Saturday, March 15, 2025

Callous Disregard

One year ago today, I was in the midst of the most difficult day of my life. The morning of May 6, 2019, we had the nurses temporarily turn off my husband’s sedation so he could participate when doctors informed us there was nothing further they could do. The fever he had started running a couple of days after they had put him on a ventilator was MRSA, the antibiotic resistant staph infection. When asked if he wanted to keep fighting to live, he shook his head. When asked if he wanted us to let him go, he nodded slowly, once, twice, as the tears poured from his eyes, mine, and those of our kids.

The decision was clear, but removing and shutting down the various life-sustaining devices was a process which would take a full 24 hours.

We had to wait for that morning’s daily shot of blood thinner to wear off before they could remove the balloon pump helping support his weakened heart. That pump was fed in through an incision in the femoral artery in his groin. Once it was removed, it would be another 12 hours waiting for a clot to form there, so he wouldn’t bleed out when moved to a sitting position. He had to be in a sitting position so the ventilator they had put him on one week previously could be removed. And in the meantime, we asked that they change the programming of his internal pacemaker so that it did not trigger again, as it had eight times during his 10-day hospital stay.

We were all – his sister, me, our children and their spouses, one grandchild – able to spend time with him, saying our individual good-byes, but the overall waiting was anguishing. I believe his spirit, his soul, departed the body about 3:30 a.m. Finally, just before 8 a.m. they came in to remove the ventilator. Once that was done, we all encircled the bed, holding his hands and each other’s, watching through our curtains of tears, as his body struggled with fewer and more ragged breaths. After an agonizing seven-and-a-half-minutes, his body ceased to function.

No, it wasn’t COVID-19. Unlike those hospitalized with this virus, my husband was able to have the comfort of contact with his loved ones, hear them talk and feel their touch. Yet his struggle to breathe, both on and off a ventilator, was excruciating, and my heart breaks for each and every one of those struggling with this coronavirus.

And no, I didn’t expect anyone else to mark this day as I did, but in view of my heartbreaking memories, what I saw and heard coming out of the state Capitol could only be categorized as “callous disregard” for the value of life.

Meanwhile, at the Legislature today, one of the first things hitting my social media feed was this post from the executive director of the Louisiana Partnership for Children and Families, Susan East Nelson:

Rep. Rick Edmonds (R-Baton Rouge), who serves on House Appropriations, Education and Municipal Affairs, is the Vice President of the Louisiana Family Forum, and the Outreach Pastor for Bethany Church.

Callous disregard for the potential of spraying his neighbors with spit droplets and germs as his bubble pops.

Late in the morning, the Senate Insurance Committee heard four bills by Sen. Jay Luneau (D-Alexandria), designed to halt auto insurance rating practices practices proven to hike the premiums paid by certain sectors of the population.

The first of the measures to be heard, SB 14, would prohibit the use of credit scores in setting auto insurance rates. Sen. Luneau phrased the dilemma succinctly, asking, “The issue here is that if you’ve had a perfect driving record for 20 years, why should some credit problems you’ve had make you pay more for insurance?”

During Sen. Luneau’s presentation of this bill and of his subsequent measures, Sen. Kirk Talbot (R-River Ridge), the committee chair, was furiously texting with someone, and barely looked up from his phone.

Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon defended the practice, saying, “Credit worthiness has shown to be an accurate predictor of the likelihood of incurring a loss. If we ban the use of credit, then the insurance companies will pass along higher overall rates to all, as part of their cost of doing business in Louisiana.”

Rich Piazza, Chief Actuary for the Louisiana Department of Insurance, testified, “While this does not affect how much money insurance companies will pay because of their losses, not using credit ratings ends up subsidizing one part of the driving public at a cost to all the rest.”

The bill failed to pass.

“I don’t know why we treat the ladies of our state as second-class citizens when it comes to insurance rates, but SB 13 would prohibit using gender as a factor in setting vehicle insurance rates,” Luneau said of his next bill to be heard.

“Women live longer than men, so charging them more is actuarially sound,” Insurance Commissioner Donelon responded, before he launched into a rant.

“All of this was brought by the trial lawyers last year, as a red herring to distract from tort reform! It is discrimination on its face, and the only thing it will do is change who pays,” an agitated Donelon said before adding heatedly, “By the way, I got a letter last week from the Louisiana Bar Association, of which I am a member, supporting all of Sen. Luneau’s bills and opposing all the tort reform bills. I absolutely resent that and urge you, don’t take the bait!”

Sen. Luneau wasn’t going to totally turn the other cheek, so he gave a staunch but soft-spoken response, expressing his disappointment in the Insurance Commissioner’s attack.

“I have tried to stay away from personalities, but I am quite honestly tired of having a statewide elected official castigating me, trying to besmirch my reputation based simply on my profession,” Luneau said sadly.

“Look, this is common sense. We should not be discriminating against women!” he remonstrated with the committee members. “If we continue to let insurance companies do whatever they want, we’re never going to get our rates down. Regulation is the only way to do it. These guys make a lot of money. I’m not against profits, but this is a product we are mandated to buy.”

That bill failed.

SB 15 would prohibit raising someone’s auto insurance rates when their spouse dies.

“A lady I know had a spouse who was bedridden for six years, and suddenly her driving became a worse risk after his death? How does that make sense?” Luneau asked.

Donelon was still fired up, and ready to whine about how he has been treated over this issue.

“I got phone calls, and special interest groups paid for ads claiming I was discriminating against widows. That’s just a lie! I am treating single women – whether widowed, divorced, or never married – the same. They pay higher rates because they are driving more, because they are not sharing the driving duties with a partner.”

(It wasn’t that long ago that Donelon “mansplained” this issue and the gender rate thing to me, a widow.)

Luneau shook his head ruefully. “Do you hear what the ‘facts’ are – they’re driving more? What about he lady I told you about? For her and how many others that is certainly not true? It’s fiction. It’s smoke and mirrors. And it’s unconscionable to charge someone more because their spouse dies.”

That didn’t pass either, though Luneau’s SB 16, to prohibit premium penalties being assessed when a military member has been deployed, advanced without objection.

“I’m glad to know the Insurance Commissioner supports the bill this time. Apparently he likes military members better than he likes women and poor people.”

Small group of protesters outside the Capitol, urging passage of HCR 58. Photo courtesy: Paul Braun on Twitter

The most egregious display of callous disregard came through the afternoon and into the early evening hours, with the House and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing testimony for and against HCR 58, a resolution to strip the Governor of some of his emergency powers.

The measure, filed late last week and authored by the House majority leader, Rep. Blake Miguez (R-New Iberia), is being brought to try and force the Governor to fully reopen the state immediately.

“This removes the governor’s ability to extend the stay-at-home order, and removes his enforcement power,” Miguez explained. “We have to take a balanced approach to protect both lives and livelihoods. People back home are losing their livelihoods, while the governor is taking a one-size-fits-all approach, and we need to empower the parishes and municipalities to to as they see best.

