Perkins challenge Cassidy? Not so fast ...

The weakest link in a purported plan for Louisiana Democrats to front Democrat Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins as a Senate pump-primer is his willingness to go along with the deal.

As qualifying for the fall Senate election for Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy’s seat looms, no Democrat of any significance has signaled intent to challenge him. No major party likes to give a free pass to an incumbent from the other in either gubernatorial or senatorial contests because you have to keep giving your voters a reason to call themselves your voters. Making them troop habitually to the polls by serving up candidates with at least a chance of winning, however remote, keeps the ground fertile for future opportunities to flip that office.

Thus has circulated the idea that, to offer up somebody who could pull more than a quarter of the vote, Democrat donors and activists led by Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards have pressured Perkins to challenge Cassidy. Not only could this provide a quality candidate, given Perkins’ current status, but it also would provide a public relations boost for state Democrats because, despite blacks having comprised the majority of the party’s base for years, its leadership only once has given serious backing from the start to a black candidate in a major statewide contest – convicted former Rep. Bill Jefferson’s run for governor in 1999. Even within the past three years, getting it to rally behind a black candidate for any statewide office has been like pulling teeth.

Edwards keeps politicizing virus issue

As always when Louisiana Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards exhibits his arrogance, understand that what he alleges of his opponents serves as a distraction from realizing he does exactly what he accuses others of doing.

That trait manifested yet again concerning Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry’s opinion about, specifically, a face covering requirement issued by Democrat Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins but expanded to address Edwards’ recent proclamation 89 JBE 2020. That order issued a masking requirement for anybody age 8 or older in public indoor places with “commercial establishments” responsible for enforcement (the Perkins version for Shreveport added penalties such as turning off the city-run water at noncompliant businesses), as well as closing bars, all in response to rising infection and hospitalization rates from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

The opinion provided the legal justification to sentiments expressed here: the masking requirement – not just as it relates to individuals but for the supposed enforcement – didn’t have enough justification to permit the curtailment of liberties ordered. It doesn’t cancel the order, but provides a basis to a court challenge and leaves the legality of enforcement in doubt.

LA should redefine qualified immunity

Just because a previous effort didn’t suffice doesn’t mean Louisiana legislators shouldn’t look seriously at altering the concept of qualified immunity for state and local officials.

Qualified immunity, first articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court over a half-century ago, is a judicially created legal doctrine that shields government officials performing discretionary duties from civil liability in cases involving the deprivation of statutory or constitutional rights.  Government officials are entitled to qualified immunity so long as their actions do not violate “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Thus, at the state and local level, plenary organs may establish what kinds of acts fall under this kind of protection, if any. It doesn’t extend to criminal behavior, but prevents levying monetary judgments against government officials who cross boundaries and reasonably knew that. In doing so, this protects officials – almost always law enforcement officers – from punishment when thrown into nebulous situations with imperfect information available for decision-making.

Court returns reason to race impact on policy

As parts of the country hurtle into policy-making based upon spurious claims of racism, at least the part of the federal judiciary that oversees Louisiana kept its wits about it.

At the end of June, a panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, and convincingly, a 2017 Louisiana Middle District ruling that declared the judicial election method used for the state’s 32^nd District unconstitutional. That district encompasses Terrebonne Parish.

There, voters across the parish elect judges who run in any of five slots. The at-large, parish-wide selection in five sections until 2014 had produced only white judges when a black Republican – like the other four winners running unopposed – took a seat on the bench. Terrebonne’s black population makes up a bit under a quarter of the parish.

Chess game with Edwards continues over outlay

Still smarting over his many legislative defeats this year, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards was perturbed enough to conduct some gamesmanship on capital outlay.

The Louisiana Legislature has its Joint Legislative Committee on Capital Outlay to approve of forwarding items from its capital outlay bills to the State Bond Commission. Practically speaking, since the state’s executive branch or local governments carry out the actual projects, for state items it approved it relies upon the governor’s office to carry out the steps towards project completion, including sending these to the SBC to garner debt financing.

Typically, the highest-priority projects and those that already have money spent and need more perfunctorily move to the SBC. But the Edwards Administration said it wanted to hold off starting work on $136 million worth, about a fifth of the total and far above the usual amount. Those not included didn’t have a full cash commitment, except for seven specially-designated projects. In essence, this holds back capacity for projects that Edwards can choose that could allow lower-priority projects to leapfrog others.

