Voting rules changes can improve LA Legislature

Perhaps stricter limits on floor voting would reduce the amount of posturing and self-fulfillment common among Louisiana legislators in the performance of their legislative duties, as well as have the salutary effect of cranking out fewer but more thoroughly vetted and better bills.

This past session representatives smothered HB 373 by state Rep. Steve Carter, which would have amended the Constitution to reduce the length of the even-year “general” session of the Legislature and have limited the number of non-local bills intended to have the effect of law that a legislator could introduce to 10. Carter argued that Louisiana ranked high in the number of bills introduced but low in passage rates compared to other states, and so changing these parameters would make for a more efficient, productive, and less-costly Legislature.

Naturally, it went nowhere. Many legislators are enthralled with filing bills, some racking up dozens a session, which this time resulted in almost 2,000 being filed and almost 900 passed (and, believe it or not, in the past two decades there have been years where these figures were around 50 percent higher), and didn’t want time or numerical limitations on them. Their addiction to filing them comes from a desire to win credit from constituents and/or special interests by making a physical demonstration they support or care about something (even if there’s no chance the bill could pass given political realities) and/or from an ideological imperative drives them to express that and/or because they enjoy the process and perhaps psychological satisfaction of winning passage and having their handiwork appear in the law or the Constitution. And this is facilitated by having more days in a session to work these over.

LA nursing home subsidies too much to continue

While the just-concluded 2014 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature did nothing to create a less-favorable policy environment for long term health care for the disabled and indigent, a report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor emphasized the problems that remain in having the state pay too much for too little service.

Historically, Louisiana tilted it resources in this regard towards institutionalized care in nursing homes, where the state paid a much higher proportion of total dollars going to this care to them relative to other states. Operators became dependent on these payments, on average 85 percent of their total revenue, comprising by fiscal year 2013 $840 million that represents nearly a quarter of all state Medicaid money spent. Because of legal changes and court rulings, however, the state has been forced to spend more on home- and community-based delivery even as payments to nursing homes continued to escalate.

Unfortunately, in the past 20 years collectively nursing home operators bet on more business, because of a less-healthy and more elderly population comparatively, disregarding the changing fiscal climate courtesy of the mandate to move less acute clients out of institutions, and overbuilt. As a result, Louisiana has among the lowest occupancy rates of the states, which even as this edges downwards faces a continuing decline in the overall number of clients in institutions. The hope among these operators is that they can ride this out until demographics of an aging national population catch up. Yet the continued growth of non-institutionalized options, which on average save the state tens of thousands of dollars a year per client with the benefit of less restricted living for each, portends that the overbuilt condition will not go away any time soon, if ever.

Now buffoonish, McAllister may aim for self-parody

What started out as light comedy has turned into full-on farce as Rep. Vance McAllister becomes ever more desperate to stay relevant and to resurrect a political career the grave of which he continues to dig deeper.

McAllister, who had no political experience before parlaying a lot of his own money and the wit to diagnose a political environment optimally arranged to elect an unknown to Congress, less than a half year later was revealed – apparently through a leak by his own staff – to have committed extramarital infidelity, prompting him to declare he would eschew an attempt at reelection this fall in order to put family affairs into order. Lately he’s hedged on a withdrawal from politics, not realizing that once surrendering that it’s unlikely any electorate ever would take him back.

But, as he made his mark as preacher of dysfunction in Washington, perhaps a return of zeal to stay in power prompted him to get back to that narrative through a bizarre story. His claimed anecdote highlights that (in his words) “money controls Washington” and how work on Capitol Hill is a “steady cycle of voting for fundraising and money instead of voting for what is right.”

Voters need to reject creating unneeded cabinet dept

Perhaps the most surprising of a surprisingly bad crop of constitutional amendments not only would end up costing more taxpayer dollars for no policy improvement, but it could violate federal law if passed, all to feed ego and empower special interests.

