LA congressional map change not soon, if ever

Against all odds – and jurisprudential good sense – Louisiana finds itself having to revisit congressional reapportionment, although unlikely with any changes until after 2024, if even then.

Over a year ago, the chances of the state having to follow the dictates of special interest groups in drawing two majority-minority congressional districts rather than maintaining its one were about as likely as a football team succeeding with a Hail Mary pass at a game’s end. Yet with a Supreme Court decision since on an Alabama reapportionment case, it seems the ball actually got hurled with enough strength to reach the goal line and offensive players in position to catch it.

But the offense has to come down with it. Whether it does begins with the Court also declining to hear the state’s appeal of a district court decision a year ago that set the stage for drawing the two M/M map after the state legislated a one M/M map not too different from that of the present.

Liberalism promotes ideology over kids' welfare

What is it about liberalism that makes its adherents go to the mattresses to preserve the infrastructure that allows minors to have irreversible medical interventions performed on them that many children later will regret, an attitude in sharp contrast with medical practice worldwide outside the U.S.?

Currently, the fate of HB 648 from the recently-concluded Louisiana Legislature regular session hangs in the balance. The bill would disallow prescribing of drugs or surgery designed to alter the physical sex of a minor.

The state of science at present on the issue notes that of the small but growing proportion of all children who begin medical interventions to alter their sex about 30 percent within a few years want to stop, if not reverse, it. Unfortunately, the effects are irreversible, causing major psychological trauma for those who want to stop the transition and major physical trauma even for those who don’t that has significant psychological impacts as well.

Ideologues put fakery ahead of protecting kids

Known more for being behind the curve, it’s refreshing to see something showing Louisiana ahead of it, providing a lesson on how to deal with current controversies.

That happened earlier this week as a result of hearings on Capitol Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by Democrats, decided to hold a hearing entitled “Protecting Pride: Defending the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” which promoted giving privileged position to a small minority at the expense generally of women and children.

It backfired when it came to a discussion about the relative physical capabilities of biological males who assert they are “female” or who have made a medical transition through drugs and/or surgery to take on some female biological aspects, relative to natal females in sports competitions. Republican Sen. John Kennedy had an interest group leader, clearly in over her head, claim that perhaps the greatest, perhaps aside from her sister Venus, female tennis player of all time Serena Williams routinely could defeat typical male professionals.

Plenty of good options to keep $100 million cut

All the fretting about a $100 million last-minute reduction that only increases Louisiana Department of Health spending by $146 million for next fiscal year, as Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt suggests, is unwarranted and no corrective should be in the offing.

This week, a couple of Senate panels met unanticipatedly in the aftermath of the regular session’s close to sort out the line item in the general appropriations bill HB 1 triggering this, an insertion which caught by surprise legislators and Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards. The latter warbled about how he would do everything he could, including casting a line item veto on it, to prevent the roughly half-percent decrease it pared, while a number of state senators listened with furrowed brows as allegedly how, when considering leveraged federal funds involved, this really meant an over $700 million loss in budget authority.

Of course, that figure was scare tactics reminiscent of what Edwards threatened would happen in 2016 when trying to muscle through a sales tax increase still haunting the state, that without taking more from the citizenry people with disabilities would be left to beg on street corners, grandparents would be kicked out of nursing homes, and, by the way, college football would cease. Unfortunately, many, including Republicans who should have known better, bought it hook, line, and sinker, then and now.

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.