BATON ROUGE (AP) — House Speaker Jim Tucker says he doesn’t expect lawmakers to support sweeping changes to the state’s ethics enforcement laws.
Frank Simoneaux, the chairman of the Board of Ethics, objects to a law that moved judicial power from the ethics board to administrative law judges, who are hired by an appointee of the governor.
Tucker says lawmakers don’t want to revisit that issue, and he expects the Legislature would reject attempts to strip enforcement authority from the law judges. Instead, he says lawmakers would be willing to tweak the system to make improvements.
Also, Tucker says he doesn’t think lawmakers will ask the Louisiana Law Institute — a commission of lawyers, law school faculty and other experts — to examine the law and suggest revisions. The nonpartisan Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana suggested such a study.
