Between The Lines

Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely. This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

2.6.16

TOPS changes this session bring little benefit

Perhaps time constraints made it necessary, but legal changes being made to the Taylor Opportunity Program for Scholars provide next to no resolution to its neither fish-nor-fowl status that promotes inefficiency and waste that beg for follow-up.

As the Louisiana Legislature’s regular session wraps up, three bills have or look likely to become law altering the nature of TOPS, which pays for tuition at Louisiana institutions of higher education for at least below-average scorers on standardized tests with at least decent high school marks having taken a certain core of courses. Together, these changes will delink tuition rates with payouts beginning next year unless the Legislature specifically authorizes full tuition coverage in the future, create higher standards to receive the highest awards that pay a few hundred dollars above tuition, and when not fully appropriated to fund all awards to give out partial awards to all qualifiers.

The last does nothing positive for the program except curtail waste. As typically over 40 percent in a cohort before graduating end up losing their awards – recipients must take at least 12 hours a semester, maintain a grade point average not much above the requirement to stay a student in good standing, and have only eight regular semesters of funding – most of this failure occurs in the lowest achievement bracket. Although detailed records remain unpublicized, from the public reports required by law the average winner scored a 24 on the American College Test while the average score of those with cancelled awards was under 23. So, the fewer dollars going into a wasteful program, the fewer that get wasted.

LA Democrats fall short on constitutional knowledge

Ignorance about founding documents among the Louisiana House of Representatives’ Democrats extends beyond state Reps. Barbara Norton and Walt Leger into unhinged fear, as a recent debate on amending the Constitution shows.

Norton, and to a lesser extent Leger, in debate about a bill that would require elementary schoolchildren to have knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, showed they lacked a basic understanding of the parchment’s content and context as the foundation of the Constitution. But when debating the merits of SCR 52 by Republican state Sen. Dan Claitor, which would have the state authorize a constitutional convention to consider limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, imposing fiscal restraints upon its activities, and limiting the terms of office that may be served by its officials and by members of Congress, other Democrats also began skidding off the rails.

Democrat state Rep. Mike Danahay stayed more on the tracks than others with a proposed amendment to disallow the convention from considering changes to the Bill of Rights, or the first ten amendments (practically speaking, the first eight). But as floor manager Republican state Rep. Ray Garofalo pointed out, to amend the version Claitor presented would make it incongruent with calls from several other states, and for states to initiate a convention on the three items alone the resolution from each needed essentially identical wordings. Thus, Danahay’s amendment, even as on the surface it appeared to help the cause, actually served as a poison pill and the body rightly rejected it.

Declaration knowledge lacking by LA lawmaker

It’s a good thing requirements to take office as a Louisiana legislator do not include even a cursory knowledge of America’s founding as a sovereign state, for state Rep. Barbara Norton surely would have failed any such exam.

Just when you thought Norton had reached a new low in discharging the duties of her position – when she said fellow legislators who opposed her bill to force theaters to use metal detectors on patrons would aid and abet in the killing of children – she suggested that not only children should not consider learning the Declaration of Independence useful but that the document deserved repudiation. HB 1035 by state Rep. Valarie Hodges mandated the teaching of the document in schools.

In her typical inarticulate way, Norton appears to have indicated that because at the signing of the Declaration slavery existed, the bill made an “unfair” request of schoolchildren. Further, she called the Declaration a fraud, prompting Hodges to ask whether Norton believed, using the Declaration’s phrasing, that all men were created equal. She bizarrely mentioned that Dr. Martin Luther King had yet to be born in 1776, and that because many blacks did not get treated equally then, they could not be created equally, seeming to say in order for establishment of equal rights King needed to show up. Thus, the Declaration was a lie unworthy of study.

Memorial Day, 2016

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) 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 Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Easter Sunday, Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Monday, May 25 being Memorial Day, I invite you to explore this link.

29.5.16

The Advocate column, May 29, 2016

Leaders seem hypocritical on outrage over Havard's "joke" stripper amendment
http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/our_views/article_cb61ddd6-f093-5592-a488-c6dc9563c756.html

Links:
http://theadvocate.com/news/15840570-123/lawmakers-call-on-havard-to-apologize-for-strip-club-amendment-to-regulate-weight-age
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/05/kenny_havard_strippers_amendme.html
http://dhh.louisiana.gov/assets/medicaid/expansion/BayouHealthSavingsAnalysisFeb15-Jan16.pdf
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/22/456988694/lousiana-democrat-governor-victory-disrupts-partisan-politics-tradition
http://jeffsadow.blogspot.com/2015/06/even-with-casting-error-jindal-vetoes.html
http://jeffsadow.blogspot.com/2014/04/stuck-on-stupid-xxvi-putting-unions.html
http://jeffsadow.blogspot.com/2014/01/license-fee-issue-again-evokes.html
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~glenz/cfwv/cfwv.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/health-beauty-and-the-ballot.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/13/no-good-looks-dont-win-elections/
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00812.x/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22204678
http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/faculty/documents/Lawson%20lenz%20baker%20myers%202010.pdf

26.5.16

Edwards stages bill neutering for partisan interests

The confusing end to a bill that would create incentives for Louisiana’s local law enforcement agencies to follow federal law highlights how the electoral politics of Gov. John Bel Edwards overshadowed the merits behind the bill.