Edwards again overreaches on virus policy

Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has often made policy ignoring laws concerning human behavior, such as in the world of economics supply and demand. But when it comes to his response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, he faithfully follows the law of the instrument, which causes problems.

He gave Louisiana another demonstration of that this weekend, when he abruptly retrenched somewhat on reopening the economy and impinged on personal liberty. He proclaimed that bars could provide only take-out service, with the exception of worship a limitation of 50 on crowds in areas without adequate spacing, and mandating face coverings in public places except for worship and with age, health, and consumption exceptions, to last from Jul. 13 to at least Jul. 24.

The rationale he gave focused on a recent increase in the number of cases and hospitalizations with the former disproportionately among younger people and the latter creeping towards full capacity. Supposedly, too many young people were going out and transmitting the virus then passing it along to their elders.

Edwards in salvage mode with line item vetoes

Wounded animals lash out, and that’s what Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has done wielding his veto pen after the humiliation he suffered at the hands of the Republican-led Louisiana Legislature in the first half of the year.

With the possible exceptions of former Republican Govs. Dave Treen and Buddy Roemer, no governor in modern state history suffered more brutalization in a calendar year by legislators as did Edwards this year. He absorbed several defeats in the almost total failure of his agenda and in having to accept things contrary to it.

Chief among these was tort reform that will trigger lower vehicle insurance premiums but at the cost of defunding both one of his major constituencies and state Democrats. Republicans outmaneuvered him to put him in a no-win situation where he dares not exercise his veto power. They did the same regarding capital outlay, forcing him to accept in total the Legislature’s list.

LA higher education in need of more oversight

Is it any wonder Louisiana’s legislators failed to renew university autonomy measures during this year’s sessions? And maybe should have attenuated higher education’s independent revenue-raising capacity even more?

For the past decade, the state’s universities have enjoyed a limited degree of financial autonomy. Louisiana has the tightest restrictions in the country on how universities may raise their own revenues, with legislative approval nominally needed. But past legislation gave schools some flexibility without legislative approval to raise tuition and fees up to ten percent annually until it met national averages. It also allowed imposition of special mandatory fees dedicated to certain purposes as long as these with tuition didn’t exceed national averages without that legislative vetting.

That authority expired at the end of June, even with legislative extension attempts out there made by one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee Republican state Rep. Zee Zeringue, along with at first dozens of co-authors. His HB 689 during the regular session would have extended initially the autonomy authority for another three years. The Legislature didn’t pursue that with a special session in the offing, so Zeringue tried again with HB 26 during the regular session.

Too many LA leaders botching virus endgame

The same lack of vision and leadership that caused Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards to botch the opening rounds of Louisiana’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic threatens the same for the emergency’s endgame.

In this situation, Louisiana suffered quickly and disproportionately largely because of decisions Edwards made. While he would have needed seer-like qualities to have understood the virus impact in mid-February to order cancellation of Carnival festivities, by its end the shape of things to come was evident.

Instead of immediately placing some restrictions on potential hotpots, launching infrastructure for testing and care of positive patients on a massive scale, and ramping up tracing capacity, Edwards dithered. Failing to take these measured actions earlier, he belatedly overreacted, shutting down quickly massive swaths of the state’s economy indiscriminately. As a result, too many people needlessly became infected early on, creating a bigger epidemiological curve, which then triggered a desperate attempt to flatten it which only has served to delay achieving the necessary solution: the acquisition of “herd immunity.”

Legislator expiation leads to stupid theorizing

Passage of historic tort reform legislation has forced at least one leftist Louisiana legislator not just to express expiation but also to expound economic ignorance and illiteracy.

Democrat state Rep. Malinda White sinned multiply against her liberal allies. She joined a veto-proof majority with initial House approval during the regular session of SB 418, then abstained on the version that drew the veto of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards. Then, in the special session she voted with a larger veto-proof bunch for the stronger HB 57 and with an even larger majority to send it to Edwards, who has said he will sign it.

That uppity behavior won’t go unnoticed by party powerbrokers, who remain indebted to the trial lawyer lobby and hope to see donations from it fall as little as possible given personal injury lawyers’ smaller profit margins and their annoyance at Democrats’ inability to curtail the transfer of wealth from vehicle insurance ratepayers to their pockets. So, White devised a way to compensate for her apostasy.