“The Governor is a pitbull. This doesn’t turn him into a chihuahua, but it does take his teeth away,” Miguez continued. “This is a respectful request. I would be happy to throw this resolution in the waste bin with a phone call from the Governor saying we’re reopening the state now. Instead, we’re doing this from desperation. We need to start reopening today. We needed to start reopening yesterday.”

Rep. Dodie Horton (R-Haughton) was completely supportive of the measure, though she had a couple of questions for Miguez.

“I’m a healthy person, and I don’t wear a mask because I’m an American, and I can choose. I mean, have you ever known healthy people to be quarantined in the history of our country? Have you ever known our economy to be shut down? I mean, are we in Nazi Germany? Seriously, we should have opened May first!” Horton effused. “But what does this actually do? Will our hair salons and nail salons be able to open immediately if we pass this resolution? And can the Governor just ignore it?”

“I’d like to think and feel the Governor will follow the law. These powers were given to the Governor by the Legislature, and the Legislature can take them away,” Miguez said, then added with a smirk, “He doesn’t have veto power of this because it’s a resolution.”

Rep. Blake Miguez and Rep. Royce Duplessis (inset) spar in HGA on Wed. May 6

Vice chairman of the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, Rep. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans), had some questions for Rep. Miguez.

“Do you think the Governor enjoys making these tough decisions?”

“No, but that’s the cost of being in public service,” Miguez replied.

“You’ve said you want to save livelihoods, but you realize you have to save lives first, because you have to live in order to have a livelihood?” Duplessis asked , somewhat rhetorically. “Yet throughout your entire presentation, there been a lack of acknowledgment of the human cost. You said you’ve consulted with the Attorney General. Did you consult with the Department of Health?”

“No, because I’m not trying to set up a health plan,” Miguez answered, snippily.

“I don’t think anyone wants to open the economy faster than the Governor, and he’s been consulting with the experts, which you have not on this resolution.” Then turning to the committee chairman, Rep. Stephen Dwight (R-Lake Charles), Duplessis asked, “Can we get a fiscal note on this?”

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Miguez objected. Then when the chair ruled one would be requested, Miguez got angry. “You want to talk about a fiscal note? What about the fiscal impact on the business owners of this state? And experts have weighed in – the White House, the CDC.”

“Tell me how that goes with your assertion that locals, being closer, know best, to rely on the feds versus state authorites?” Duplessis asked. “Is it true or not true that a majority of the people believe the Governor is doing a good job with his response?”

“That depends on which poll you read,” Miguez said. “People in my district, people in our churches support this legislation.”

“Earlier you said this is a ‘respectful request.’ I think it’s more like a shot across the bow,” Duplessis remarked.

“I said I would toss it in the trash if he changed his mind,” Miguez said, gloatingly. “And there are more nuclear options on the table than this. I’m trying to be respectful.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards’ executive counsel Matthew Block spoke in opposition to the bill (as, ultimately, did Louisiana Health Secretary Dr. Courtney Phillips and Assistant Secretary for Public Health, Dr. Alex Billioux.)

Matthew Block, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ executive counsel.

“Obviously, the Governor does not support this resolution,” Block told committee members. “While Mr. Miguez and I don’t see the world the same way, I do appreciate the oppty to address this. Recovery from this is not something the Governor, the Legislature, the parishes can do on their own. Each has a critical role to play and this has to be done together. Without working together, we’re not going to have the recovery we need. If we just go back to how things were before, we’re soon back in the same boat as in March, with the highest per capita number of cases in the world.”

Rep. Tanner Magee (R-Houma), the House Speaker Pro Temp, quizzed Block, “You said Legislature has critical role in recovery. Don’t we have a critical role in the response?”

“Of course,” Block replied.

(Block forbore to point out that playing a role, even a critical one, is nowhere near the same thing as directing the play.)

“Didn’t the Governor say, I think it was in March, that we would run out of ventilators?” Magee asked.

“Yes, but fortunately that didn’t happen,” Block answered.

“I believe the Governor said, ‘It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.’ To my mind, that’s a promise, and it didn’t come true,” Magee came back. “My mother taught me, ‘to trust is good. To not trust is better’.”

“What you are creating with this resolution is a hodge-pode of responses to the biggest health disaster in more than one hundred years,” Block remonstrated with the committee members. “You are taking away the authority of the state, which is the funnel between federal and local governments for emergency management. That’s the way the federal laws and state laws are designed.”

“We mourn the loss of every life that COVID claims, but there’s the slippery slope of shutting down our constitutional rights,” Rep. Valarie Hodges (R-Denham Springs) declared. “Our constitutional rights supercede everything else that we are facing.”

There was a motion to delay a vote on the resolution until after the Governor makes his scheduled Monday announcement regarding plans for lifting the stay home orders, but it failed to pass. And with a 9-7 vote, the committee moved the resolution to the full House, where, with suspensions of the rules, it could be voted on as swiftly as Thursday evening.

Blast From The Past

This column is *not* about the hilarious 1999 movie comedy of the same title. There is, however, a New Orleans connection. Blast From The Past was directed and co-written by Hugh Wilson the man behind the teevee cult classic, Frank’s Place, which was set in a New Orleans eatery.

Speaking of New Orleans restaurants, Chef’s Brigade NOLA still needs your help. Here’s a message from co-founder and Bayou Brief writer, Troy Gilbert:

Please help if you can. I recently donated for a second time.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Perhaps this column should be called Blasts From The Past since there are two segments but that’s not as catchy. This may make my board of former Picayune editors shudder but I’m going with blast. Please don’t blast me for my singularity, y’all.

FESTING IN PLACE: Jazz Fest 2020 was initially postponed and moved to the fall. It became obvious that it would still not be safe in October, so the Fest was cancelled. Cancelling one of the city’s signature events is a sign of how seriously this pandemic is taken locally. It resulted in widespread mourning among music lovers in the Gret Stet of Louisiana and beyond. To learn more about the economic and cultural impact of the cancellation read Alison Fensterstock’s piece at NPR.org.

WWOZ-FM stepped into the breach with Festing In Place, which evoked past Jazz Fests only without heat, horseshit, mud, or porta potties. I, for one, try not to frequent the latter. I head for the grandstand where, one memorable year, an attendant proudly proclaimed, “It’s the place to be, to make wee-wee.” I am not making this up.

Back to Festing In Place. It was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. It was 8 days of fun and music. They even had their own scheduling cubes a la the real thing.

The emotional peak was the final Sunday. It featured part of Bruce Springsteen’s legendary 2006 set, which included a song written in the aftermath of 9/11, My City Of Ruins. But it applied equally to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and the Federal Flood:

The Boss had everyone in tears in both 2006 and 2020, even your humble columnist, and I don’t weep easily. Sunday’s replay united the city, reminding us of what I like to call  The Spirit Of ’05.

