House leaders part of problem, not solution

When under pressure, people revert to their true natures. And insofar as political leadership goes, in the final session of the 2020-24 term of the Louisiana what we saw from the Legislature leadership was ugly, hopefully the last gasp of a mentality that has left Louisiana in tatters.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans Speaker Clay Schexnayder and Pro Tem Tanner Magee have come under much fire for their handling of the session. It all crystallized in the last week of the session, when they muscled through a resolution allowing state government to spend, as opposed to banking, about 10 percent more of transitory revenue generation, and in the final half-hour of the session, when most of the spending bills were presented for members’ approval with hardly any of them knowing any details about what they were asked on which to vote.

This failure of leadership occurred at two levels, beginning with their unwise squandering of dollars ahead of a bleaker revenue picture. The Revenue Estimating Conference foresees fiscal year taxes, licenses, and fees falling from $15.277 billion in fiscal year 2024 to $15.103 billion in FY 2025, $14.666 billion in FY 2026, then a bump upwards to $14.936 billion in FY 2027 – a drop of over a billion bucks from FY 2023 just wrapping up. Given that new commitments (at least in intention) of around $320 million annually were doled out for education alone starting in 2024, maintaining this total level of spending will be difficult.

Legislators may thwart Edwards’ pettiness

Perhaps more than illuminating his mean-spiritedness, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ swipe at the Bossier Four demonstrates again the sanctimony that has undergirded his time in elective office — although they yet may prevail.

The Bossier Four — Republican state Reps. Raymond Crews, Dodie Horton, Danny McCormick, and Alan Seabaugh — along with 15 others in the Louisiana Legislature’s lower chamber voted against busting the state’s spending cap. They reasoned that excess dollars should go towards unfunded accrued liabilities and topping off state savings accounts, which not only would free up state and local dollars towards education that could be used for pay raises but also would trigger individual income tax reductions, all the while avoiding new commitments that would threaten fiscal stability when the 2016/2018 sales tax increases expire at the end of fiscal year 2025 and the tapering of Washington Democrats’ debt-fueled spending binge that boosted state coffers, changes which are pegged to bring in $1.5 billion fewer annually after three years.

 

Instead, egged on by Edwards, legislators opted to blow a significant portion of the excess collected from the people on new ongoing commitments of questionable affordability and much of the rest on capital items. These four saw their districts hardly share in that, first because Edwards-backed GOP Speaker Clay Schexnayder and his leadership team headed by Republican state Rep. Tanner Magee made sure several items initially placed in the capital outlay bill concerning the Four’s districts were removed after they voted against the breach.

DeSoto case could reshape reapportionment law

Even as the nation charts an uncertain course through a recent dubious U.S. Supreme Court decision where cases involving reapportionment for Louisiana’s Legislature and congressional districts may provide greater definition or even upheaval, the most consequential case of all actually might come from DeSoto Parish.

For over a year controversy has swirled around the reapportionment plan passed by its Police Jury. Originally, it created five majority-minority districts out of its 11, maintaining that arrangement as the parish’s population hardly changed from the 2010 to 2020 census.

Problem was, that masked a shift in population towards the north, facilitated with majority-black Mansfield losing about six percent of its population reducing it to town status below 5,000 residents, and a significant change in the racial composition of the parish that saw its proportion residents claiming any black ancestry fall from 39.4 percent to fall to 37.2 percent. Nonetheless, under that plan M/M seats remained at 45.5 percent where one fewer seat would have represented 36.4 of these.

GOP chamber majorities little affected by ruling

The surprising and flawed U.S. Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Milligan not only might have an impact on Louisiana’s congressional districts, but also could affect its state legislative maps – in both cases not immediately but eventually, if at all.

Recently issued regarding Alabama’s division of seven congressional districts that left just one majority-minority district where about two-sevenths of the population is black – defined as when somebody claims any black ancestry on the census – the ruling said because a number of jurisdictions nationwide had reapportioned on the basis of interpreting the Voting Rights Act as amended and reauthorized to draw the proportion of M/M districts roughly similar to that of the population, that they should despite the actual wording of the VRA that forbids such a practice. In other words, apply bad law long enough and it magically becomes acceptable due to an unsupportable undue reliance on precedent.

Louisiana has a similar situation where its population is almost a third black (31.2 percent) but of its six districts only one was made M/M. It has a pair of cases addressing this presently in the hands of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and an offshoot where a lower court had arrogated its appealed decision against the state to the Fifth Circuit into an attempt to draw its own map. The Supreme Court placed a stay on all of this activity pending the Alabama decision.

Fiscally responsible legislators punished

Adopting the rhetoric of spousal abusers, Republican state Senate Pres. Page Cortez blamed Bossier Parish victims because they dared stand up for taxpayers when he collaborated with GOP state House Speaker Clay Schexnayder in stripping a net nearly $140 million from parish projects.

Republican state Reps. Raymond Crews, Dodie Horton, and Danny McCormick a day before the massacre had voted against busting the state’s spending cap to the tune of $250 million over the next two weeks and $1.4 billion over the succeeding year. While much of it ended up going to one-time items, a shell game maneuvered nearly $200 million towards education pay raises.

