Louisiana’s Errand Boy Caucus
Donald Trump is the real House speaker; why repealing the state income tax is a terrible idea; more condemnation for Sen. John Kennedy; and is the LSU president's pay huge raise unconstitutional?
I often hear people from Louisiana celebrate that the two top U.S. House leaders are from Louisiana. The comment usually is like: “I may not agree with them, but it’s a good thing for our state that two of the most powerful people in Washington are from Louisiana.”
It’s never been clear to me what great benefit Louisiana derives from all this supposed power.
Can you point to anything earth-shattering or remarkable that Speaker Mike Johnson or Majority Leader Steve Scalise have delivered to Louisiana because of their powerful positions? I can’t.
But there’s another problem with celebrating that Johnson and Scalise are the two top leaders of the U.S. House:
They’re not.
Donald Trump is the de facto speaker. Johnson and Scalise are his errand boys.
Johnson wouldn’t have a desk in the speaker’s office without Trump anointing him last year.
And Johnson wouldn’t have held the job this long if Trump hadn’t kept the far-right hyenas, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, at bay after the House passed a bill to prevent a government shutdown that the most conservative members opposed.
Remember a few months ago when Democratic and Republican leaders were poised to pass a bipartisan immigration reform deal? Speaker Trump intervened to kill the deal because it threatened to deprive him of a campaign issue.
But now, Speaker Trump wants a government shutdown and is sending messages to his Errand Boy Caucus to make it happen. Johnson,
On Wednesday, Trump posted these instructions for Johnson on his social media site, Truth Social:
Johnson followed Trump’s orders and put an unserious, fatally flawed bill on the House floor. He knew it could not pass, and it has increased the possibility of a government shutdown. The bill failed on Wednesday night in a 220-202 vote.
The New York Times reported: “Even with a Sept. 30 deadline approaching to fund the government, Mr. Johnson had pulled the plug on the vote last week as it became clear that his plan would not have the necessary support. But the speaker, under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump and the hard right to insist on the proposal, plunged ahead on Wednesday anyway, working to show members of his party that he was willing to fight for their principles.”
In a barnburner of a piece in the Washington Post this week, columnist Dana Milbank laid all the chaos in the House at Trump’s feet:
In lieu of consequential legislating, [GOP House members} passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.
Republicans themselves know they’ve been a disaster. “Our Republican House majority has failed completely,” Greene has said.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), stood on the House floor and demanded: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did.”
The chaos has one source. While Johnson and his House GOP colleagues may think they’ve been hearing the voice of God, they’ve actually been heeding the voice of the “Orange Jesus,” as Tennessee Republican Rep. Mark Green called Trump (in Liz Cheney’s telling).
Johnson owes his job entirely to Trump, who backed Johnson’s speakership bid last year and shot down Greene’s effort to oust him in May. Johnson has reciprocated by relinquishing control of the House agenda to Trump, most prominently when the speaker, responding to Trump’s orders, killed a bipartisan border-security bill — the toughest in decades — of the sort Johnson himself had been demanding for months.
With each election since Trump became a political force a decade ago, the House GOP caucus has swelled with ever-more-exotic hooligans, saboteurs and conspiracy theorists in the MAGA mold.
The madness of eliminating the state income tax
Former Louisiana state budget director Stephen Winham recently wrote a letter to the Baton Rouge Advocate in response to Treasurer John Fleming and others’ proposals to abolish the state income tax.
I’m not here to question why the paper did not run it. That’s their call. But I asked Steve for permission to share his thoughts with readers here because I think he raises important points about why Louisiana lawmakers should not rush headlong off this cliff:
Louisiana does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem." ["Call renewed for repealed income tax", September 1, 2024]. I suppose State Treasurer Fleming considers this a profound statement of fact.
Having spent two decades in the state executive budget office and more than a decade as its director, I can assure you this is not only one of the stalest comments in budget history, but the most disingenuous. Though I've been retired for quite some time, I still cringe when I hear it.
I'm sure Dr. Fleming's comments warmed the hearts of many readers who believe we can eliminate the state income tax, and others, not replace them, and be perfectly fine. After all, many believe as Dr. Fleming says, "Louisiana spends too much and wastes too much, just like the federal government does." If that is true, and everybody knows it, why haven't we done something about it? For a clue, let's look at a front-page headline in that same day's paper: "Louisiana lawmakers spent $113M on 'pet projects.'"
