Parents worried about their children’s safety as they go to Parkway High School in Bossier City should be furious right now with Gov. Jeff Landry. So should parents who want tutoring in Crowley, and parents who expected a new athletic field at Fontainebleau High School in Mandeville, or new tennis and pickleball courts in Watson, near Denham Springs.
Families who want better parks in Coushatta, Martin, Hall Summit, Lacombe, Shreveport, Arabi, Benton and Metairie should be seething against Landry.
Residents with sewer problems in Minden should blame their drainage problems on Landry. Ditto for motorists who want a better bridge in Plain Dealing and better roads and economic development in Breaux Bridge.
In what can only be described as a combination of pettiness, bullying and an ego-driven power trip, all these projects that were passed by both the state House and state Senate. These were not vetoes justifiable by budgetary concerns. These were not vetoes based on philosophical principles. These vetoes were entirely due to politics — politics of a most unsavory kind.
Residents of all these communities should hold Landry responsible for making them the victims when his selfish dispute is not with them but with local legislators. The ordinary citizens are the political equivalent of innocent bystanders of an attempted drive-by shooting that misses its intended targets.
Because of Landry, and only because of Landry, their quality of living will be diminished from what it otherwise would have been.
What happened was this: Of Landry’s 17 line-item vetoes of relatively inexpensive but much-needed construction projects, 16 just so happened to kill items sponsored by Republicans who dared oppose the governor on a completely unrelated bill. And even on that bill, Landry’s biggest obvious interest wasn’t good government, but political gamesmanship. In other words, the vetoes were a crass political power play rooted in an earlier crass political power play.
Landry, you see, seems to have a political animus against Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple. Landry was pushing a bill to give the commissioner — whoever it may be in the future — the arbitrary power to reject rate requests from insurance companies, without requiring that the commissioner base his decision on actuarial data.
There’s no defensible reason, via logic or philosophy, to push that arbitrary power onto the commissioner. Landry gave his true objective away when he told radio host Moon Griffon that once the bill becomes law, In other words, Landry isn’t doing anything about rates; he’s just setting up the blame game so it falls on the commissioner.
All of which is background, making Landry’s power play look even more petty. Yet even if the underlying bill at the real heart of this matter were one of an honorable philosophical stance rather than a petty blame game, Landry’s vetoes still would be unseemly.
Granted, it is standard, old-style political hardball to grant or withhold support depending on how cooperative a fellow politician is. Even political hardball, though, usually pays at least some homage to context and proportionality. Landry’s line-item vetoes lack both.
Unless a single bill is really do or die for a governor’s substantive agenda, opposition to that bill from those otherwise the governor’s allies hardly qualifies as a major political affront — especially if the bill passes anyway, which the “blame the insurance commissioner” bill did.
And even then, political retribution is more legitimately aimed toward insider-baseball status, such as the granting or withholding of plum committee assignments. Instead, Landry’s fit of pique results in blocking objectively reasonable projects whose prime beneficiaries would not have been the politicians themselves but the Louisiana constituents they serve.
As in: “Hah: If you won’t help me pass a bill that lets me blame the insurance commissioner for high rates, your constituents will still have unsafe road access to their children’s school in Bossier City.” Or: “You want a safer bridge in Plain Dealing? Sorry, dude, if your people have accidents, but you voted against me, so your people can stuff it.”
Unfortunately, Landry has made a habit of this sort of bullying power play, to the detriment of ordinary Louisianans. Witness the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East which, as I write, still literally lacks a quorum of appointed members even in the midst of hurricane season, and which is riven by discord , all because of Landry’s anti-reformist, power-grabbing schemes there.
Landry should learn that the days of Huey Long are long past. Louisianans these days are less likely to reward petty tyrants than (figuratively speaking) to throw them out on their ears.
