Bill to give GOP leg up in constitutional changes

One of the most consequential bills of the Louisiana Legislature’s 2025 regular session – especially for reformers and Republicans – that has received no media attention now awaits the pen of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to sign it into law.

HB 625 by GOP state Rep. Rhonda Butler would expand the municipal/party primary election date on Apr. 18, 2026 to include constitutional amendments. Otherwise, those amendments would be next eligible for ratification in 2026 on Nov. 3.

As of this writing, over half a dozen potential constitutional amendments remain realistically alive for supermajority approval in each chamber. While some would go to the voters on Nov. 3, three significant ones favored by Republicans and generally opposed by Democrats were amended to appear on the earlier Apr. 18 date – and in each case by doing so, raise their chances of passage.

Amendment could increase LA govt responsiveness

If you want to find out who has cornered the market on red herrings, look no further than the opponents of SB 8 by Republican state Sen. Jay Morris.

The bill would amend the Constitution to create another exception to the kinds of employees that have civil service protections under the State Civil Service Commission. It would allow the Legislature to create these by statute, meaning the job positions involved could have their occupants more easily removed from these, among other things.

A merit-based civil service is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it promotes responsible government by attempting to place qualified individuals free of extraneous influences into government jobs as the best way to ensure quality, fair, and impartial discharge of their duties. On the other hand, it detracts from responsive government because it allows incubation of individuals who use their job protections to carry out their own agendas when these differ from those of their bosses accountable to the voting public’s preferences, if not use their insulation to perform their jobs poorly or to behave badly with almost zero chance of punishment or termination.

Chickens come home to roost for failed BC venture

This was how it always was going to end: the reckoning of Bossier City throwing away tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on something that now is little more than a rejected waystation for electric vehicle chargers.

For many years the writing has been on the wall concerning what’s now known as the Louisiana Boardwalk Outlets. Opening just over two decades ago to great fanfare, the outdoor mall most recently sold for less than a fifth of its cost to build and since continues to hemorrhage lessees. In the past month, four tenants, including three of the hospitality venues leaving now only two, have abandoned the area, making almost 40 retail spaces empty.

That adds to a completely discouraging picture. At the middle of last month, of the 185,000 square feet of leasable space, about 77 percent was available. Since then, the subsequent closures will add a few thousand more feet of empty space – keeping in mind that most of the remainder is dominated by the two remaining restaurants, a movie theater, and a church.

Start wringing liberal populism out of LA budget

Liberal populists largely may have been evicted from power in Louisiana, but their ethos lives on, according to budgetary politics in the Senate to date for next year’s state spending plan.

More often than not, after the general appropriations bill HB 1 makes it way from the House of Representatives where constitutionally it must start the Senate will make a few significant changes. The most far-reaching change came concerning Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s initiative to open up voucher-like programming to families beyond the current eligible pool of students coming from lower-income households who otherwise would attend lower-ranking schools to include those from any lower-income household, wrapping all into an education savings account format called LA GATOR.

Landry asked for $43.4 million to cover the existing pool and then $50 million to expand it to a least a small portion of newly-eligible families. But instead, the Senate Finance Committee stripped the additional funds. GOP Sen. Pres. Cameron Henry led the charge, questioning whether the cost of the program would grow too big, too quickly.

Any publicity good for long shot Senate hopeful?

If as a political candidate have little in the way of campaign resources commensurate to the office you seek, a shot of free publicity surely can’t hurt – unless it threatens to make you appear to be a crank.

That’s the situation in which Republican Senate challenger Sammy Wyatt finds himself. Next to no one in the state probably paid attention to his entry into the contest to knock off GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, which he formally announced in mid-March. Wyatt, from Shreveport originally who worked in local law enforcement mainly in Bossier City and then in security in the private sector before decamping for graduate study at Louisiana State University (after a failed run for Bossier City Marshal), returned to serve currently as Chief Compliance Officer and Investigation Officer for Louisiana State University Health-Shreveport, a senior administrative position, although in 2022 he did apply unsuccessfully for the police chief’s position in Shreveport.

