LA politicians lead against EPA dystopian power grab

It’s good to see that in defending against the war the Environmental Protection Agency has declared on private enterprise that several Louisiana federal officeholders are providing leadership crucial to turning back the assault on rationality.

Reps. Steve Scalise, John Fleming, Bill Cassidy, and Charles Boustany, all Republicans and all but Scalise physicians, joined other House members in adding their voices to those of several senators three months ago, including fellow Louisianans David Vitter and Mary Landrieu, in protesting new EPA ozone attainment standards. The letter transmitted complained about how the move to change standards subverts the Clean Air Act which by law is to be reviewed no sooner than every five years. That was last done in 2008 and new standards proposed.

But not all of the review was implemented because activists who wanted an even lower standard, which was supposed to have gone from 84 to 75 parts per billion, wanting a level according to studies done commissioned by the EPA which asked for a standard of 70 or lower even though questionable science was involved in coming up with that number and the assumptions from it have strayed even further from reality since. As such, they claim they can introduce new standards now because of non-implementation, even though the law does not consider non-implementation as a failure to follow the revision timetable.

Thus, if any final rules are issued, they would be illegal and immediately challenged in court. This explains in part why the EPA has missed two dates announced as to the issuance of the final rules, because as a politicized agency it pays close attention to the political environment which is becoming increasingly unfavorable for this plan as the 2010 midterm elections demonstrated.

EPA’s increased politicization has led to its recent unprecedented amount of regulatory activity as the Pres. Barack Obama Administration tries to do by fiat what it could not do through representative democratic processes. Unneeded regulation fits the strategy of bringing more under the control of government and allowing those who desire to exercise power and to obtain privilege through it, such as those in the environmental movement who rely upon the questionable data to assert the newest standards are needed for health reason, to achieve them.

Louisiana has been a leader in fighting against these attempts utilizing the EPA, about a year ago joining other states in trying to block related, unconstitutional measures. As well it should – at almost a million jobs, the unnecessary new standards would make Louisiana the third-largest loser of them of all the states and the largest per capita.

Both state and federal policy-makers in Louisiana have shown great responsibility in opposing this road to serfdom, and are to be commended as such. Let’s hope the efforts of theirs and others pay off with the EPA backing down or being forced by Congress to move away from its dystopian vision.

Thanksgiving Day, 2010

This column publishes usually every Sunday through Thursday after noon (sometimes even before; maybe even after sundown on busy days) U.S. Central Time except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Independence Day or Christmas or New Year's when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, there are six of these: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas.

With Thursday, Nov. 25 being Thanksgiving Day, I invite you to explore the link above.

Special election calls to reveal redistricting strategies

Right after the disastrous national and statewide results came in for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, state Rep. Walker Hines became the first of them to jump ship as he angled for future political ambitions outside as well as security for his reelection. Next, state Sen. John Alario said he was almost certain to join the GOP, without revealing it was for future Senate ambitions. Hines’ leap gave the Republicans a plurality in the House, while if Alario follows through he’ll cause the Democrats’ majority to fall to four seats.

That may become three in short order. The Senate’s only independent, who himself was a Democrat a year ago, Troy Hebert, is set to become the commissioner of the state’s Alcohol and Tobacco Control Board. Hebert, who in his initial run for the Senate in 2007 fought off a very spirited challenge from Republican soon-to-be Rep. Jeff Landry, announced his retirement after this term at the end of the last session. His 22^nd District has been trending more conservatively and redistricting to take place within months could make it more so for the fall elections.

Meanwhile, the GOP is extremely unlikely to pick up any more advantage with the departure of state Rep. Cedric Richmond at the beginning of the year from his office so that the Democrat can take a seat like Landry in the U.S. House of Representatives. But politics may play a role in how quickly this seat gets filled and connect it to Hebert’s.