Festing In Place concluded with a stirring 1994 set by the Neville Brothers. They closed out nearly every Jazz Fest on the big ass Fess/Acura stage between 1980 and 2012. I was fortunate enough to become acquainted with the brothers after moving to my 13th Ward neighborhood in 2000. Art, Charles, and other relatives lived nearby, which is why I call it Faubourg Neville.

The Neville Brothers were important to me long before that. My first date with my wife was seeing the Nevilles at Tipitina’s. They were late that night. I subsequently learned that they were habitually tardy. One of many reasons they’re the ultimate New Orleans band as far as I’m concerned.

The Neville Brothers 1994 set can be found at the WWOZ archives. Here’s a video clip of their closing medley from 4 years earlier:

We’ll never see their like again. RIP, Art and Charles.

The last word of the segment goes to Herriman biographer, parade route book signer, and former Gambit editor Michael Tisserand:

LOOSE TONGUE: Former New Orleans Mayor C Ray Nagin was released from the slammer recently:

“Nagin, who served two tumultuous terms in office that ended in 2010, was found guilty by a jury in 2014 on 20 counts of wire fraud, bribery and tax evasion after a trial that captivated the city. He was the first New Orleans mayor ever convicted of corruption. He reported to prison that fall to begin serving a 10-year term, but went home to his family in Frisco, Texas, on Monday after completing a little over half of his sentence at a prison camp in Texarkana, Texas.

Nagin’s early release at age 63 came at the discretion of the Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the Department of Justice, which has been under orders from U.S. Attorney General William Barr to release vulnerable inmates into home confinement when possible. A spokesman for the BOP said he could not comment on the specifics of Nagin’s current arrangement but said that he was under the supervision of a federal probation office in Dallas, and that, all told, 1,576 federal inmates — less than 1% of the total population — had been moved into home confinement.”

There was a veritable orgy of social media dumbassery after C Ray’s release. It was divided between those who believed his original sentence was too lenient and that he shouldn’t have been released early and those who thought he got a raw deal and shouldn’t have been locked up in the first place. I am in neither camp. Prison is supposed to be punishment, not torture. Besides, he’s still under house arrest, which is not dissimilar to what most of us are experiencing during the lockdown. But we don’t have to wear an ankle bracelet that lets the feds track our movements.

C Ray Nagin was the wrong man at the wrong time. The first three years of his tenure were relatively uneventful but there were warning signs. He came off as a well-meaning goofball whose business background left him unprepared for office. In some ways, he was a proto-Trump; only much better looking. Then again, who isn’t?

C Ray’s shallowness, vanity, and lack of political savvy became a huge problem after Katrina and the Federal Flood. He began to act even more erratically. When Air Force One landed not long after the storm, Nagin kept everyone waiting by taking an epic shower and primping like a teenybopper. Vanity thy name is C Ray Nagin.

After winning re-election, Nagin lost interest in the job and the city’s recovery. His erratic behavior accelerated culminating in a threat to “cold cock” then WWL-TV reporter Lee Zurick for a story he did not like. He also began complaining about financial sacrifices he had made in becoming Mayor. That, in turn, led to the grifting that landed him in prison.

As a blogger/pundit during Nagin’s time as Mayor, I had a lot of fun at his expense. I called him a “shiny-headed boob” among other things. My friend Leigh Checkman of the Liprap’s Lament blog dubbed Nagin “the Walking Id” for his propensity to shoot from the lip and say remarkably dumb and/or inflammatory things. Who among us can forget the Chocolate City speech?

I was president of my neighborhood association during the Nagin administration, so I had some up close and personal encounters with C Ray. I was never impressed by his intellect or political acuity, but his vanity was off-the-hook. I recall seeing the Mayor primping in front of a mirror in a hotel lobby. In a voice dripping with sarcasm I said, “Lookin’ pretty.” He smiled and said without a hint of irony, “I do, don’t I?”  He resumed checking the shine on his bald pate. I am not making this up.

Nagin’s corruption trial was a catastrophe for the former Mayor. Against the advice of his experienced attorney, John Jenkins, he insisted on testifying. It was a disaster on direct examination and even worse under cross-examination. He thought he was coming off as a likable man persecuted by his enemies. The jury saw him as a jerk who cared only for himself and his family when the city was struggling to recover.

Nagin was convicted, then caught a break. Judge Ginger Berrigan could have sentenced him to up to 20 years but threw a much smaller book at him, 10 years. Now he’s out of jail and living with his family in Frisco, Texas.

The Nagin story is a cautionary tale about electing anyone who promises to run government like a business. They are nothing alike. The country as a whole is learning that in 2020 as the Trump regime runs it into the ground. It’s not pretty even if C Ray was.

Ray Nagin’s loose tongue cost him his freedom. 

The last word of the segment goes to Neil Finn:

Finally, I recently posted my hitherto unpublished law school murder mystery online at First Draft. It’s set in New Orleans in 1991 and 1992. In 2020, it almost qualifies as a historical novel. The title, Tongue In The Mail, is taken from another Neil Finn song. What is it with Neil Finn and tongues? If you’re interested, click here and scroll back to Chapter 1.

That concludes this edition of the 13th Ward Rambler. See you in two weeks.

Not All Bandits Wear Their Masks

You could say Monday morning’s reconvening of Louisiana’s full House of Representatives was a live metaphoric illustration of “unmasking motives,” as a majority of the Republican majority in the chamber declined to wear anti-viral masks while congregated on the House floor.

While the vast majority of the full House business consisted of reading in new resolutions and assigning bills to committees, it was announced the two money panels – Ways and Means, concerned with the flow of state income, and Appropriations, which deals with spending that income – would meet simultaneously, upon adjournment of the complete body. Neither meeting had appeared on the main legislative website’s daily schedule until moments after they were announced on the House floor, when poof! There they were, complete with agendas.

House Speaker Clay Schexnayder declines to wear his mask .

Long known to state Capitol insiders as the “Ways to be Mean” committee, the panel charged with first vetting of tax measures, as well as composing the annual capital outlay bill, is chaired this term by Rep. Stuart Bishop (R-Lafayette). Eleven members are Republicans: six are Democrats.

Monday, they spent nearly half their total meeting time chewing on HB 506, by Rep. Phillip DeVillier (R-Eunice). Generally, the bill proposes a gradual reduction in the state severance tax on oil, a half-percent per year for the next eight years, but as amended it now includes price triggers that would cut oil and natural gas severance taxes by 80-percent, possibly as soon as the July 1 start of this next fiscal year. Currently, Louisiana severance tax is 12.5% of the price per barrel of oil at the time that oil is pumped out of the ground.

DeVillier is the legislative author of the bill, but it quickly became clear that Gifford Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), is the true author. (Briggs is the ventriloquist here, with DeVillier as his dummy.)