Wyatt positions himself as a consistently ideological conservative in line with the agenda of Republican Pres. Donald Trump. It’s unknown how much financial support his campaign has picked up, since he first filed with the Federal Election Commission on Apr. 1, the day after a quarterly report would have been required with the next due at the end of the month, but likely it is very little.

Insurance reforms diluted by rate-setting bill

The two steps forward, one step back approach Louisiana policy-makers have taken towards insurance reform seems unlikely to make much positive impact, because they keep coming up short in addressing the most prominent impediments to reducing premiums.

Insurance reform has been the topic of this year’s legislative session. While some effort has been made on immovable structure insurance, most and most attention has gone towards vehicle insurance. Indeed, with pomp and circumstance last week Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed several bills on the subject that he had supported, although a few more that he does not languish in the legislative pipeline.

The most controversial was HB 148 by GOP state Rep. Jeff Wiley, which actually started out differently. That bill gives the insurance commissioner, at present Republican Tim Temple, the power to set rates, potentially on any basis even arbitrary, filed by insurers regardless of how competitive is the market; until then, the commissioner could review a requested increase for noncompetitive noncommercial lines for an “excessive” increase, but not those that were deemed competitive, with competitiveness now not a factor for the criterion of “excessive.”

Another LA blackout, another renewable own goal

The advice Dr. Zaius gave to Taylor at the end of Planet of the Apes applies very well to the likes of hard left politicians on the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council, in reference to the blackout that hit the New Orleans area some days ago which brings both lessons and warnings.

Parts of four parishes, including Orleans, were hit by what power companies euphemistically call a “load shed” last weekend. Over half were in New Orleans, and nearly 100,000 total customers had lights out for several hours because, with one of Entergy’s nuclear reactors down, another shut down unexpectedly presumably over concerns that if left unaddressed could have blacked out even more ratepayers and for longer.

This echoed two similar events in northern Louisiana in April. Affecting about a third of customers compared to the one in south Louisiana, as part of its meeting the Public Service Commission held a gripe session earlier this month about those incidents, where both the utility involved, Southwestern Electric Power Company, and the regional transmission organization Southwest Power Pool tried either to blame the other or shrugged them off as acts of the Deity.

Ignore naysayers, pass Medicaid integrity bill

It’s a bill that would improve matters tepidly, but you would think it heralded the end of the world from the rhetoric emanating courtesy of the far left that favors government as a redistribution machine.

SB 130 by Republican state Sen. Heather Cloud would increase moderately the oversight that the Louisiana Department of Health maintains over Medicaid eligibility: all of regular, expanded, children’s, and waiver provision of the program. It requires LDH to verify independently eligibility information, prohibits relying solely on automatic renewals (and for future waiver program operation prohibits these entirely), prohibits sole use of self-attestation to verify income and assets and mandates verification of residency, and mandates data matching use from a variety of sources on quarterly, semiannual, and annual bases.

Unfortunately, until the last couple of years since Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards had entered office, LDH didn’t often utilize these efforts listed in the bill. Vast swaths of verification occurred through self-attestation and what data-based verification did occur usually came in perfunctory form, asking for very little and skipping the finer points of eligibility requirements.

Bills would shield LA from bad energy policy

Bills moving in the Louisiana Legislature not only look to forestall potentially bad policy decisions elsewhere emanating from faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but actually to reverse the chances of these inflicting harm.

For years, Europe has demonstrated the costs, both in price and reliability, of government-subsidized or -mandated moves into increasing the proportion supplied of nondispatchable energy – the considered “green” forms primarily wind and solar power – as part of an overall portfolio of energy provision. Permanent spikes upwards in average pricing along with man-made crises of late demonstrate the problem, both economic and political, of state-sponsored favoring of less reliable, if not more expensive, renewable energy forms.

Fortunately, the federal government appears to be exiting that inferior policy option, but some states in their policy agendas continue to cling to the mythical, evidence-free view that fossil fuels cause significantly negative climate change. This religious faith often manifests in official renewable portfolio standards, where about half have some mandatory standard to be met sometime in the future (some as early as five years from now) specifying the proportion of renewable energy sources behind powering that state’s homes and businesses.

Memorial Day, 2025

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 26 being Memorial Day, I invite you to explore this link.