In its original form, HB 1148 by state Rep. Valarie Hodges would have tried to prevent LEAs from failing to follow federal law in conveying information about illegal aliens’ presence in the country. That law requires that LEAs create no affirmative impediment to reporting citizenship or immigrant status to federal authorities. Current policy in New Orleans and Lafayette Parish appear to do that. The penalty would have been restrictions on the ability to use bonding authority.

That bill Democrat Edwards desperately did not want to come to his desk. His party’s larger strategy has encouraged illegal aliens’ presence in order for them to gain citizenship and vote legally or to vote illegally in the belief that they will support disproportionately the party’s candidates. As Edwards’ successful election rested largely on a fiction that he would not govern from the left, he needed on social issues plausible deniability of his true ideological leanings. Having to veto this bill would puncture any tenuous myth that he would govern largely as a social conservative, exposing him as a full spectrum liberal to a center-right state electorate.

Complaint shows "even if" attitude flourishes for some

Maybe because Andrew Jones’ hometown produced a high school valedictorian who showed the electorate’s rules didn’t apply to his political career, Amite High School’s current class valedictorian thought school rules didn’t apply to his academic career. Just because the kid got taught a lesson now has sent some off to shoot the messenger.

While Gov. John Bel Edwards, who defied electoral dynamics by having him and his leftist agenda elected in an ideologically center-right state, and Jones graduated at the top of their classes from the same school 32 years apart, something else crucial separated the two: Edwards, on his way to a service academy appointment, was clean-shaven at his graduation ceremony, while Jones, having won a scholarship to Southeastern Louisiana University, abjured the razor. Given that district rules specified to participate in the ceremony all males, except for those whom shaving facial hair led to documented medical complications, had to appear without a beard, Jones could not walk or give the valedictory address.

That did not come off well even within his own family; his mother asked him to conform even as other relatives supported his decision to go hirsute. However, she did get upset with the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for using him and his story as a means to call for the ouster of the Tangipahoa Parish School District superintendent and some school board members. Why the group felt the need to protest on the base facts appears baffling; its leader said the district’s actions somehow unfairly discriminated, implicitly on race (Jones is black), even though the personal appearance regulations seemed applied in a uniform manner across high school ceremonies.

Underling avoids recommending anything but tax hikes

As senior members of his department drop like flies, it’s become increasingly clear why Louisiana’s Department of Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc ended up as one of the few appointees from previous Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration to get the nod from Gov. John Bel Edwards to continue in his post: because he can serve as a point person to shill for Edwards’ tax-and-spend agenda.

Even as former warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary Burl Cain retired under an ethical cloud amid charges of departmental laxity in rules that favored the conduct of his that came under question, his son Nate Cain got removed as warden at Avoyelles Correctional Center, and former Deputy Secretary of the Office of Juvenile Justice (which position simultaneously reports to the governor) Mary Livers retired under criticism for handling her duties, LeBlanc has kept his perch. Whether he made a grand bargain with Edwards to stump for the governor’s policy preferences in exchange for his job, he echoes the governor's call for higher taxes rather than find better ways of doing things that run counter to Edwards’ notions of retaining outsized state government.

Somewhat mirroring previous testimony in the House, to a Senate panel last week LeBlanc bemoaned the proposed 7.7 percent cut, almost halved from the version of the state’s operating budget that began in the House, of $39 million from last year’s spending plan for prisoners under state supervision. He repeated that such cuts would create dangerous conditions, said these would cause the closure of the state’s two privately-run prisons and send those prisoners to local facilities that would overcrowd those, and slash re-entry programs designed to reduce recidivism rates. He saw additional revenue raised as the only solution to prevent these moves.

LA Cuba trade policy must avoid wishfulness

As the Louisiana Legislature reviews a bill to restart an economic relationship with Cuba, policy-makers must not make the same mistakes form over a decade ago. From the initial reaction from some senators, it does not seem that they will avoid the same errors, but the process has just begun.

HCR 37 by state Rep. Patrick Connick doesn’t ask for much, just that the state review business opportunities in Cuba and report back to the Legislature. Actually, this means little in that, since 2001 when federal law changed to allow food and humanitarian trade with Cuba, business opportunities remain unaffected even with Pres. Barack Obama’s unilateral normalization of relations a couple of years ago. But what it does not ask makes the difference between what the measure could do to invigorate desirable system evolution and it becoming complicit in a propaganda exercise that might bring some monetary benefits to businesses but do nothing to bring the country out of its totalitarian system.

That latter outcome describes the 2005 trip made by former Gov. Kathleen Blanco and several legislators to Cuba, then led by the Führer of the Caribbean Fidel Castro. Blanco went there also looking for business opportunities during the existing near-total embargo and during a highly-publicized propaganda war between the two states. With her previous 2004 trip and this one paid for by Cuba, her demonstration of political naïveté went from average to exceptional when she allowed Castro to accost and harangue her about her national government, in a former church forcibly desacralized by Castro, and then before leaving the island did not accept the request of her own national government to meet with a Nobel prize-winner dissident.