Great symbolism, little substance, to method change

The populism intertwined in Louisiana’s political culture contains a fatal conceit that has held back the state for so long, which expressed itself in the Senate’s decision henceforth to hold secret ballots for Senate leaders that ultimately will change little, and perhaps for the worse, because the problems deemed solved by this do not come from outside the Legislature, but from within its own members.

Under current rules, a voice vote determines the presidency. Under the new rule passed yesterday, the president and president pro tempore will be selected by secret ballot in two rounds if necessary. Currently, the House follows the current procedure, but it could make a similar change today.

The rationale stated by some for the switch that attracted all but five votes was that it increased legislative independence. Supposedly by having a public vote this would prevent a governor from backing a particular candidate, where knowledge of who voted for whom would guide the chief executive in decisions such as concerning members’ bills to support or veto these, capital outlay items to recommend, whether to veto those, and in influencing committee assignments as the president makes those appointments. In essence, a governor could not visit retribution lacking this information, and it could increase the chances of election of somebody less allied with the governor, for by breaking the governor’s stranglehold senators now will have gained the liberty to vote for whomever, so the assertion goes.

Clueless GOP leader walks like duck, disclaims it

From comments proffered by state Rep. Lance Harris, leader of the GOP House delegation, at a meeting of Baton Rouge Republicans, we can draw two conclusions: level of government, national or state, doesn’t affect the tendency for party leaders in elected offices to lose touch with the people that elected them and that it takes some self-deception and delusion to hold that office, that personifies the products of this year’s session of the Legislature stemming from the state’s political culture.

Harris seemed taken aback when members of the conservative audience queried why the party’s House contingent seemed overly eager to embrace non-conservative solutions in dealing with the troubled state budget, such as the largest tax increase in the aggregate in the state’s history, rather than by making more of an effort to right-size state government. Perhaps his lower lip trembled when he replied, and what he said deserves full rendition to understand the incredible lack of self-awareness contained within it:

You don’t have the LGBT agenda this year. You don’t have the pro-choice agenda this year. You don’t have the expansion of Medicaid this year. You have gotten everything you wanted as a conservative on the social issues you want. Period. But we still have to govern as the Republican Party when it comes to the finances of the state of Louisiana. And to call some of us liberals because we have to make that tough choice …. We have taken care of 90 percent of what conservatives want taken care of.

Needed LA higher education policy fixes slipping away

What began as a session promising to accomplish major strides in bring Louisiana higher education into the 21^st century, and perhaps set up even more beneficial future change, instead looks to have come completely undone.

The House’s refusal to send SB 155 by state Sen. Jack Donahue to the voters to amend the Constitution to get the Legislature out of the tuition-setting business certainly erases a major reform tool in higher education policy. This means that not only does the Legislature, contrary to the practice in almost every state where higher education systems make tuition and fee decisions without interference, continues to have a veto power over these kinds of decisions, but also it need muster only a third or more of the members of one chamber to block any of these, the only state where a legislative supermajority must approve of these increases.

It’s a horrible policy that has led to the inappropriately low pricing of tuition – only 38^th highest for baccalaureate-and-above institutions in a state that ranks 30^th in per capita income – and thereby overreliance on taxpayers to subsidize it. Too many lawmakers enjoy claiming they prevent the cost of higher education from being too high to those who benefit directly from it by having this veto in place to provide cover, while spreading out the costs among taxpayers who don’t have as intense feelings about the issue as do the beneficiaries (who typically are significantly wealthier than the mass public thereby better able to mobilize lobbying resources to magnify their persuasive abilities). If Louisiana higher education ever has a chance of becoming efficient in delivery – both by the process and in its structure, at present wildly overbuilt at the top – it needs greater discipline induced by leaning less on taxpayers and more on its own resources, and this amendment could have provided that.

Legislators still enabling bad N.O. policy choices

Bad choices made by both legislators and New Orleans imperil funding that could go to reducing the large backlog of services for people with disabilities in Louisiana’s fiscal year 2016 budget.