HB 341 by state Rep. Joe Harrison proved surprising in that it even made it to the voters. The proposed amendment would allow expand the number of cabinet departments allowed to exist in the state from 20 to 21 and would allow a department authorized by the amendment to disburse funds from Title XIX of the federal Social Security Act, but limit its authority only to over programs not ever administered by another part of government and could come into existence only when it had its own appropriated funds after Jun. 12, 2015.

In practical terms, this means a Department of Elderly Affairs would be created, courtesy of Act 384 of 2013, which set this up contingent on there being enough constitutional room for it. This takes programs and authority from the Division of Administration, principally the Governor’s Office for Elderly Affairs, and also empowers establishing a new program to serve the “frail elderly.” How and why it got there illustrates the quest for political symbolism over policy substance.

Calming agents on LA budgeting this year won't remain

In the decade this space has served mankind (or at least that portion attentive to Louisiana politics), the 2014 budgeting process, described as quiescent elsewhere, provoked the least commentary. Due to the same dynamics involved this, don’t expect it again next year.

Ever since 2006, the state’s budgetary picture has been whipsawed by extremes. Immediately after the hurricane disasters of that year, a great state revenue retrenchment was feared and in special session general fund spending was contracted by about 13 percent or nearly a billion dollars. The cautiousness was debated in 2006 and continued, although reductions focused mostly on reaping the “disaster dividend” (i.e., fewer social service payments because of the disproportionate displacement of disproportionately larger receivers of those), across-the-board cutting with little attention paid to structural changes to make government more efficient or to eliminating programs on the basis of need, and using the Budget Stabilization Fund.

But by 2007, the unanticipated “false economy” of the federal government steadily pumping into the state’s economy what would become in five years the lion’s share of $142 billion allocated for recovery. This created general fund revenues that in fact surpassed those of fiscal year 2006 by FY 2009, even as the country was sliding into economic recession. Now the problem became the opposite: vigorous debates not on how to cut, but on how to spend.

Analysis shows case compelling to make SB 469 law

Given that from the very start the overall themes behind the lawsuit launched by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East were greed, ideology, and power, it’s no accident that forces that support the continuation of the suit channel those qualities in a last ditch effort to keep alive an option contrary to the best interests of the state and its people.

Filed last summer against 97 companies claiming they violated permitting law and had to pay unspecified damages that could reach into the billions of dollars, at the outset its ringleaders openly admitted they saw these oil producers as fatted calves to be slaughtered in order to increase vastly the revenues and spending of their agency, even if their choices seemed outside the scope of their agency’s authority, had no coordination with, or even countered the state’s overall master plan for coastal restoration. Insulated from accountability to taxpayers, this clique blindly asserted that this action was necessary for coastal restoration, and rigged the contract to shunt as much as a third of recovery to go to lawyers it hired and it put in a poison pill provision that meant a huge payday to them even if it chose to drop the suit – a clear breach of fiduciary duty to taxpayers.

In response, SB 469 was passed this session in the Legislature to allow only entities under the state’s Coastal Resources Management Act to bring legal claims involving allegations about permits in coastal areas. Those agencies would be the state, the secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, the attorney general, parish governments with coastal management plans, and the local district attorneys for parishes without a plan.

Jindal gets another shot to strengthen CCSS narrative

As the 2014 Louisiana Legislature regular session closed, Gov. Bobby Jindal has strived to have it both ways on the Common Core State Standards, and has a chance to reinforce that soon with a by-product of the session.

Jindal at one time gave understated support (the only kind given for so long since there was no controversy attached to it until about a year ago) to this framework agreed upon by most states for concepts to be taught in schools, but earlier this year reversed course and disavowed both the testing regime Partnership for Accountability and Readiness for Colleges and Careers (largely developed from the state’s previous testing framework) for CCSS and CCSS itself, saying they risked too greatly forcing Louisiana into following a national curriculum. He appeared to be egged on by some legislators, special interests, and concerned parents, first by a claim that he could back out the state unilaterally from participating in PARCC, then by the observation that promulgated rules for PARCC administration he could veto.