The normal earliest election dates by calendar happenstance in 2011 are both in April. However, any special session for redistricting or anything else would be at least a couple of months earlier, so, in Richmond’s case, the presiding officer of his body, Republican Speaker Jim Tucker, could call for one before those dates. A practical reason not to would be to save the state money and hassle in conducting an election on an unscheduled date in only a handful of precincts but requiring state elections officials to be on duty.

Tucker may see an advantage to hold off, depriving Democrats of a vote during the redistricting session. However, Republicans and black Democrats will have a community of interests in redistricting to set aside as many districts with majorities of Republicans or blacks as possible, so having another black Democrat vote (as almost certainly Richmond’s successor will be) might be something Tucker wants.

Simultaneously, and it depends upon how quickly Hebert wants to start his new job (he may take his position immediately through interim appointment since the Senate which needs to confirm him will not be in session, although it would have to confirm him by the end of the 2011 regular session), Democrat state Sen. Pres. Joel Chaisson has the call on filling Hebert’s slot and he may not be as eager to do so prior to the regular election date, if Hebert resigns fairly quickly, because it could well end up putting a Republican in that place. This would further endanger the electability of white Democrats in the Senate, as five of six term-limited senators are white Democrats all from more conservative areas of the state, and the results of the redistricting process could make the task of Democrats holding on to the Senate even more difficult. Chaisson could see Hebert’s successor as an important piece in creating the conditions to produce a Republican majority in the special session.

Matters might get very interesting if Tucker feels like trying to link the two. With the only real disincentive for him to call an unscheduled election being saving the state money, by doing so he may pressure Chaisson into joining him by arguing why wait on giving District 22 voters representation when there’s already another election going on? After all, state election officials will already have to be on hand and adding a Senate race will probably only cost maybe $20,000 more. He further could turn up the heat by rallying his black Democrat colleagues in the House to get their Senate co-partisan co-ethnics to lean on Chaisson as part of a deal to have the special House election.

Thus, the scheduling of these elections will provide clues to observers about the internal political dynamics at play in this very interesting upcoming year of legislative electoral politics.

If Oregon can, why not privatize LSU Baton Rouge?

Maybe it’s not possible, but the option should be considered: if the University of Oregon can do try to do it, why can’t Louisiana State University Baton Rouge?

That is essentially privatizing its operating functions. UO’s president Richard Lariviere has proposed to state government that it only continue to fund capital improvements to the Eugene campus for 30 years, and that tuition and endowments would cover other expenses. Eventually, with projected growth rates, all expenses could be covered without any state subsidy although the state still would govern the institution.

This is Lariviere’s attempt to smooth the cyclical nature that Oregon, like Louisiana, faces in its higher education funding, where some times things are flush, and other times lean. It’s bold reform that stands in stark contrast to the tinkering at the margins for which Louisiana’s elected officials and higher education administrators have settled.

Blue Dogs out because they voted as fiscal liberals

One of the consequences of the 2010 midterm elections was the shattering of the “Blue Dog” myth – unless you’re one of the champions of this fictitious cause who will maintain that these House Democrats are significantly different than the liberal leadership of House Democrats that pulled the party to follow Pres. Barack Obama into electoral disaster.

These presumed “moderate” Democrats, many but not all from the South, above all were supposed to be fiscal conservatives. Elected from conservative-leaning districts, they claimed they would have a moderating effect on Democrats, justifying their elections to represent their districts – a narrative many in the media swallowed uncritically (as the linked article above shows).

In fact, as more prescient observers have noted, the Blue Dogs in reality were lap dogs to the House liberals. When in the minority, they did vote more fiscally conservatively than did the rest of their party. But since then, on all of the major budget-busting issues of the past four years of Democrat control of the House, majorities, mostly large, of Blue Dogs voted for increased spending. You name it, they went for it – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the spending package early in Obama’s term, cash-for-clunkers, Obama's debt-tripling 2010 budget, the auto bailout, and for the federal takeover of health care.

