Many lawmakers entered the Memorial Day weekend not thinking about backyard barbecues or dreaming about seaside resorts, Jeremy Alford says in his latest column.
“Thoughts instead gravitated towards one question: ‘What in the hell is going on?’” he writes. “With the regular session scheduled to end soon, as in next week, they weren’t the only ones. Others tracking the process—and even those ignoring it—would have been satisfied just to learn exactly how the Legislature got here: this place where important bills are somehow stalled in legislative purgatory and a complete meltdown is a likelihood.”
Alford says the Legislature’s current state can be traced back to May 4, when the Louisiana House of Representatives approved a skinny state budget without the meaty tax increases sought by the Governor’s Office and Senate leadership.
“At the time, the House had refused to move most of the key tax bills out of the committee process, and insiders doubted the measures would have made it much further even if they had been,” he writes. “GOP representatives hadn’t rallied around permanent tax increases since Gov. John Bel Edwards took office last year, and they weren’t going to start now.”
Edwards, Alford says, immediately labeled the budget document as a nonstarter.
Alford says Democratic representatives were enraged, too—some even more so nine days later when the House passed a bill requiring public votes before military memorials could be uninstalled.
“The removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans helped ignite the floor hearing, which ended with members of the Black Caucus staging a walk-out,” he writes. “Issues of race drove that debate and the process of picking sides completely destroyed some relationship inside the rails of the House, leaving behind only anger and resentment.”
Alford says Democrats wanted concessions from the House GOP leadership on the budget and tax increases—at least initially. What Democrats really wanted was better representation on the lower chamber’s budget-writing and tax-creation committees, he says.
“This was around the same time that separate negotiations between the House and Senate on the budget seemed to deteriorate,” Alford says. “At the heart of the matter is $206 million that the House wants to sock away and that the Senate and governor want to spend. On the page that’s a tiny sum in a $29 billion budget. But it’s also proof that ideology—in this case cutting versus spending—is the diet of the day at the Capitol.”
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
