This happened in one decidedly unfoolish week in April: A headline in Forbes read, “Louisiana Is Litigating Away Its Economic Prosperity;” while a column in The Wall Street Journal carried this headline, “A Bad Business on the Bayou—Chevron finds itself the victim of a political alliance between the tort bar and Louisiana Republicans.”
Sadly, these were no jokes.
Rolfe McCollister Jr. is a contributing columnist. The viewpoints expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Business Report or its staff.
In a cosmic nod to irony, where was Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry chilling as these headlines burned across the nation?
He and a handful of powerful state legislators were at a hunting lodge in Texas with a pair of influential trial attorneys hunting turkey and talking about auto insurance, specifically about whether lawmakers will make it harder for lawyers to collect big payouts for clients injured in car accidents.
According to an article in The Advocate by Tyler Bridges, “Gordon McKernan, one of the two attorneys, flew House Speaker Phillip DeVillier, Senate President Cameron Henry and three committee chairpersons on his law firm’s jet to the Tributary Sporting Club near Austin. Landry met them there.”
Landry issued the invitations, and Protect Louisiana Values, one of his political organizations, paid for their stay at the hunting resort, lawmakers told Bridges. And where do you think the governor’s PAC got that money to pay?
Folks, you can’t make this stuff up. Louisiana politics in 2025 under Landry is entertainment and theater—and he seems to love it. We are just the audience, and it seems the legislators are his actors. But this show has been seen before in the days of Edwin Edwards. Brash. Tainted. And entertaining the nation with a few good laughs. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
I think we are the “turkeys” and on the dinner menu. Our governor and his gang flew to Texas for a “secret meeting” to decide how to carve us up. They got caught—shame, shame, shame.
Have you gotten your insurance renewals for this year? I had one policy where the premium doubled. I decided to call that the “Landry Tort Tax”—and I didn’t get to vote on it.
Politics, we’re told, makes strange bedfellows, and Mr. Far-Right Republican was sleeping with the Democratic trial attorneys to help him capture the governor’s mansion in the primary. The bill for trial attorneys helping Landry get elected is coming due, and those of us with car insurance are picking up the tab.
Landry and our insurance commissioner, Tim Temple, consider insurance a “crisis,” but they are at odds on how to fix this mess in the legislative session.
According to the Cato Institute, Louisiana’s litigation environment is the third-worst in the country, and some refer to our state as “tort hell.” Suing people and companies is not an industry on which to build a state’s economy.
McCollister also criticizes the Louisiana Supreme Court for its lax punishment for District Judge Eboni Johnson Rose and gives kudos to EBR School Superintendent, Lamont Cole, for his courage to close and merge schools.