In all, the Lap Dogs voted 80 percent of the time with liberal Democrats on fiscal issues. This does not include the 86 percent of the time they supported suspensions of what they crowed as their biggest achievement in pulling their party closer to the center, “pay-as-you-go” rules that mandated whenever spending was increased in one area, it had to be offset with a cut in another, making the whole enterprise a sham.

So when Louisiana’s outgoing Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon laments about the pasting Lap Dogs took in the midterm elections, losing over half their members (he being one of them, the only one not to lose reelection but because he opted to tilt spectacularly unsuccessfully for Sen. David Vitter’s seat), asserting they somehow kept his party’s leadership honest, it’s just another con job in an attempt to revise history. Melancon, once a leader of the coalition, is a poster child of the scam: his National Taxpayer Union grades in his five rated years in office were 3 D’s and 2 F’s.

Their record shows the whole movement became a tactic to try to fool voters into thinking they were electing representatives who were one thing on the campaign trail then when in office they were another. The story that some try to circulate that the Lap Dogs got crucified on the campaign trail for the sins of the liberal party leadership doesn’t jive with what their constituents understood: they were not the fiscal conservatives they proclaimed themselves to be, their votes were crucial to passing a lot of bad legislation, and they deserved punishment for selling out those they represented. Let the Blue Dog myth die its overdue, deserved death to which voters will break out in song.

Any legislative revolt needs constructive purpose

Does it appear that the Louisiana Legislature is growing a spine? That’s probably is not the best interpretation of the recent Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget’s mini-revolt against the Gov. Bobby Jindal on the question of the spending of educational dollars from the federal government.

Three months ago, the Democrat-controlled federal government decided to spend some more money the country didn’t have on the states in a last-ditch bid to buy and activate support from some traditional constituencies, including teachers’ unions as almost half of the appropriations went an Education Jobs Fund to which states could apply to retain educators’ jobs. Louisiana applied and got $147 million.

After an interval during which local school districts were led to believe the money would arrive for them this fiscal year, the Jindal Administration decided to save the money for higher education for next year, by a complex shuffling of money from fund to fund. Because of the previous acceptance of federal funds for higher education, which apparently will not be available for this upcoming fiscal year, $68 million had to be there for higher education to fulfill requirements for use of the money already spent or intended to be spent. The remainder the Jindal Administration hoped to spend on higher education next year.

But for the fund shunting to occur and the money added to this year’s budget, this appropriations change had to be approved, as the entire Legislature is not in session, by its Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget, a panel composed of members of each chamber’s money committees plus the chairmen of another important committee from each, which routinely accepts these changes. Composed as such, currently it is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, given the chambers’ partisan balances.

So it wouldn’t take much for frustrated Democrats on the committee to relish a chance to stick it to Jindal. Several openly loath his attempts (with partial success) to hold down spending that contradicts their big government impulses, and especially resent his curtailing one of their main sources of electoral leverage, members’ amendments, with his line item veto power and its threatened use. Combine them with a few Republican members friendly with the traditional special interests that run elementary and secondary education in the state (some with backgrounds in it), and there were more than enough votes there to use only the $68 million for higher education next year, and to pump the other $79 million into state schools now.

However, likely this is not a novel assertion of legislative power; rather, it’s a one-off episode. This was a very narrowly-defined issue with plenty of time to investigate the public policy ramifications, among themselves and in public. The coming situation where thousands of line items and so many unknowns about hundreds of revenues and expenditure sources get dumped like a waterfall on legislators over just a few weeks always brings the advantage to the governor who has the staff to understand much better options and implications, as well as the veto power on which the Legislature never has used its override ability on any appropriation.