Briggs told the committee, “We did a survey of our members that we’re actually releasing today. Four out of five of the producers that we have in our membership right now responded they have already taken steps to shut in production. The State Mineral Board is already looking at what it can do, because it knows production is going to be shut in. When production is shut in, royalty checks aren’t being distributed. And up in north Louisiana, south Louisiana, there are thousands of people getting royalty checks every month right now that they’re using to take care of their family because maybe they’re not working because jobs are closed down. So if we can keep the wells flowing, then we can continue to generate some severance tax for the state, we can continue to generate royalty checks and we can continue to have people that work. If we don’t, we are going to see massive shut in across the state. And twelve-and-a-half percent of zero production is zero dollars for the state and everyone else.”

(Here comes the punchline…spoiler alert: It’s about jobs.)

“We’ve got billions in wages that are going to be lost because of the crisis the industry’s facing,” Briggs added, before coming as close as he dared to spelling out the real reason for the plummet in the price of oil. “The crisis we are facing is huge, and it’s not gonna go away when everybody can go back to work because of the challenges of the global demand issue.”

Rep. Matthew Willard (inset) quizzes LOGA’s Gifford Briggs (center left) and Rep. Phillip DeVillier (unmasked on right)

Rep. Matthew Willard (D-New Orleans) had some sharply pointed questions for Briggs and DeVillier.

“Did we suddenly become the state with the highest severance tax rate in the country?” Willard wondered.

“Uh, no.,” Briggs replied. “We’ve had the highest severance tax rate in the country for a long time, which is one of the reasons why we see declining oil production, declining investment, declining jobs, and declining revenues in this state.”

“Have you heard from any oil and gas companies that would potentially relocate to Louisiana or expand their production capabilities because of this bill?” Willard asked

Briggs squirmed a bit before answering, “Um, uh, this legislation is not going to be enough to make a company relocate their headquarters here. It will make companies invest. And it will make companies that are here today that are producing oil – especially in this downturn – have the ability to continue producing it, uh, at such low prices.”

Willard then turned directly to DeVillier. “Looking at the fiscal note for this bill, we’re looking at more than $10-million lost in revenue in the first year, and after five years, we’re looking at more than a hundred-million dollars in lost revenue. How do you propose that we fill that budget gap? As the state responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are dealing with a budget that I would suggest is at best precarious. So is it wise right now to move forward with a bill that will remove tens, hundreds of millions of dollars from the state of Louisiana?”

“That’s a great question and something that we certainly need to be aware of,” DeVillier responded, with a grin. (He was not wearing a mask over his face, though he had a bandana tied around his neck.) “How do we deal with the loss? Certainly the fiscal note says that we will have a loss. But I am of the opinion that when we tax something less, we will create more. So we will produce more. More jobs create income, income creates sales taxes. Possibly people buy homes which means property taxes. Those things build the tax base. We’re going to produce much more revenues. And so when you look at the fiscal note dealing with just the severance tax changes, I don’t believe it tells the whole truth.”

(Yes, indeed. Don’t trust the legislature’s fiscal experts. Don’t believe the numbers or facts.)

Briggs jumped in, then, saying, “We’re the highest paying industry in the state. Our average wages are the highest in the state. And so when we talk about losing the 23,000 workers that are directly employed in the oil and gas industry, according to what our members are telling us in the next 90 days, is 2.3 billion in lost wages – because it is uneconomical to produce oil and natural gas.”

“Are other states experiencing similar decreases in production and exploration right now, or is this a unique problem just for the state of Louisiana?” Willard asked.

“We’re seeing a massive shutdown and shut in of production across the country,” Briggs admitted. “It is a global crisis that we are facing, where the value of the product that we sold has decreased by 85-percent. That’s the challenge that we’re facing that’s not going to be going away.”

“The severance issue – how long has it been around?” Rep. Buddy Mincey (R-Denham Springs) wanted to know. “How long have we been tryin’ and how long has oil and gas been tryin’ to bring those rates down now?”

“We haven’t really looked at oil severance before this, saying we need to bring it down,” Briggs admitted. “We’ve seen such a shift to natural gas that we haven’t really looked at it. We hadn’t really started to lose our aggressive oil production like we have in the last four years. And so for our members it continued to bubble up and they asked us to address it. I think they would like it to be a lot lower than eight-and-a-half percent, but trying to do it in a manner that would ease the transition for the state was the best we thought we could do at this time.”

“I hear it will increase production. How will we gauge the results of this, reducing the severance? How does the industry plan to come back and say, yes, it did increase production by so much?” Mincey asked.

“Right now, we’ve got one rig drilling for oil. If we start lowering the rate, and we can move back to two rigs, then we’re moving in the right direction and restoring some confidence,” Briggs replied.

Weak factual support and spurious claims notwithstanding, the Ways and Means Committee renewed their allegiance to the oil and gas industry, sending the severance tax-cutting bill to the House floor with a vote of 14-3 in favor.

Meanwhile, across the hall in Appropriations, committee members received abbreviated previews of the possible revenue changes that will be detailed at next Monday’s meeting of the Revenue Estimating Conference. A fair portion of the more intensive attention focused on mineral revenues, and the state’s oil and gas industry as a whole.

Slide showing unemployment claims, as presented by Dr. Stephen Barnes to House Appropriations on 5/4/2020.

Dr. Stephen Barnes, who replaced longtime REC member Dr, Jim Richardson as the economist designee on the panel last fall, gave the Appropriations Committee a brief rundown on the anti-COVID measures’ affect on unemployment claims, drilling down on the mining sector numbers, which include oil and gas workers.

“We know the oil and gas industry has taken a severe hit over the last month or so, and that’s something that hasn’t even really started to show up in the unemployment data yet,” Barnes said.”By regional perspective, Houma and Lafayette are on high alert, although they still haven’t seen real effects of the slowdown in oil and gas present themselves to the extent that we expect they will.”

(Note: this does coincide with what Briggs had been telling the committee across the hall – that exploration and production are preparing to shut down.)

Legislative Fiscal analyst Greg Albrecht went next, telling the budget panel by way of preface, “I’ve been here nearly 35 years, and this is the strangest situation I’ve ever seen. I can’t give complete numbers until the REC meeting May 11th, but I can tell you, without a doubt, that the forecast will go down, and the order of magnitude here is going to be substantial.”

Albrecht ticked off the larger components of Louisiana’s income streams, saying, “Sales tax will drop off. Income tax will drop off. And mineral revenue will be the biggest drop off.”

Asked if there was any hope of that changing soon, Albrecht was blunt.

“Mineral revenue may start recovering, but not until the price of oil gets close to $50 per barrel. We need demand to increase in order for the price to recover, but there’s a large inventory sitting out there. And we – the U.S. and the state of Louisiana – are part of the oversupply problem.”

