Maginnis: What standing up to Jindal gets you

Given that his was the lone dissenting vote against the new Senate president, Sen. Barrow Peacock might have thought twice before asking John Alario to take him for a ride. Alario was at the Governor’s Mansion on the day of the inauguration when he received a text message from Peacock asking if he could catch a ride to New Orleans for the LSU-Alabama game. “I showed it to the governor,” says Alario. “I thought it was a joke.” It wasn’t. “I didn’t get a ticket to the game until late,” says the Shreveport Republican, “and I knew he would be going that way.” Alario’s son John Jr. was, and took Peacock along. Later, the freshman senator explained his vote against Alario as a promise he made to voters when the issue came up in his Senate race. The conservative Republicans he was chasing distrusted Alario, a former Democrat and twice speaker of the House under former Gov. Edwin Edwards. For his part, Alario is not going to criticize a man for how he gets elected, and he hopes the unpleasantness is behind them. “If he will give me a millimeter of a chance, he will find out we are not such bad people,” says the president. Peacock agrees. “We’ll have our differences, but we can still be colleagues and be sociable,” he says. Good will aside, a millimeter is about what Peacock got in committee assignments, to the least sought-after Retirement and Labor committees. Their relationship might blossom one day, but, for now, Alario can ill afford to let such uppityness go unpunished. “He could have done better, obviously,” notes the president. What happened to Peacock is a cautionary tale to other freshman lawmakers about the consequences for those who defy the order of things as deigned by the governor. Read the full column here.