The secretary of state’s race hit the political radar screen this week, with the expected announcement by House Speaker Jim Tucker, who shared the news cycle with incumbent Tom Schedler’s criticism of Tucker’s lead role in the pay-raise fiasco of 2008. Close to entering the all-Republican fray so far is Democrat Caroline Fayard, who sounded very much like a candidate about to run during her appearance on Jim Engster’s radio talk show on WRKF. The race had a third GOP candidate, Rep. Walker Hines of New Orleans, but he dropped out Thursday. Fayard is bound to face questions about the source of her financial support, if she gets it from the same place she did last year. In the lieutenant governor’s race, her family and friends poured over $700,000 into the state Democratic Party, which spent a like amount on ads for her. The New Orleans attorney put up $440,000 of her own in that race. That issue already is bubbling below the surface in the coming election. This week, Fayard, her father Calvin Fayard and the Democratic Party filed suit seeking an injunction against the state Ethics Board. So did her lawyer, Gray Sexton, the former longtime ethics administrator. District Judge William Morvant promptly sealed both suits from public view at the plaintiffs’ requests. State law bars the Ethics Board or anyone who files an ethics complaint from divulging that a complaint has been filed. But it is not hard to surmise that someone is seeking to raise the issue in a timely manner.
—In a long-anticipated move, Rep. Taylor Barras, D-New Iberia, will announce today he is joining the Republican Party, according to a GOP party source. Barras, a first-termer, would become the 56th Republican in the current 105-member House. He already was voting largely with the delegation, the administration and the business lobby. He has no declared opponent.
They said it: “I can promise you, when Bobby Jindal over on my eastern flank comes up with a new way to deliver health care . . . we’ll go over there and snitch that in a minute and implement it in our state.” —Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now a presidential candidate, in The Advocate
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