There it is – what DeVillier didn’t understand and what Briggs would not say as clearly. The problem, created primarily by Saudi Arabia and Russia getting into an oil pricing limbo contest (how low can you go?), increased the worldwide supply of oil dramatically. That became a glut as the COVID pandemic spread and demand dropped precipitously, with much of the world’s population self-isolating to slow the contagion.

Until it is safe to move about freely again, we won’t be needing all the crude oil already pumped out of the ground and stored in tanks and tankers, or sitting, unflowing, in pipelines. If HB 506 passes, Louisiana will end up sacrificing much more than a gradual move toward reducing its mineral revenues by one third over the next eight years. Based on the wobbles of current oil prices under $30 per barrel, it will be the loss of 80 percent of the revenue from of what little production remains.

So, on second thought, DeVillier may have been right when he said, “When you look at the fiscal note dealing with just the severance tax changes, I don’t believe it tells the whole truth.”

Despite, or Just Plain Old Spite?

Despite the Governor’s extension of the statewide stay-at home proclamation to May 15, despite a House member having died from COVID-19, and despite the Senate President himself having been infected; the Louisiana Legislature is coming back into session tomorrow.

“We have got to get back and start doing our business,” Senate President Page Cortez said, after the Governor announced he would be extending his stay-at-home order another two weeks. “We are essential to government operations. We are just as essential as grocery stores and the Home Depots and Lowe’s of the world.”

State Rep. Ted James (D-Baton Rouge), who from late March through early April spent several terrifying days and nights hospitalized and battling for his life and breath due to COVID-related pneumonia, has said don’t expect him to be there.

“The virus isn’t going away in June. It is not going away in August. But we still have to have a budget by June 30,” Senate President Cortez said.

The committee meetings thus far scheduled for the beginning of this first week back don’t include the spending or revenue panels, and the bills on the agendas of the committees that are meeting don’t seem to have anything to do with resolving issues related to the pandemic.

Occupational licensing waivers for military families (HB 613), regulating how banks handle abandoned safe deposit boxes (HB 427), regulating electric-assisted bicycles (HB 514), forfeiture of property related to sex crimes (SB 383) – none of these seem especially urgent or pertinent to minimizing the overall effects of the virus on residents’ health or Louisiana’s economy.

But until the Revenue Estimating Conference holds its mid-May meeting, and we all hear what the Division of Administration’s Manfred Dix and the Legislative Fiscal Office’s Greg Albrecht offer as their best guesstimates of the economic impacts of the pandemic, there’s no target number for making the present budget balance or for planning a new one for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Why, then, is the Legislature reconvening now? It’s partly because the Republican leadership have been persuaded by their LABI masters that this is the optimal time to shove tort reform through.

When officially announcing the date and times of lawmakers’ return to work, Senate President Cortez pitched tort reform, i.e., changing access to the courts for those involved in vehicular accidents, as a financial relief measure that would help state residents with the impacts of corona virus. Cortez said that’s because proponents of those bills argue auto insurance premiums will be reduced once tort reform is enacted.

This is, of course, in direct contradiction to actual studies of the verifiable factors contributing to Louisiana’s generally exorbitant vehicle insurance premium rates. Those studies were revealed in full in the Bayou Brief’s Wrecked series, and were presented in testimony to the legislature last year.

Another motivation for resuming the legislative session before the Governor and federal or state health experts deem it wise or advisable to lift restrictions designed to reduce virus transmission is pure partisan gamesmanship. As our own Lamar White’s article disclosed, there’s memo from a GOP consultant that’s been circulated by Republican state lawmakers. It goes into detail about the power of semantics, listing “good words (words to use)” and “trap words (words to avoid)” in what is bluntly described as “a coordinated campaign aimed at politicizing and undermining the emergency orders issued by Gov. John Bel Edwards in curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Stop for a moment and think about all the implications of what that says. For the extremist true believers in the Louisiana Republican Party, it is not tragic enough to have close to 2,000 Louisiana residents dead of COVID-19, and nearly 30,000 here known to be infected. They are sharing ways to sabotage the governor’s emergency orders to curtail the pandemic. In other words, some legislators in the red uniforms want to win the game against the governor in blue so badly that they’re willing for their own teammates and you, their fans, to sicken and even die.

Another part of this entire scenario is a resolution that will likely get its introduction in the House on Monday morning or – at the latest – Tuesday. Rep. Alan Seabaugh (R-Shreveport) has been circulating a petition, seeking 53 House members to sign onto a resolution to overturn the governor’s emergency health declaration and stay-at-home orders. State law (RS 29:724) does include a provision permitting a simple majority of either the House or Senate to pass a resolution which would terminate the governor’s order declaring a state of disaster or emergency.

In the email to Republican lawmakers, Seabaugh says, “This may not be a perfect solution, but it is the only one on the table. Doing nothing is not an option!”

The Shreveport representative has taken his campaign to the airwaves, and, as has been his pattern during his previous verbal skirmishing with Gov. Edwards, spent some quality ranting and raving time on KEEL radio’s morning show, saying he is convinced the people of Louisiana can’t take too much more of the economic quarantine.

“Poverty kills more people every year than sickness or disease,” Seabaugh said on the radio program. “Poverty kills people…and right now what we’re doing is we’re forcing people into poverty.”

Gov. Edwards’ executive counsel Matthew Block has issued a letter to lawmakers, reminding them that under the Stafford Act, a state emergency declaration is required before money from federal disaster programs can be released. If legislators terminate the emergency declaration, that could halt Louisiana’s expected $1.8 billion share of the $2 trillion federal stimulus, among other things. That means each Louisiana resident who has gotten the $1200 stimulus payment would have to pay it back.

How is that going to help Louisiana’s people struggling with poverty?

Remarking that “it makes no sense” to overturn the emergency order, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne told The Advocate the state is expecting at least 75% of its costs to combat this coronavirus to be covered by the federal government – because of the emergency order. Dardenne said with about $586 million spent so far, the total could reach or exceed $662 million, “at which point the feds would pick up 90% of the tab.”

“Nonsensical” is a word JBE used, as well.

“Silly is not the right word,’ Edwards said at one of his virus update press conferences this past week. “It would be profoundly regrettable. That would just be completely irresponsible and nonsensical to be the only state in the nation without an emergency declaration in place for the public health emergency of COVID-19.”

Yet House Speaker Clay Schexnayder seems to be receptive to the concept of Seabaugh’s resolution, as he has put out a statement saying he is “incredibly frustrated with Governor Edwards’ unilateral decision” to extend the stay-at-home order and that “people are ready to re-open the economy.”

One could reasonably characterize Rep. Seabaugh as a recurrent thorn-in-the-side for Gov. John Bel Edwards. Even before Edwards was duly elected governor in November 2015, Seabaugh penned a Letter to the Editor, published in the USA-Today chain of newspapers in Shreveport, Monroe, Alexandria, Lafayette, and Opelousas, shading Edwards’ votes as a state representative and stances on issues in a way that prompted ten other House members to respond with their own letter. In it they call Seabaugh’s statements “distorted facts” and “offensive untruths.”

