When sports teams trade away star players to clear salary cap space and lose games to secure draft picks, frazzled fans are often told to “trust the process” because losing big today can mean winning big tomorrow, writes LABI President and CEO Stephen Waguespack in his latest column.
While showing patience and trusting the process may occasionally work in sports, it doesn’t usually work in government, he says.
“For generations, we have been told time and time again in Louisiana to just trust the process,” writes Waguespack. “The pitch made by a chorus of politicos and talking heads over the years is that Louisiana’s model of government is fine, it has just never gotten enough money to make it work right. That sales pitch is losing credibility by the day, spurring momentum for a constitutional convention across the state.”
The latest example of government’s “trust the process” sales pitch came this week in the Louisiana Senate.
State Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, introduced a bill that would permit a judge to tell a jury—convened for a personal injury lawsuit resulting from a car crash—if a driver, who filed the lawsuit, was wearing a seat belt. Rep. Jack McFarland introduced similar legislation on the House side.
Current state law bans this evidence from being discussed in civil trials, Waguespack says. The provision is known as a “seat belt gag order.”
When Hewitt’s bill came up for vote on the Senate floor, as scheduled, a procedural motion was made to send the bill to a second judiciary committee instead of debating it on the floor, Waguespack writes.
“The stated rationale was simply to ‘follow the process,’ but the unstated goal was clearly to kill the bill. The motion passed, and this common-sense legislation will likely die in that committee,” he says. “Why should you care about this tidbit of parliamentary procedure? Because ‘following the process’ will once again quietly kill anything remotely close to legal reform in the Louisiana Legislature. Still, don’t care? Well, think about how following the process over the years has impacted your car insurance rates…”
