Republican David Vitter and Democrat Foster Campbell—you don’t get much further apart than that among Louisiana politicians, especially on their attitudes about government regulating commerce. Sen. Vitter is an unbridled free enterpriser who led the opposition to the federal government’s bailout of General Motors when then-President George W. Bush proposed it in late 2008. Public Service Commission Chairman Campbell is the state’s leading populist, who wants to tax offshore oil production and to lower the guaranteed profits of public utilities. Last week, as usual, they took opposite sides on a multibillion-dollar question, but, very unusually, they traded places. In response to Entergy’s problems in restoring power to customers in the New Orleans region following Hurricane Isaac, Vitter, along with Jefferson Parish President John Young, came out with a breathtaking, big-government proposal to allow parishes to expropriate or to force the sale of a utility company’s assets if it “fails to perform,” as determined, presumably, by government. That massive of a public intervention might sound to Republicans like the kind of left-wing scheme they would expect from Campbell, who, instead, described it the way Republicans often do his ideas. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he told The Times-Picayune. Eric Skrmetta, a Republican who represents Jefferson Parish on the PSC, was more diplomatic in his response, but he shared Campbell’s assessment of Vitter’s ulterior motive, calling it “hyperpolitical.” Read the full column here.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
