The leading Democrats running for Louisiana’s U.S.
Senate open seat have a renewed chance to run their party’s decades-old
campaign playbook that worked so well last year in electing Gov. John Bel Edwards –
except the election dynamics of 2016 differ so greatly from those in 2015.
America’s political left understands that its
agenda cannot win elections in most states or nationwide because the factual
record and logic support conservative policy preferences. Hence, liberals’
political party, the Democrats, seeks to turn elections into referenda about
Republican candidates’ personalities in order to distract from issues.
Edwards did that to perfection against pre-race
favorite GOP Sen. David Vitter,
whose admitted “serious
sin” likely meaning dalliance with prostitutes over a decade ago, provided
the perfect example to argue that Vitter lacked character and dimmed the
spotlight on issues. However, Edwards could not have won without the aid of major
Republican candidates: Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle, now running for
Congress, and his current Commissioner of Administration, then lieutenant
governor, Jay
Dardenne.
Louisiana’s policy-makers should understand that a law
designed to discourage illegal bigamous situations that also has made it
too difficult for some non-citizens to apply for marriage licenses does not
need alteration but, because of larger judicial trends, needs excision.
Act 436 of 2015
changed standards for issuance of marriage licenses, in part impacting those
applied for by non-citizens. It continued to require those not born in the U.S.
to produce additional documentation that included a birth certificate, but
removed a passage that permitted almost any state or local judge to waive this
criterion. Its sponsor, state Rep. Valarie Hodges,
noted that without that documentation – useful for where applicants did not
have a Social Security number – this made more likely the possibility that a
person already married elsewhere could not be identified as such.
But while the law could verify someone illegally
in the country tried to obtain a license, it also made the process impossible for some
legal resident and nonresident aliens in the U.S. A number of plausible
situations could prevent these individuals from obtaining a certified birth
certificate, such as having fled from war that additionally could cripple the
capacity of their country of birth from sending verification of their natality –
to the point of making the law possibly conflict with a 2007 federal
court ruling that allows those who cannot prove U.S. citizenship or legal
immigrant status to marry.
Increasingly clearly, a special state
panel convened to study recommendations changing Louisiana’s tax code
serves little more than an excuse to lock in overgrown government, specifically
paying for Medicaid expansion, by making a temporary tax hike permanent.
Twice now the Task Force on Structural Changes in
Budget and Tax Policy, put together by the Legislature, has postponed its final
product originally due Sep. 1. If it stays on schedule legislators can analyze
its product Nov. 1. Some of its members, however, have spoken of what should
appear in the report to come.
Most prominently, it will recommend to make proceeds
of a one cent hike in the sales tax permanent. The Republican-majority
Legislature forced Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards to accept this increase only through
Jun. 30, 2018, balking
at making it perpetual and/or putting any increased taxation in a form depending
upon higher income taxes. Edwards and Democrats never liked this because of
their belief that higher-income individuals should bear the costs of expanded
government, and a greater proportion of sales taxes come from households outside
of this category of people than in the case of income taxes.
If you want to see the fruits of liberalism and how
it has warped the culture, you needed to look no further than Baton Rouge’s
City Hall a couple of weeks ago at a semi-rally
addressing the probe into the police shooting of ex-convict Alton Sterling.
Three months ago two Baton Rouge police officers
wrestled Sterling onto the ground, apparently as he resisted arrest after a
call had gone out saying he had threatened somebody with a gun. Tragedy ensued
when it seems one officer felt it necessary to fire his weapon into Sterling. A
short while later the federal government took over the investigation into
potential police misconduct.
There it sits at present, which did not sit well with relatives
of Sterling and community organizers. They planned to march for answers to the
Governor’s Mansion two Mondays ago, only to chuck that in concluding the heat made
such a venture too taxing. Instead, already at City Hall they made their way to
a chamber where officials and local ministers discussed in a scheduled meeting
the larger question of potential police reform.
If state elected officials wish to protect younger adults
from sex trafficking, they likely will have to take another approach than a
challenged law that prevents 18- to 21-year-olds from employment as nude
dancers.