Advocates for and the disabilities community initially were cheered, if not overjoyed, when the House of Representatives sent to the Senate a budget that included around $61 million that not only would restore funding for recipients of New Opportunities Waivers frozen as a result of mid-year budget cuts but also could open up thousands more. By apportioning around $23 million in state general funds, federal funding could make up the difference.

But any such joy would be short-lived upon discovery that the state match relied upon defunding the Office of Public Health, in what the legislator whose amendment to the budget provided the means of finance state Rep. Chris Broadwater would admit catered to a constituent’s request designed only to get attention about alleged shortcomings at the agency. The Senate Finance Committee reversed the decision and when the Senate takes up the budget today it will consider funding only $3.5 million in state money, enough to unfreeze the slots.

Medicaid expansion gun ready to injure Louisianans

This space warned two years ago that the parts of the gun had been made, and implored voters not to put it together. But they either were ignorant of or ignored that and did it. Now the Louisiana Legislature has put the bullet in the chamber, leaving it only in the hands of next year’s new body and governor to fire the bullet into the corpus of the people of Louisiana.

The passage of HCR 75 by Speaker Chuck Kleckley took the next step, steeped in subterfuge, of trying to shovel money into Louisiana’s budget to satisfy short-term electoral whims of legislators at the expense of needlessly costing Louisianans more in the long run. This resolution allows the state to decide within the first three months of next year whether to have general urban larger hospitals, which they and their affiliated doctors receive the lion’s share of Medicaid funds, pony up money to use as a match for Medicaid – hidden code to foist wasteful and counterproductive expansion of the program through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The facts establishing that expansion would have a negligible, if not negative, impact on the health care of its clients while costing far more than at present are well known. And the studies that demonstrate Louisiana would pay upwards of $2 billion extra over the next decade through expansion in return for health outcomes of those covered likely no better than under the current system where health care is delivered to the indigent upon request regardless of their ability to pay probably understate that unnecessary extra expense: data from states that already have expanded show significantly lower forecasts of extra costs than what actually has transpired.

Senate aids Jindal in producing tolerable budget

It looks as if the SAVE plan will save Louisiana’s stressed fiscal year 2016 budget, thanks to the typical force alignment process seen in the state’s budgetary politics.

At present, the House of Representatives remains balky on SB 284 by state Sen. Jack Donahue, which would create a complex mechanism that allows higher education institutions to charge a fee, presumed to be $1,500 annually, per student; allows that to exist as a tax credit accessible for the families involved regardless of whether they have that much tax liability; and draws from the created SAVE Fund that gets filled from tax increases in other areas such as on cigarettes, meaning the families never pay the bill nor receive the credit rebate while the funds flow directly to higher education. The law promulgates such gyrations because Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has declared that any bills that increase taxes without offsets elsewhere and any budget with a net tax increase he will veto.

Without the Student Assessment for a Valuable Education plan made into law, a budget with a net tax hike that no accounting gimmickry can hide (taxes definitely are going up) seems inevitable, bringing the state as previously mentioned to the brink of a clash between an irresistible force and an unmovable object, with resolution attained only when one side politically can overpower the other. While that conflict would play out, after the Jul. 1 start of the new fiscal year fiscal chaos will reign.

EITC bill support illustrates LA's troubled fiscal policy

The debate that surrounded the Louisiana House’s wise rejection of inflating the Earned Income Tax Credit was less a policy discussion and more an expository about the attitudes that produced the budget difficulties of this year that promise to recur.

Representatives narrowly defeated state Rep. Walt Leger’s HB 70, denying it by five votes, which would double the credit to seven percent of the federal version. About half the states have this, with Louisiana’s the lowest and the only southern state on the list. The federal program is particularly generous for families with children: while the 2015 levels mean that a single person working minimum wage full time gets almost nothing from it, a single mother raising three children making three times minimum wage still would qualify for a higher rebate.

