“Can you smell it from where you are?” asks LaPolitics’ Jeremy Alford. “Because we can smell it in Baton Rouge already.”
If Louisiana is a restaurant, then its politicians are a group of chefs cooking a meal of policies for the state, as Alford puts it in his latest column.
“Many were taken by surprise when the smoky aromas wafted their way, especially since the Legislature just put away its pots and pans last week,” Alford writes. “That was after the Looziana Legislature failed to do as much as boil water during its regular session.”
Legislators are now waiting on a seventh special session to convene Monday. While some have been catching up on their sleep or honey-do lists or fishing or work, Alford says, others have been in the Capitol testing policy recipes for the policymaking gathering to come—hereinafter referred to as The Special Session of Our Discontent.
“All those elected chefs in the Legislature just need to figure out how to toss it together without giving everyone food poisoning or otherwise ruining the entire meal for 4.6 million residents,” Alford writes.
Senate President John Alario—the upper chamber’s executive chef—met with leaders of the House and Senate on Monday to start working on fixing the suffering state budget.
“But what, exactly, is going to be on the table for The Special Session of Our Discontent?,” Alford wonders. “To answer that menu question, we need to dial back to the recently-adjourned second special session of the year, hereinafter referred to as The Special Session That Barely Happened.”
Those closing moments of The Special Session That Barely Happened sent many business lobbyists into a tailspin. While nothing came of the votes taken that night—or of the centerpiece sales tax proposal that will eventually be acted upon—Alford says those minutes are keeping business and industry on the nervous side as The Special Session of Our Discontent sneaks up on us.
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.