On Inauguration Day, in January 2016, speaking to NY Times about the Louisiana House breaking tradition and going with someone other than the governor’s choice for Speaker, Seabaugh made his differences with Edwards sound personal, rather than politically partisan. The Shreveport Republican said, “I think he thought he was going to push us around. He found out today, very clearly, that he can’t do that.”

Upon finally passing a budget in June 2016, after one regular and two contentious special sessions trying to deal with the nearly two billion-dollar fiscal shortfall Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal left behind, Seabaugh was continued with his invective toward the now Democratic denizen of the Governor’s Mansion. He wrote an op-ed, saying considering the size of the state, the budget was one-third larger than it should be. “If managed in a fiscally responsible manner, the amount of revenue currently generated by the state of Louisiana should lead to a massive budget surplus,” Seabaugh wrote. “Why no surplus this year? The answer is simple. Governor Edwards and his allies in the legislature don’t want one.”

In March 2018, during another special session attempting to come up with a more permanent fix than the temporary sales tax enacted in 2016, Rep. Alan Seabaugh got up on the floor of the House and called Gov. John Bel Edwards “a bald-faced liar.” Yet as we reported then, Seabaugh didn’t have the courage to subsequently answer the governor’s invitation to come up to the 4th Floor and have a little chat.

Seabaugh running out the clock in June 2018.

On June 4, 2018, Seabaugh played a pivotal role in the failure of that year’s second special and third overall session, by filibustering during the final minutes. As we reported at the time, the Shreveport Republican’s actions prevented reconsideration of a bill that would have put the budget, as is constitutionally required, in balance. Seabaugh openly admitted his purpose, saying his intent was “running out the clock.”

In the Governor’s primary last fall, Seabaugh threw his support to Congressman Ralph Abraham, who lost. Even after John Bel Edwards ultimately defeated Eddie Rispone on Saturday, Nov. 16, Seabaugh was sounding like a sore loser. First thing Monday morning after the Saturday decision by voters, he went on his local radio station promising the governor would face “more fights and more vetoes” during his second term.

Compare Seabaugh’s animosity toward Gov. John Bel Edwards to what’s been exhibited toward the governor by Attorney General Jeff Landry. The Edwards-Landry spats have clearly been partisan, but the A.G. did the decent and proper thing by coming out in support of the governor’s initial disaster declaration and stay-at-home order. Seabaugh’s hostility, on the other hand, has a personal edge to it that must be categorized as “spiteful.”

Take a look at who came out to tailgate across from the Governor’s Mansion Saturday, demonstrating their support for overriding the stay-at-home edict. Organized by Republican Rep. Danny McCormick of Oil City, a freshman lawmaker from up in Seabaugh’s neck of the woods, the estimated 250 or so demonstrators included members from Life Tabernacle Church in Central. That church’s pastor remains under house arrest after repeatedly defying the state emergency order by holding church services for crowds that far exceeded the allowed maximum of ten people.

Protest at Governor’s Mansion, 5-02-2020. Screenshot from Twitter video by @MarkBallardCnb

Part of the law allowing the legislative body to resolve to dissolve a governor’s disaster declaration is a provision that permits lawmakers to set up “a period during which no other declaration of emergency or disaster may be issued.” If Seabaugh’s resolution does include a provision to that effect, as his pattern of spitefulness might predict, how might that play out?

An immediate mass reopening of Louisiana’s economy would likely spike the COVID infection rate exponentially within the next month. Once more people start sickening, the proper thing would be to send all non-essential personnel back home again, immediately.

Oops. Can’t do that, because 53 Republicans in the House say they know better than the governor and the federal and state health experts he has been consulting with all along.

Once it gets to this point, it has then moved far beyond being a partisan game. It will have become a duel to the death, with we the people as the collateral damage.

Staying Connected in Light of the Pandemic

Back on Frenchman Street in the Marigny Triangle, an artist utilizes the bare plywood pieces protecting the music venues to stencil a series of music-inspired figures. Here is a piece depicting the Jazz legend Louis Armstrong, on the front window of Cafe Negril.
People silhouetted against a picturesque sunrise along the Mississippi River in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Staying Six Feet apart from has been a challenge for many under the Quarantine.
A deserted French Market sits on the site where the infamous Gallatin Street was in the early part of the 20th Century, now only the morning light can break through the silence and stillness of the empty stalls.
A roller skater shows off her moves while exercising to stay fit, making the most of the empty market by using the space as a repurposed roller-rink. 
A park goer is shut out of the Alcee Fortier Park in Midcity, New Orleans, which was recently closed amid the current Pandemic as a public health precaution. 
Social distancing doesn’t prevent this stylist from cutting her woozy friend’s hair – smack in the middle of the neutral ground on Orleans Avenue in Midcity this past week.
Close friends utilize creative measures to Socially Distance while still sharing the special gift of each others’ presence. 
The same sunrise Illuminated the downtown New Orleans, Louisiana skyline. Center: the former World Trade Center New Orleans, a key piece of riverfront real estate, now actively under development as Four Seasons hotel and private residences.
A Fireman enjoys a smoke on an exceptionally quiet evening. Hovering above: the glowing green clock face on the top of the building that houses the Louisiana Music Factory, among others.
Night walkers don white face masks while observing the reverse spectacle: a mostly deserted Bourbon Street. As a motorcycle drives by, the scene is all too surreal: perhaps a film still from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick?
In modern times, this New Babylon has never been seen so deserted and desolate. As politicians seek to re-open the local economy, the question still remains: when will the tourists think it’s safe 
The New Orleans Jazz Museum in the Old US Mint, lit up in blue on the evening of Thursday, April 30th, in solidarity and tribute to healthcare workers and first responders on the front lines in Louisiana.

Carlos Marcello and the Making of a Mafia Myth

“I am not in no racket. I am not in no organized crime.”
– Carlos Marcello
Featured image: Carlos Marcello testifies at the McClellan Hearings in 1959. Restored in color by the Bayou Brief.

In Part One of the Bayou Brief’s Godfather Trilogy, we introduced an infant who arrived in New Orleans from a country that he had never known long enough to remember, carrying a name that he never wore as his own. Yet Carlos Marcello— the self-described “tomato salesman” who rose to become one of the most fearsome and powerful Mafia bosses in America— could never escape Calogero Minacore of Sicily.

In the second part of the trilogy, we trace Marcello’s meteoric rise to power, his covert connections to a dark web of gangsters and racketeers and a secret society known as Cosa Nostra, and the spectacle of the city that would catapult him into the national spotlight.

I.

How Ya Like Dat?

He was just shooting the shit with a friend.

