to pick up much relative support to notch a runoff win. But a few factors should have raised alarms in her camp.

First, there would be a chunk of voters who showed up simply to boot incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy. A half-baked flipflop on the question of convicting (then former) GOP Pres. Donald Trump as well as subsequent votes backing a big-spending Democrat agenda soured especially conservative voters on him, who would make up disproportionately the party primary electorate. Further, they disproportionately likely voted for Letlow because she was seen as the more moderate of the two, but they had no real commitment to her and with a good portion of the state having nothing but the runoff on the ballot, many of these voters would disappear from the polls, giving Fleming an advantage.

Landry vetoes urge NO to get, keep it together

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry wouldn’t be much of a chief executive by Louisiana’s past standards if he wasn’t using his line-item veto clout. But this year his aim seems different.

In his first two years, Landry employed this technique of vetoing line items animated by a particular purpose. In 2024, he lopped off items that he didn’t see having a statewide purpose that went to nongovernmental organizations, and from there developed criteria by which such requests would pass his muster. In 2025, he used his pen more punitively as retribution against legislators, even of his own party, who opposed some signature pieces of his legislative agenda.

For 2026, the overall theme seemed to be to get Orleans Parish affairs in order. The regular capital outlay bill for 2024 apportioned for projects exclusively in New Orleans some $341 million (keep in mind this doesn’t have to be spent in that year or could include projects from previous years not complete, and this amount includes roads, ports, and recreation money but not for state buildings, and also accounts for NGOs and subgovernments exclusively within the parish), and its 2025 counterpart laid out $514 million (the jump mainly due to a huge appropriation to the Port of New Orleans, counted although technically in St. Bernard, as well as the airport, technically in Jefferson, counted in all years). In 2024, all three Landry line item excisions hit Orleans, for almost $2 million, and in 2025 none of those three affected Orleans.

Left fighting rearguard action against pay raises

The struggle never ends against Louisiana’s political left’s quest to expand government, as the battle over a one-time shift in education spending demonstrates.

This week, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry notched a victory towards the state providing yet another stipend for educators and support staff in public schools. It all started in 2023 when the state, rather than baking in a permanent pay hike of $2,000 for those with a teaching license and $1,000 for all other employed full-time by a local education association to the Minimum Foundation Program, instead didn’t pass a formula for the MFP but did make a one-time appropriation for stipends. The process repeated the next two years, even as last year voters turned down constitutional amendments taking money from overstuffed trust funds that would pay down unfunded accrued liabilities that could shift money to LEAs to provide these raises, and did so again this year to a similar measure.

The two rejections came from the left mobilizing voters against those items, because in essence these would devolve power away from the state in ongoing education expenses, placing more in the hands of local governments which the left sees as less reliably able to spend more money and grow government because local officials and taxpayers are more likely to hold the line on spending in many places, whereas having the money as part of the MFP put spending increases across the state on autopilot. With this electorate veto power for the moment and Landry and GOP supermajorities in the Legislature wishing to fund raises but not from the MFP that provided for less local control, Landry hit on a plan through an executive order to perform an intercessional redirection for this budget year only to provide for the hikes.

Change execution method to save public's lives

A recent series of legal rulings has left Louisiana with the need to tweak its law that ultimately saves lives.

Rulings made concerning an Alabama law that permits hypoxia as a method of carrying out capital punishment, coupled with a U.S. Supreme Court declination to review them, said that particular method of execution is unconstitutional. This would rest on Eighth Amendment grounds as cruel and unusual punishment, as in the several instances where such a method has been used, including in Louisiana where the method was added into law in 2024 and carried out last year, the inmates appeared to struggle during the process.

This represents a temporary victory for capital punishment opponents, whose strategy in the face of the constitutionality of the general concept of the death penalty is to try to declare every specific method as unconstitutional. They do this despite the fact that social science research indicates that capital punishment when consistently applied saves innocent lives – or perhaps in spite of it for ideological reasons because they know if they can disrupt the consistency then the practice becomes ineffective and then they can use that to try to attack the conceptual constitutionality argument.