Yet the incident might convolute the process negatively. Jindal cannot act petulantly by using the incident as an excuse not to provide the leadership only available from his office in this time of budgeting stress in order to put the onus on the Legislature. For their part, legislators cannot see this as an encouragement to sabotage for political purposes only leadership emanating from Jindal, especially tempting as this is an election year; opposition should come only when it is constructive and assists in hammering out a budget without bad consequences in a period of declining revenue. Failure to operate in the proper spirit is going to make for a bad situation all around.

Unruly choir demands bold Jindal leadership on budget

Three political forces continue to move towards digging Louisiana out of a tremendous projected budget hole for next fiscal year. The question is, whether they will be able to go far enough, fast enough to prevent unnecessarily harsh spending cuts.

There’s the one majoritarian branch which has shown the greatest progress but at a slow rate. While Gov. Bobby Jindal’s rhetoric sometimes has exceeded results to date, slowly but surely the cautious, incremental reform approach of his administration grinds it way to better prioritized and more efficient state spending. Big moves have been few, yet the little ones are starting to add up. But this approach unlikely to be enough in time to address this dilemma.

Then there’s the other majoritarian branch that makes grand gestures but ends up with not much to show for them, the Legislature. Last year, it convened the Commission for Streamlining Government and its companion the Post-Secondary Education Review Commission which made suggestions from incremental to grand to make state spending more efficient. The Jindal Administration shot layups on the smaller stuff but only mildly pushed for the bigger and the Legislature, lacking any other imperative, whiffed on those. Whether the greater imperative of the crisis will be enough for more sweeping measures this year is another matter.

Cao's contests affect careers of LaFonta, Hines

The inability of Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao to secure recent reelection for his federal office has produced interesting political consequences regarding different state offices and their holders.

While Cao’s defeat was expected, the size by which he lost to state Rep. Cedric Richmond was not, despite spending huge sums to hold onto his seat in an uphill battle. Demographics worked heavily against Cao, who two years ago found the right combination of circumstances to be elected as a Republican in a majority black and Democrat district.

But Cao’s conduct in office and reputation for honesty and weighing ethics heavily in his decisions was the former seminarian’s strong suit, and he may have found the office that would emphasize most those qualities as he left the door open for a run for Louisiana Secretary of State, to be occupied on an interim basis by former state Sen. Tom Schedler when his boss Jay Dardenne becomes lieutenant governor next week. A significant portion of the job deals with elections and their integrity, and integrity is Cao’s strong suit.

Cao’s leaving the door open for this possibility should not have been received well by state Rep. Walker Hines, who last week announced a party switch to the GOP and possible pursuit of the same job. He has established a centrist voting record largely made that way by enthusiastic reform efforts. Schedler, who has registered his intention for the job and is anticipated to be supported by many establishment Republican activists, would be expected to be backed by long-standing conservative forces so Hines’ strategy may have been to come in front the center, stressing his reform credentials.

However, were Cao to enter the contest not only could he stress those same credentials, but his reputation for integrity, greater name recognition, and congressional experience would trump Hines’ qualities. He also has demonstrated the great fundraising prowess necessary to run successfully statewide while Hines has not (although Cao cannot use any leftover funds from his federal campaign). This may make any such campaign by Hines stillborn from the start.

In addition, Cao’s defeat may have been the final straw to end, at least for now, the elective career of state Rep. Juan LaFonta, whom Richmond convincingly defeated in the Democrat primary. LaFonta, first elected in a special contest five years ago, proclaimed that he would not run for reelection, in essence arguing the job wasn’t any fun any more if it ever had been.

LaFonta called the atmosphere of the Legislature “vindictive,” said over the past few years (meaning about all the time he was in it) it frustrated him, and, in particular, Gov. Bobby Jindal was really spoiling the party by threatening to under the penalty of their withdrawal or actually vetoing LaFonta’s slush fund line item appropriations. Confirming that he had no stomach to fight for and/or no confidence in his own leadership qualities to pursue his agenda, he remarked, “To beat Bobby Jindal it takes ... the people of this state to really wake up and put their foot down. To be vocal and active and organized and I just have not seen that.”

