The Advocate. June 9, 2024.
Editorial: Session was jam-packed with action, but its impact less clear
If there’s a word for the annual legislative session that ended last week — indeed, for the three sessions that lawmakers have held since they took office in January — it might be “frenetic.”
All newly elected politicians set out to seize the momentum from their victories, but Gov. Jeff Landry, bolstered by a friendly Legislature comprised of supermajorities from his own Republican Party, pursued so many major changes that following the action felt like drinking from a firehouse.
After upending the way Louisiana holds many elections and rolling back bipartisan criminal justice reform measures in a pair of special sessions, the Legislature used the regular session to plow through a long checklist of conservative priorities. These included hot-button social issues such as hurtful legislation restricting how schools address LGBTQ+ issues as well as business-friendly bills to loosen regulation on insurance companies.
Landry was so determined to signal a new direction that his press office’s list of “major wins” from the session noted six bills that were substantially similar to measures that his Democratic predecessor John Bel Edwards had vetoed.
It’s no secret that we generally supported those vetoes, and we worry that the newly passed bills will make life harder for already vulnerable young people, block commonsense health measures in case of a future pandemic and prevent citizens from keeping an eye on police. Likewise, we continue to believe in the largely overturned 2017 criminal justice reforms, which reduced the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, saved money and didn’t demonstrably make Louisianans less safe.
Yet we also leave this busy stretch focused on developments that give us hope for the future.
Some of that hope springs from the governor’s agenda. After a political campaign in which he often used New Orleans as a foil, Landry stepped up as a supportive partner to the city, offering state help to combat crime and untangle the mess that is the Sewerage & Water Board — although we do wish he had listened to law enforcement leaders who backed narrow exceptions to the permitless concealed carry bill he’d previously signed, another measure that Edwards had wisely vetoed.
And much of the hope comes from the Legislature, which in its best moments put aside politics and focused on solving problems. We applaud lawmakers from both parties who pushed to accept federal money to feed poor students who are out of school for the summer, and who helped residents caught in a spiral of unfair fines from the Office of Motor Vehicles.
We’re glad they allocated significant excess revenue toward long-backlogged needs such as roads, higher ed facilities and drinking water infrastructure.
And we applaud the Senate in particular for wisely slowing down a headlong race to offer public money to all families who want to send their kids to private school — another major conservative wish list item — no matter the cost, and for blocking what would have been a chaotically quick rewrite of the state’s constitution.
We were also heartened to see some lawmakers push back on measures to significantly reduce government transparency and expand Landry’s — and future governors’ — appointment power, although we think the measures they did approve still go too far.
Even with one party firmly in charge of government, we hope to see less legislative haste in the months and years ahead and more sober-minded deliberation over important policies, now that these first frenetic sessions are behind us.
No question, Landry and lawmakers did a lot during their first five months in office.
As for how much they improved the lives of Louisiana’s people, time will tell.
END