Everyone who knew him personally could’ve told you that was the way Carlos always talked. Flourishes of bluster and bravado, stitched together with a string of curse words. For the most part, he just wanted to talk about trivial stuff, usually something he’d just read in the morning paper or watched the night before on Johnny Carson. The funny thing was that even if you’d already heard the punchline or read the news, when it came from Carlos, it was like you were being let in on some kind of secret.

Besides, he didn’t seriously believe this fellow from Beverly Hills, Joe Hauser, was a rat. Sure, some of his other friends had their own suspicions, but they were always suspicious.

“Forget about him,” Carlos told them. “He ain’t sayin’ nuthin’.”

After all, Hauser had been introduced to him by way of none other than Santo Trafficante, his friend in Miami. They went way back, Carlos and Santo, at least thirty years, and if it hadn’t been for Castro, the two of them would’ve been partners in the casino business in Cuba.

Irv Davidson also vouched for this guy Hauser, and Irv wasn’t just Carlos’s man up in D.C.; he was Hoffa’s as well. And when Baby Doc in Haiti needed advice about dealing with Congress or the White House, he called Irv.

“The only governor I could ever do business with was Jimmie Davis,” Carlos said in another secretly-recorded meeting, before immediately contradicting himself. “Jimmie Davis and Earl Long.”

But even the great Isaac Irving Davidson had been blindsided, which is why he found himself in a New Orleans courtroom listening to secretly-recorded tapes of an aging Mafia boss prattling about politicians.

“Man, I know better than you, man, ’bout ‘dem politicians,” Carlos told Vincent Marinello on April 2, 1979. “They take your fuckin’ money, man, and then they tell you goodbye. I put $2,000 in (former Louisiana Gov. John) McKeithen’s pocket. I hate the motherfucker. Take my money and don’t do nuthin’ for me. I went with him before, when he wasn’t nuthin’. I had McKeithen for eight years. That sonuvabitch got $168,000 of my money, and then that sonuvabitch too scared to talk to me. How ya like dat shit?”

Former Louisiana Gov. John McKeithen

McKeithen- that’d be John McKeithen, the former governor, Big John they called him- had actually done worse than nothing for Carlos Marcello. After a reporter for Life Magazine started asking questions about the Mafia and began pestering people in Baton Rouge about “The Little Man,” Big John met personally with him, agreeing to be one of his off-the-record sources.

Carlos had been hoping to convince the powers-that-be to build the Superdome out on his land at Churchill Farms, a 4,200-acre spread of swamp ten miles west of downtown New Orleans. No matter how hard he tried- at one point, he offered to just give it away- that was never going to happen.

McKeithen claimed he had never taken a damn penny from that “street thug.” But just because he hadn’t taken money from Carlos did’t mean he hadn’t taken Carlos’s money.

“Everybody knows Mr. Marcello knows Louisiana state politics,” Irv told the Washington Post. “He knows everybody in the state.”

Big John may have been too scared- or too smart- to talk to Carlos, but when his successor, Edwin Edwards, confirmed that he’d taken a meeting with the aging Mafia boss, most people just shrugged. Of course he did. Every smart politician did. At least Edwin was honest about it.

“Edwin and me, we all right. But I can’t see him every day. He’s the strongest sonuvabtich governor ever had,” Carlos said to Marinello, approvingly. “He fuck with women and play dice, but won’t drink. How ya like dat?”

He may have admired Edwin Edwards, but it wouldn’t be accurate to claim the two men were ever all that close.

“The only governor I could ever do business with was Jimmie Davis,” Carlos said in another secretly-recorded meeting, before immediately contradicting himself. “Jimmie Davis and Earl Long.”

***

In Part One, we traced the origins of the Mafia in New Orleans and the early years of the man who would transform a small ring of Sicilian-Italian bandits and marauders into a billion-dollar empire. We now turn our attention to the rise of Carlos Marcello.

But before we turn our full attention back over to Marcello, it’s important to know there’s an entire, fateful part of his story that had been set into motion without his involvement, by powerful men he’d never even met, and when— from his perspective as an inmate locked up behind the bars of Angola in West Feliciana Parish— it would have seemed impossible to imagine he could ever be so lucky.

Next page: Huey “Pee” Long

Exclusive: Internal Memo Circulated by LA GOP’s Sharon Hewitt Outlines Effort to Undermine Emergency Covid-19 Orders

This article has been updated.

An internal memorandum from Mandeville-based GOP political operative Jay Connaughton, addressed to Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt of Slidell, and privately circulated among GOP state legislators outlines a series of talking points to use in a coordinated campaign aimed at politicizing and undermining the emergency orders issued by Gov. John Bel Edwards in curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Edwards’ orders are in conformance with the guidelines issued by the White House and follow the recommendations of public health experts and medical professionals. The Bayou Brief obtained a copy of the document earlier this evening.

Among other things, the memo advises legislators to avoid “trap words” like “death/die,” “politics/political,” “models,” and “hoax.” The very first “trap word” on the list: “Republican.”

It cautions lawmakers to anticipate questions about whether or not “reopening too early (will) cause the virus to rebound” and whether a “virus respects parish borders.” Taken in its totality, the document reads like a guide to subverting public health policy and reframing the efforts to curb the pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Louisianians, as an “economic shutdown.”

Covid-19 has now killed more people in Louisiana than those who perished as a consequence of the Federal Flood after Hurricane Katrina. More than one out of every 1,000 residents of New Orleans have died from the virus, which had been disproportionately affected when the novel Coronavirus was first reported in the state. Since then, the pandemic has spread to all 64 parishes.

The full three-page memo, in addition to an email from the political operative to state Sen. Hewitt, is embedded below.

Taken in its totality, the document reads like a guide to subverting public health policy and reframing the efforts to curb the pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of at least 1,800 Louisianians, as an “economic shutdown.”

Gov. Edwards announced Monday the extension of the state’s emergency “stay at home orders” until May 15th. “While this is not the announcement I want to make, I am hopeful, and all of Louisiana should be hopeful, that we will enter into the next phase of reopening soon, in mid-May,” he said. ”I am anxious to get all areas of our economy reopened, but if we accelerate too quickly, we may have to slam on the brakes. That will be bad for public health and for businesses, bad for our people and bad for our state.”

The GOP memorandum contains a series of factual distortions about the state’s response and falsely claims that Gov. Edwards’s order was made against the advice of the Trump White House. The White House actually recommended Edwards take the exact approach that he’s now implementing, telling governors to ensure their states have satisfied a set of criteria before ordering a “phased reopening.”

The Trump administration also makes it abundantly clear that plans for a phased reopening are at the “governors’ discretion,” and recommends that any phased reopening— which could only occur after meeting the initial “gating criteria” listed below— consider “local circumstances.” As an example, the White House distinguishes between urban areas with severe outbreaks and “rural and suburban areas where outbreaks have not occurred or have been mild.”

In Louisiana, the pandemic has spread to all 64 parishes, and the majority of new infections are now outside of the New Orleans area.