Act 395
passed this year that disallows those under 21 from engaging in that activity
in establishments that serve alcohol. Three women anonymously sued, saying the
age limit arbitrarily proscribed their rights of free expression. Spuriously,
they claim failure of equal protection because they allege the law singles out
females, but statute does not limit the restriction to women.
U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier granted
injunctive relief to them, with the case pending. Although the state points
out, in seeking to have the plaintiffs’ names revealed, the contradiction of using
pseudonyms because in the original filing the women claim they do not see their
constitutionally-protected activity as stigmatic yet claim stigmatism from
having their names known, that does not alter the basic jurisprudence here that
indicates the law would be struck down on the precedent that nude dancing by
adults has constitutional protection as a form of expression, whether for compensation.
The B-Team of Louisiana’s 2016 U.S. Senate race
seems moving right along from the absurd to the paranoid in
response to selections by the Council for a
Better Louisiana’s Oct. 18 debate, to be covered by Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
It started
with minor candidate Democrat Josh
Pellerin fulminating against pollsters for usually not including his name
in their choices. Now it’s other minor candidates spinning additional wild
tales of conspiracy that purportedly keep them out of these televised forums.
If you’re a down-on-you-luck lawyer, better hook
up with no party former legislator Troy
Hebert, because he’ll throw plenty of frivolous business your way. Having
already sued a pollster for not identifying him in a survey as without party,
later dropping that, now he’s suing CABL and LPB for excluding him from the
debate. CABL rules, changed this year, do not unreasonably outline that it will
invite candidates who have polled at least 5 percent in an independent survey
and who have raised a million bucks for election.
For now the experiment in health care provision in north Louisiana appears it will continue, between the state when in between a rock and a hard place and Shreveport's Biomedical Research Foundation that took an opportunity to increase its relevance.
Three years ago the BRF, which at the time had as
its only direct medical provision experience running a Positron Emission Tomography
scanner, expanded
its revenue base by a factor of over 50 when the Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration chose it to run the Louisiana State University
hospital division that included state charity hospitals in Shreveport and
Monroe. No local providers then seemed interested, so the BRF became the only
non-hospital operator of the hospitals shifted out from state control.
When after state budgeting for fiscal year 2014
had concluded Congress abruptly increased the state’s Medicaid reimbursement
proportion, sensing the break should expire that afforded Louisiana as a result
of the hurricane disasters of 2005 to pay a discounted rate, Jindal had to
respond quickly to the sudden, huge extra expenses on the horizon. With no
model of such a transition available and little time in which to formulate one,
the Jindal Administration did a remarkable job in securing operators on reasonable
financial terms.
As if voters needed a reminder why not to vote for
either major Democrat candidate for Louisiana’s U.S. Senate seat this fall,
along comes one in the form of discussion about a major health care change
under Democrat Pres. Barack Obama.
When asked
recently about Medicaid expansion, which Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
inflicted upon the state although a Republican-led
legislature idiotically put the loaded gun in his hands, the major Republican
candidates – two of them physicians – correctly reacted negatively. They
pointed out that, as research has demonstrated, Medicaid outcomes at best are
no better than the care clients received when uninsured, if not worse, despite
much more taxpayer expense. They also noted that its low reimbursement rates do
nothing to stop the shrinking of the provider pool that makes access to care
less and less likely. They additionally said that major programmatic reforms,
likely in the direction of greater patient choice and responsibility, had to
occur to improve health care provision to the poor.
All
true, yet completely lost on the two Democrats. Of the pair, Public Service
Commissioner Foster Campbell merely
offered a confused rationale that displayed little command of the facts. Stupidly
he claimed “It makes health care available to people,” obviously not knowing
that since 1986 federal
law has required that providers deliver appropriate care to those in an
emergency situation. Nor does he understand (perhaps because he’s in the
insurance business, although he makes most of his money these days off of oil and gas) that health insurance and health care are two different things,
oblivious to the fact that Medicaid expansion causes more people to flood
emergency rooms for episodic care not preventive in nature because the supply
of providers continues to dwindle.
