Let’s break out the handkerchiefs and violins for poor old Republican state Rep. Tanner Magee, who says too many people are holding him accountable for him doing his job for him to do his job.
After the veto session concluded, Magee revealed he would not seek reelection. Magee at present serves as speaker pro tempore, the second-ranked position in the House of Representatives. Last year he ran for an appellate judgeship and lost convincingly. This resounding defeat plus that a new governor, almost certainly a Republican and likely GOP Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry who has clashed with House leaders on some issues, where governors typically have influence in legislative chamber leadership selection when of the same party, also loom as factors that may have played into Magee’s decision.
His publicly articulated reason for letting go is that, he says, “[State legislative politics is] moving more in a direction of a D.C. style and I don’t want to spend the next four years missing my kids and being away from family and not really enjoying the process.” This very much echoes a recurring theme from Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, who in his two terms typified dissent to his agenda as a divisive “Washington” politics while agreement with it denoted a desire to “unify” and make progress.
Magee also said that “Much of my class, people I came in with [beginning with the 2015 election cycle], really are not there anymore, it’s dwindling down, I miss them and I am going to miss them in the future, but it’s really changed.” Finally, he asserted as a negative that “[Special interest groups] are more interested in recording how you vote, than they are passing meaningful legislation that will help people in Louisiana, because for them politics is just a game.”
These statements rival those issued by Edwards from time to time in the sheer breadth and depth of sanctimony and hypocrisy, beginning with the fact that Magee participated in an authoritarian leadership team more interested in stamping out opposition when criticized, whether internal to the chamber party or externally from the public, than in trying to build a unifying consensus. As one example, when Republican state Rep. Danny McCormick last year resisted a bill favored by Magee and his boss GOP Speaker Clay Schexnayder and he rallied grassroots public resistance to it, Magee on the floor disparaged the citizen input as manufactured, as if opposition to the measure inherently was illegitimate and possible only as fakery of some kind.
And the wistful longing to hang with the class of 2016 legislators elected with him? Tell that to Republican state Reps. Raymond Crews and Dodie Horton, also elected then, who Schexnayder and Magee punished with removal of their capital outlay projects because they had backed a move to spend fewer dollars than leadership wished this fiscal year. Magee publicly noted that if they weren’t going to want to spend more collectively on capital outlay, then their constituents could stand losing projects.
It's all right if you’re in leadership to crack the whip to encourage discipline. But then don’t go around saying you don’t endorse “D.C. style” politics because in exerting power this way you’re being as confrontational as what happens in Washington, or in any other state capitol for that matter.
But his most offensive remarks concern publicizing his voting record, which he sees as antithetical to “meaningful” legislation, as if the two can’t coexist. Publicizing records is essential to democratic functioning as a vital accountability linkage, facilitating the ability of voters to judge whether their representatives satisfactorily express their interests. When a particular viewpoint wins an argument, it does so through convincing majorities of its wisdom who then pass that along to their representatives, according to democratic theory. Unless that preferred policy seems manifestly unwise, whereupon the legislator uses his judgment potentially to act contrary to it, representatives act accordingly in line with the public to produce “meaningful legislation.” This can’t happen without information about representatives’ actions being publicized.
Except that to him Magee indicates exposure of records is a bad thing, This implies he views the task of publicizing, engaged in by an interested public, as a hindrance to good policy-making, as if he and his ilk are the only ones who truly understand what’s best for the people and if they could operate without their votes disseminated to a wider audience that might disagree, which apparently threatens their ability to produce good policy if not their very legislative tenures, then things would be better.
The breath-taking arrogance and elitism of this claim stands out. Such a statement shows Magee very much believes in old-style Louisiana politics, where you act like a good old boy around your constituents, have them vote for you because they think you’re a good guy and that you “care” (regular church attendance and social conservatism are plusses), and then once elected you have license to engage in all sorts of wasteful spending and unneeded government control over their lives. Just as long as the people don’t know what you’re doing, you can do what you think is best, and you think you know what is best for them even if they disagree on these accounts.
In other words, beleaguered Magee simply doesn’t like it when he gets criticism for stupid votes. By the Louisiana Legislature Log voting scorecard, he hasn’t done badly in the three years previous to this, averaging over 83, or a bit below the House GOP average (higher scores mean more conservative/reform voting, which is what the second-ranked leader of House Republicans ought to aspire to). But he made stupid vote choices from time to time, most recently preventing successful veto overrides of HB 81 and HB 466, both of which could have used his affirmative vote (which almost every member of his party gave) s these failed by close margins – important bills for supporting parental rights as previously explained.
And in doing that to Magee, forcing him to wield power with people looking over his shoulder and telling him and the world when he made what they explain are mistakes – where to him those actions of his promoted “meaningful” policy and prevented the opposite because of the monopoly of wisdom he dreams that he has – is no fun anymore, the inability to do whatever he wants without consequences of criticism or electoral survival. It’s most decidedly not a game to them, because they have to live with the consequences of his mistakes, magnified by his leadership position.
Maybe whiny Magee is a great guy, but by his statements he simply isn’t suitable to serve in any elective office. You don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen; nobody is forcing you to wield power. Magee is doing so, to which people who found his abilities and commitment insufficient to improve the dismal governance those like him have foisted on the state decade after decade advise: not to let the door hit him on the way out.
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