While there’s still a chance the U.S. Supreme Court will reignite a redistricting debate while lawmakers are in session this spring, members of the governmental affairs committees are more likely to discuss constitutional rewrites and sexual harassment training for elected officials, among other issues.
It has been two years since Gov. Jeff Landry unsuccessfully pushed the Legislature to approve his call for a constitutional convention, and 2026 could host the sequel to this ongoing policy drama.
“I still think it’s a needed thing in our state,” says House and Governmental Affairs Chair Beau Beaullieu, whose committee will take up the issue. “We really need to clean some things up.”
Rep. Dixon McMakin has filed House Bill 4 to call for a convention. He has previously run legislation with the same goal.
McMakin tells LaPolitics that he doesn’t have any specific policy objectives for the effort, he just wants to trim down the unwieldy, lengthy document to something that lays out “core principles” without dictating “the day-to-day operations of your state.”
As for the congressional map, lawmakers are moving forward with the assumption that the current map will remain in place for this year’s election. With qualifying set for next week, there’s not much else they can do.
But Beaullieu says the Supremes still could throw the Legislature a curveball.
“Barring any decision from the Supreme Court, it looks like we’d be using the current maps,” he says. “But I just don’t know what they’re going to say, what they are going to do, and how they’re going to opine on the situation.”
Beaullieu adds, “I’m planning to file a bill on our legislative maps just as a precautionary measure, just to have one in the hopper in case we had to use it based on what the Supreme Court says.”
Beaullieu’s Senate counterpart also plans to drop placeholder maps.
“I’m always going to bring a Senate map and I’m going to bring a congressional map until they tell us otherwise, just in case,” Senate and Governmental Affairs Chair Caleb Kleinpeter says.
Kleinpeter also is considering bringing a constitutional amendment that would ensure each member the opportunity to run for three full terms. Currently, members that serve two-and-a-half terms consecutively cannot run in the following term.
Under the current system, members who join the body through a special election can be limited to 10 years, based on the timing of their election, Kleinpeter says.
Kleinpeter already has filed Senate Bill 25, which would boost pay for registrars of voters, their chief deputies and confidential assistants.
Salary ranges are based on experience and the population of the parish the registrar serves, and his bill would adjust the pay schedule. For example, the maximum salary for a registrar in a parish with more than 200,000 residents would increase from $115,507 to $148,221, as the bill currently is written; it doesn’t have a fiscal note yet.
“They haven’t had a raise in many years,” Kleinpeter says. “We’ve asked them to perform more duties and we haven’t given them raises. I just don’t think it’s fair.”
You can also expect lawmakers to revisit recent overhauls of ethics and campaign finance rules and make some “minor adjustments,” Beaullieu says. He may bring a bill to adjust filing dates for campaign finance reports, for example, while Kleinpeter would like to raise the threshold for individual reporting of raffle tickets from $50 to $100.
—They said it: “Sen. Miguez lives closer to Beaumont than Baton Rouge and closer to Conroe than Monroe.” –State Sen. Rick Edmonds, who is running for the 5th Congressional District, as reported by USA Today Network’s Greg Hilburn. (State Sen. Blake Miguez is running for the same seat.)