During my tenure in state government, hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts were recommended by my office, the Legislative Fiscal Office, and others. For several years we ranked every single state program in a priority order with which few could argue in hope the lowest priorities could be cut. How many of these hundreds of programs do you think actually got cut and remained cut? I can only think of one off the top of my head, a very small one. I can point to a multitude that have been added.
Dr. Fleming is making political statements from his safe position as State Treasurer that feed a myth many people want desperately to believe. The fact is we have both revenue and spending problems and our leaders are doing too little to actually fix them. We all need to ask them why.
The governor recommends budgets and executes the enacted budgets, but our state legislature actually appropriates the money that gets spent and enacts the taxes that provide the funding. We can complain to each other all day, but until those who should be accountable are held accountable little will change.
Dr. Fleming can do very little to fix our fiscal problems. Our governor and the legislature can do a whole lot more. Let's all start expecting more from them.
More condemnation for Sen. John Kennedy’s bigotry
In my previous post, I condemned Sen. John Kennedy’s bigoted, outrageous attack on Maya Berry, director of the Arab American Institute, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Since then, Louisiana Illuminator editor Greg LaRose devoted an excellent column to Kennedy’s deplorable behavior. Here’s an excerpt:
[U]pon winning a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2017, Kennedy assumed a persona that’s equal parts Foghorn Leghorn, Huckleberry Hound and Jar-Jar Binks — a chimera unwittingly spawned from the Sid and Morty Krofft laboratory.
Louisiana deserves better than a mean-spirited caricature in the U.S. Senate. At the very least, Kennedy needs to be sent a message that the level of rudeness he displayed Tuesday toward Berry doesn’t sit well with the home crowd.
More importantly, Louisiana needs to have a zero-tolerance policy for the people we elected to represent us: No racism, no bigotry, no misogyny, no dogmatism, no more refusal to budge from intransigent views.Until we do, brace yourselves for more embarrassment.
In the Baton Rouge Advocate, D.C. reporter Mark Ballard also examined the incident. I was happy Mark called me for a comment:
“He should be censured. Joseph McCarthy was censured for the same type of questioning,” said Bob Mann, a retired LSU journalism professor and former who worked for U.S. Sens. Russell Long and John Breaux, both Louisiana Democrats.
Mann said adopting a “just asking the question” pose, Kennedy smeared Berry, Muslims, and Arab Americans by inferring support of terrorism and asking her to explain herself.“If you have evidence that she has sympathies for Hamas and Iran, then he should present that evidence and ask to explain," Mann said. "Instead, he has nothing to show, other than what a bigot would use.”
There’s something else about this Kennedy incident worth noting: It wasn’t that long ago that behavior like this would get a member condemned in the GOP.
Recall that in 2002, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was forced to step down after he praised then-South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign.
Kennedy’s recent comments were no less egregious or bigoted. What’s changed is that the GOP is now a party controlled by a virulent racist – Donald Trump. Trump’s open racism has given license to all sorts of bigotry and misogyny within his party.
Once, Kennedy might have paid a price for being so open with his bigotry. However, he’ll be rewarded and praised in today's GOP.
Does LSU President Bill Tate’s huge pay increase violate the Louisiana Constitution?
Louisiana's attorney general thinks LSU violates the state constitution by giving President Bill Tate a 100% pay increase. She posted this on her personal Twitter account on Wednesday:
The day after the General Election, the good people of Louisiana should start a grassroots recall effort of Senator Kennedy. He does not represent the temperament nor civility that we expect of our leaders. His example of bigotry in the hearing with Ms Berry tells a story, a story that we surly do not want our children or grandchildren to repeat. We, as a melting pot of people in Louisiana, are better than that. The Graham Nash song starts out, “teach your children well”; well, let’s not let Senator Kennedy teach, by his example, our children anymore.
There’s almost too much in your piece on which to comment. However, I will make one comment regarding Sen. John Kennedy; namely, what a disgrace of a US Senator he is! I have been a constituent of some good US Senators in another state and they served in their Senate office(s) with honor. John Kennedy’s performances as Senator are disgraceful to his office and to this constituent in Louisiana.