And rebate it is, for even making that amount of money, the latter household (assuming the mother’s wage is the only cash income, although this family also likely would qualify for some other assistance programs as well), the size of the credit not only would wipe out all income tax liability but also give back over $2,000 more than that (and this does not include other tax credits that this family would qualify for, such as child care). This is why the current Louisiana credit costs $47 million annually and the federal one yearly now over $60 billion – more than what is spent on the higher-profile, more-criticized Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash benefits program, making it the most expensive cash benefit program in the nation.

Trivial and extreme define LA Democrats' agenda

It rather shows the depths that Louisiana’s Democrats currently plumb when their talking points consist of over-the-top complaints about Republican gubernatorial news releases and asking GOP legislators whether these opponents consider them murderers.

In the latter instance, discretion was the better part of valor when last week state Rep. Lenar Whitney demurred giving any provocative answer when, from the Senate’s Judiciary B Committee, state Sen. Karen Peterson, also state Democrats’ party chairwoman, asked her “Do I look like a murderer?” This was in response to Whitney’s assertion that to vote against her HB 701, which would prevent sex-selective abortions, meant one was “willing to kill baby girls.” It presaged Peterson’s vote against the bill that helped deadlock a vote that sidelined it.

If Whitney had been willing to speak truth to power, she could have said in response something like “If the shoe fits ….” Because, yes, if you participate in the abortion a human being as a result of it being a certain sex, you are a murderer. In fact, with the exception of when the birth of the human being would cause its mother to die so only one can be saved, any other rationale for abortion is murder, plain and simple. It may not be recognized legally as murder, depending upon the circumstances, but in the universals of human existence it is, and no amount of sublimation, deflection, projection, rationalization, or any other kind of psychological defense to avoid that truth changes this fact. It may discomfit and agitate and lead to concocting all sorts of sophistic mental gymnastics to avoid facing this truth, and it may be impolite and foment resentment against those remind of it, but it simply is.

Fee hike now suddenly not anathema to lawmakers

It’s funny what a difference of a few years and a billion or so dollars makes when it comes to legislator attitudes about fee increases related to vehicle operation.

Currently, two bills, HB 445 and HB 833, after being approved in the House had different Senate committees tack on the same major revenue increase based upon fees – a $50 hike for gaining a certificate of title and the same for a salvage title, which represent raises of 270 and 333 percent, respectively. Together, the fee changes are predicted to generate at least $59.8 million a year. Similarly, rumor has it HB 37 will experience the same treatment in the Senate where it could tack on $39.50 to the existing $32.25 Class E (individual) charge (and parishes may be permitted to charge as much as $3 extra), or at least 122 percent, which would add an estimated $18.8 million more.

The title fee hikes might reflect current, fluctuating budget necessities where state police have received around $60 million a year from the Transportation Trust Fund, a sore spot among some legislators as that money otherwise could go to infrastructure needs. Legislation to increase taxes going to roads has stalled, and jacking up these fees may represent a fallback position to retain money in the TTF while not dramatically decreasing funding to state police.

Group advocates for law to silence its opponents

Sun Tzu in The Art of War advises that the successful general ensures asymmetrically favorable resources accrue to him before he initiates battle. That’s what a leftist interest group attempts when it calls for selective restriction of free speech rights concerning Louisiana’s Public Service Commission.

Recently, the Alliance for Affordable Energy from New Orleans published reservations about the ability of members of the PSC to collect campaign funds from regulated entities. The group is best known for its strident agenda against large energy concerns that use oil, gas, or nuclear energy to generate electricity and its shilling for alternative energy concerns, cost-shifting for retail energy pricing, and that one of its former employees ran, unsuccessfully, twice in different districts for a seat on the PSC.

Its literature called the ability of regulated entities to donate “troubling” and pointed out that some states prohibited the practice of allowing this. While generally states may place limitations on amounts of campaign donations directly to candidates, unless there is a system of public financing in place that prohibits all donations, only regulated entities may have their ability to donate to campaigns denied while other interests do not face such a ban.