LaFonta insists he had made up his mind on this before Richmond’s shellacking of him. Translation: LaFonta was putting up with his fruitless legislative position only so long as it took him to use it to ascend to higher office. But now that Richmond has got it and the district’s demographics and history (of long tenures once elected) on his side, he doesn’t want to play any more and is going to go home.

Given a voting record favoring higher taxes, more spending, bigger government, and greater regulation by it, the citizenry should congratulate LaFonta on his exit from elective office, if not ask, since he seems set on this, for his immediate resignation.

LA's Medicaid proposal superior to providers' preference

As Louisiana tries to get a handle on its biggest ticket item, health care spending on the poor and disabled, it’s imperative that it get it right which means making sure taxpayers and patients’ needs are put before those of managing care, whether they be insurers or providers.

In the past few years, accelerated under Gov. Bobby Jindal’s term, the state has sought to move away from the uncoordinated system that relies on individual providers and the charity hospital system to provide this care. It has resulted in user overutilization often of the least efficient manner of service provision, while users have neglected much more efficient practices such as preventive care.

For lack of a better term, recent reform has gone in the direction of “Florida Plan,” which encourages competition among private providers managed by insurers (either third-party or extensions of providers). The state pays the manager the premium for the Medicaid enrollee which then reimburses the provider. Different plans would offer different mixes of benefits.

Changing wind blowing Alario to new, expedient label

Another day, another announcement for all intents and purposes that a Louisiana Democrat lawmaker is going to switch to the Republican Party. But this one smacks even more of seeking electoral advantage.

The proclamation by grizzled Legislature veteran state Sen. John Alario that he was almost certain to change registration before the year’s end seems even more expedient than the recent declaration by state Rep. Walker Hines that he was doing the same now. At least in Hines’ case his three-year career voting record seemed more amenable to a GOP affiliation all along, so the expediency comes from his having had to gain his election in a fairly Democrat-heavy, majority-black district. Having secured that election as a Democrat, his present defection is a signal to the GOP to help him out in redistricting and may help his chances in case he makes a run for Secretary of State next year.

But Alario’s move would come for almost the opposite reason. Until recently, he never has shown much affinity for a conservative/reform agenda, not the least because he served as House Speaker and as a committee leader in periods where the governors and Legislatures were comfortable with tax increases and big spending. His voting record, as by the Louisiana Legislature Log’s index, over the past seven years averaged about 49, where 100 is the maximum support in voting for conservative or reform positions on legislation.

However, this centrist score is skewed by his activities since entering the Senate after being term-limited in the House at the end of 2007. His last term there he averaged under 35, barely above the Democrat average of about 32 and well under the House overall average of around 46. Yet he seemed a changed man in the Senate, averaging about 67 in those three years with a stunning 90 in 2010.

It’s not that his district is pushing him in this direction; although it has been trending more conservatively, its large majority of Democrats and one-quarter black minority does not mean he could not get reelected as a Democrat. Unlike Hines’ case, redistricting really does not threaten dismembering his district, packing it with enough blacks to invite a challenge from a black Democrat, or with more Republicans to make that party able to knock him off: the Louisiana Family Forum plan, for example, adds some blacks but leaves it clearly with a white Democrat majority.

Rather, Alario, as he has done his entire career, is going whichever way the wind blows. When populist Democrats and/or Republicans-in-name-only called the shots in the Governor’s Mansion and Capitol, he was out in front of that as one of the biggest yes-men and facilitators of their tax-and-spend, grow government agenda. Times are different now, with conservative Republicans having captured the fourth floor, tightening their grip on the House, and may well gain a Senate majority for the first time since Reconstruction in the Senate by this time next year.

Alario acts however he needs to try to retain influence with whichever faction wields power. While he mouths the expected “Democrats have left me” line to explain it, any switch that does occur must be evaluated in light of this fact.