The contract withdrawal strategy seemed questionable as it also would take the acquiescence of Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Pres. Chas Roemer and Superintendent of Education John White, who have backed steadfastly CCSS and PARCC. But the Administrative Procedures Act clearly gave Jindal the ability to veto the regulations which, for whatever reason, were issued only in early May. This meant that Jindal had until the end of that month essentially to reject them, which would restart the process. Theoretically, this loop could continue indefinitely and presumably CCSS/PARCC opponents could use the time to induce the state’s withdrawal from them.

Better tweaking of LA capital punishment law needed

Perhaps it's best that the Legislature passed on enacting a bill that tweaked Louisiana's procedures for capital punishment, as more needs doing to ensure that these sentences get levied appropriately.

HB 328 by state Rep. Joe Lopinto would have allowed purchase of the combination of drugs required to produce a lethal injection formula, compounded for executions that minimizes suffering of the guilty, from out-of-state pharmacies and for information regarding suppliers and participants in the process to be kept confidential. Many states have experienced difficulty in getting such chemicals because manufacturers of them face intimidation from vocal minorities against the idea of capital punishment that, if they sell these, negative public relations campaigns against them will be engaged in, leading them reluctant to sell these if knowledge of that becomes public.

In effect, this activism attempts to veto by other means, through preventing the practice from being carried out, the sensible public policy of the use of a death penalty. The fact is that allowing capital punishment makes society better off by saving lives, in three ways. First, it has a proven deterrent effect that preserves the innocent. Second, it protects from those not deterred by ensuring that they never again can threaten society that provides them targets, where they may access those targets through various means such as judicial incompetence that allows them out of prison, within prisons where they have the chance to murder correctional employees and fellow prisoners, and/or by escape. Third, their eternal souls may be saved by having to face execution, for impending death provides a terrific incentive to focus on this aspect of their existence that without they may otherwise never explore, resisting the knowledge that the owner of the vineyard is like God the Father, and that salvation thus can come at any time, even the at the end of life.

Moral, legal factors make surrogacy veto best choice

Even if there hadn’t been a good moral argument for Gov. Bobby Jindal to veto HB 187, there was an additional good policy argument to do so.

This past weekend Jindal issued a veto of the bill by state Rep. Joe Lopinto that would have allowed the state’s judiciary to enforce surrogacy contracts. The bill would have allowed a married couple to hire a surrogate mother aged 24-35 to carry embryos from them and to pay only for expenses for the task and lost wages by the surrogate. It was a much narrower bill than one Jindal vetoed last year tailored to overcome many past objections to it.

But it continued to draw opposition from some, including Louisiana’s Catholic bishops, because the entire concept of surrogate births is contrary to Catholic moral teaching. It denies the unifying grace of marriage and invites the indiscriminate disposal of human life, the unused embryos. And if Jindal has demonstrated nothing else during his political career it’s that on legislation concerning bioethical questions he takes his Catholicism seriously in informing his actions concerning these.

Whitney CD 6 entry dilutes conservative voter influence

Making the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera” look relatively barren of people by comparison, the field for Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District gained another major candidate, shifting dynamics of the contest in favor of some at the expense of others.

At about the last minute that a serious candidate could announce with any hope of winning, state Rep. Lenar Whitney danced into the competition. The Republican has served two-and-a-half years of her first term in any elective office, but has considerable connections with local politics in being an ally of state Sen. Norby Chabert (who had considered running for this) and with state politics, in being the party’s national committeewoman to the Republican National Committee.

Those connections and that she is the only candidate from the southernmost part of the district she will need to help her overcome her relatively late start. Some assistance that might have gone to her from regular Republican donors and activists already will have been apportioned elsewhere. She and her husband do appear to have assets that could help finance a campaign, although her state office campaign account at the end of last year was practically empty.