Crews, Horton, and McCormick along with local GOP state Rep. Alan Seabaugh and some other representatives across the state who voted against busting the cap but who couldn’t stop it, had a better way to secure those hikes. By paying down state pension unfunded accrued liabilities, they planned on facilitating local education agencies to dole out raises from money saved as a result of the paying down. That could be accomplished without breaching the cap.

Session did little good, but avoided disaster

It wasn’t a very helpful regular session of the Louisiana Legislature, but it could have been worse.

Reformers had high hopes that the one-time state revenue bonus courtesy of Washington Democrats’ debt binge – even as it brought the highest price inflation in four decades that drives up the cost of government – could be managed in a way that curbed the state’s addiction to spending that has increased two-thirds faster inflation adjusted that state-generated revenue intake during the terms of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards. They hoped to bank hundreds of millions of dollars and pay down the same in liabilities before a forecast $1.5 billion in state revenue declination over the next three years came to pass.

Unfortunately, they only succeeded partially. While some of the surplus did go to reduce unfunded accrued liabilities, freeing up funds for state and local agencies, more was spent on recurring and nonrecurring commitments. This was made possible by raising the state’s spending cap by $250 million this current year, with another $1.4 billion rise on the books for the impending one, not leaving much for when the well starts running dry over the next year.

Bad ruling may upend LA Congressional districts

A surprising and faulty U.S. Supreme Court decision may force Louisiana to redraw its congressional map for 2024 – or might put the state in a position to act as a springboard for an entirely new challenge to making race the predominant factor in drawing electoral boundaries.

That predominance was strengthened by today’s decision in Allen v. Milligan, which concerned Alabama’s districts. Although six justices – those nominated by a Republican president – agreed that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not compel states to give race a privileged place in drawing lines, which Alabama argued in that the only real difference between its adopted plan that created only one majority-minority district out of seven whereas the population proportion would suggest two, Chief Justice John Roberts and Assoc. Justice Brett Kavanaugh essentially said because enough states had treated it as such over the years that it had earned that privilege.

In other words, apply a bad interpretation of the law long enough and it becomes sanitized. Specifically in this case, as long as district drawing doesn’t devolve into ridiculous shapes and running riot over other generally-accepted principles of reapportionment, race can have a privileged status over all others. Dissenting justices noted the perversity of an interpretation that grants precedent such power over intent and logic.

GOP leaders confirm Greene probe dog and pony show

At best, it was a joke; at worst, a tool designed to boost the fortunes of the legislators involved. Meanwhile, Louisianans remain in the dark about whether Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards and top officials in the Louisiana State Police hindered justice regarding the death of black motorist Ronald Greene.

This week, it was announced that the Special Committee to Inquire into the Circumstances and Investigation of the Death of Ronald Greene, a House of Representatives select committee convened two or so years ago by Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, had died from neglect, confirmed by GOP Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee with disparagement of the creation he served as chairman. Greene died in LSP custody after a car chase, low-speed crash, and his manhandling from his vehicle and on the ground for nearly ten minutes.

At first, the LSP implied Greene died in the crash, despite an initial media statement to the contrary and conveying information to Edwards that, with the media reports, made clear the actual circumstances. Despite that, for well over a year the LSP slow-walked internal and external investigations into the matter and Edwards and his office did not reveal key information to federal investigators. Indeed, he continued to propagate in public the discredited death-by-crash explanation and, according to Schexnayder, continued to insist privately on the same.

Any but small spending limit hike reckless

It’s not preferable, but the proposal to bust Louisiana’s spending cap is salvageable from its present imprudent state.

This week, the House Appropriations Committee went along partially with the gargantuan amounts contained in SCR 3 by Republican Pres. Page Cortez. As introduced, it would have raised the cap for this concluding fiscal year by $500 million and for the upcoming year by $1.8 million.

Supporters of the idea – which apparently includes the entire Senate and its Republican supermajority – pledge it all would go to one-time expenses such as transportation infrastructure. That would involve some three-card monte where infrastructure money in a budget not breaching the cap then becomes used for new ongoing commitments of questionable long-term sustainability given the looming disappearance of a sales tax hike in 2016, renewed in 2018, in fiscal year 2025 and an expected slowdown in revenue collection that together will drop incoming monies about $1.5 billion by then.

Triggered educrats act like hiding something

When educrats seem so triggered by a simple request, you have to suspect there’s something more to it than meets the eye.

HR 13 by Republican state Rep. Valarie Hodges would have required public schools and colleges to submit a written report of all campus programs and activities related to critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; or transformative social emotional learning. Documentation minimally would have included the purpose and expected outcome of each program or activity, a brief description of each program or activity, the number of personnel dedicated to the program or activity and the position and title of each, the total amount of funding expended to support the program or activity, and the total amount spent to support the program or activity with the amount that is state-funded.

That’s all. And it’s not difficult to do. For an example at the university level, a quick perusal of the University of Louisiana Monroe’s website reveals it has an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with paid staff. It doles out fellowships to ULM staff. It sponsors events and forums. Along with other University of Louisiana System universities it awards a scholarship to black males – a gift likely to be under constitutional scrutiny before the month is out. Its Honors Program promotes the notion. Its English major with a concentration in music requires a “Diversity Equity Inclusion Elective.” And so on.