Source: Louisiana Department of Health, World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and Johns Hopkins University.

President Trump, who is scheduled to meet personally with Gov. Edwards tomorrow in Washington, has repeatedly singled out Edwards, a Democrat, for his coordination with his administration, praising the governor’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic on more than one occasion. “In the case of Louisiana, we have a very good governor, John Bel Edwards, though he’s a Democrat,” Trump told Fox News.

Vice President Mike Pence also praised the state’s response under Edwards. “I have to say how proud we are, despite the heartbreaking loss of people in our community and the families who’ve lost loved ones, New Orleans has made great progress, and Louisiana has made great progress by putting the health of their neighbors first.” Pence told WWLTV on Monday.

In a list of talking points outlined in the Louisiana GOP document, legislators are encouraged to argue that they are “disappointed in the Governor’s decision to delay the restart of our economy” (emphasis added), and to share the fact that some cities in Louisiana are closer to Dallas, Jackson, and Houston” than they are to New Orleans, though the memo leaves out the words “New Orleans.”

“Slidell is closer to Gulfport,” it points out. Slidell is the hometown of state Sen. Hewitt.

Connaughton, who earned statewide notoriety after his political marketing and advertising firm, now known as People Who Think, had worked as a vendor on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign; he was back in the press last November, when an attack ad against Gov. Edwards’s reelection campaign that Connaughton helped produce for the political action committee Truth in Politics was forced off of the airwaves for spreading a brazenly false claim that a West Point classmate of the governor’s was the recipient of a lucrative state contract.

Connaughton presented himself as the “spokesman” for the PAC, which was founded and funded by Lane Grigsby, a wealthy Baton Rouge construction magnate and the best friend of Edwards’s Republican opponent, Eddie Rispone.

Hewitt, a former employee of Shell Oil who ascended into Republican Party leadership after first winning election in 2015, currently serves as Chair of the Louisiana Senate’s GOP Caucus as well as Chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, where she recently sabotaged an emergency order that would have meaningfully expanded access to mail-in ballots for the upcoming Democratic Presidential primary election. Hewitt used her position on the committee to demand an amendment requiring those requesting mail-in ballots (who would not have ordinarily qualified under state law) sign affidavits certifying they have at least one of the underlying conditions the Centers for Disease Control includes in a list of diagnoses that pose unique susceptibility to Covid-19.

Already, legislators have lifted passages from the memo- often verbatim- to share on social media. One of the first members to do so was Hewitt herself:

Hewitt also prompted her followers to sign a petition, which is mentioned in the memo to legislators as well, by sharing a tweet from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, announcing the state’s decision to no longer require visitors from Louisiana self-quarantine for 14 days. Abbott’s order created an almost entirely unworkable regime that attempted to force non-commercial traffic arriving from Interstates 10 and 20 into a check-in area (in the case of I-20, the area was located nearly five miles from the state border).

“Texas Governor lifts the quarantine of Louisiana citizens entering his state, but our LA Governor keeps us locked down,” Hewitt declared, misapprehending a “stay at home order” as an order preventing citizens from traveling anywhere. The Slidell lawmaker also failed to appreciate the justification Abbott provided for eliminating the requirement, which had been widely seen as an act of political theater.

Louisiana has done a good job of corralling the coronavirus and because their increased rate of new coronavirus cases is less than what we have in the state of Texas now, it’s important for these people who either have families who live across the Louisiana border, or they may be living in Louisiana but working in the state of Texas, or they may need to come to the state of Texas for doing business — whatever the case may be — it was determined by the doctors and the data that it was fine at this time for people to be able to come into the state of Texas from Louisiana,” Abbott said.

While Abbott announced he would also let Texas’s statewide “stay at home order” lapse on Thursday, his directive is phased approach, and, like Edwards’s order, it follows the guidelines set out by the White House. 200 of 254 of Texas’s counties report no deaths as a result of the virus, compared with only 10 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes.

Although Texas’s population is 6.1 times larger, Louisiana has reported more than three times the number of Covid-19 fatalities than the Lone Star State.

Inside the Luminous, Fantastical, and Endlessly Fascinating World of Hunt Slonem’s Louisiana

April 28, 2020. The artist Hunt Slonem poses in front of a collection of his paintings of Louisiana’s Bayou LaFource and Bayou Teche at his studio in Brooklyn, New York.. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Tulane University’s most illustrious living artistic alumnus shares his wisdom and muses on Louisiana, life, spirituality, creativity, and Abraham Lincoln.

Hunt Slonem sits in a chair that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Joseph. “Believe it or not, he lived in New Jersey,” he tells me. Slonem is a baritone who speaks with a punctuated, deliberate cadence. He chooses his words carefully, and he loves sharing pieces of arcana, like the one about Joseph Bonaparte.

He’d once called himself “a glutton for color.” The room he’s in, I learn, is painted “cerulean blue.”

Originally, we had intended to talk in person, at Madewood, his home on the banks of Bayou LaFourche about an hour south of Baton Rouge, outside of the small town of Napoleonville.

But now, we were in the middle of a global pandemic, and Slonem wisely decided to remain in Brooklyn. At one point, his partner politely interrupts our conversation. He places me on hold.

A few minutes later, he’s back on the line. “They just announced a two-week lockdown,” he says. “Well, this is the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Without even taking a breath, his tone shifts. “Anyway, let’s get back to the magic of Louisiana.”

Live Oak by Hunt Slonem. 2011, Courtesy LouisianaArt.com.

“My work is about a last look at a lot of these things before they disappear forever.” – Hunt Slonem

Hunt Slonem is— arguably— the most important artist to emerge from Tulane University since Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer.

He’s a painter, a print-maker, a sculptor, an entrepreneur, an educator, a writer, a historic preservationist, the subject of several books- including one in Italian and two in Russian, and a conservationist.

Four years ago, Lee Jofa, the high-end interior design firm, approached Slonem about launching his own luxury fabrics, wallpaper, and carpet. “Charles E. Burchfield, who was one of the most important American watercolor painters, created wallpaper for most of his life and used that wallpaper with his work in shows and museums, and I am following in his mold,” Slonem says.

In a separate arrangement with Penelope Scott Kernen, Slonem designs scarves, bags, and household goods for his “Hop Up Shop.” He once created a decorative tabletop for Tiffany & Co. and collaborated with Audi on the design of a one-of-a-kind A5 coupe art car as a fundraiser for cancer research.

His works are featured in the most respected museums and private collections in the world. And although he’s based in New York, Slonem has devoted outsized attention to Louisiana.

Since his career launched into orbit in 1977, he’s returned to the state for at least 32 different solo exhibitions, including six recent events at Martine Chaisson’s dazzling, eponymous modern art gallery on Camp Street in New Orleans.

(Publisher’s Note: If you’re a collector of Louisiana political trivia, Chaisson’s father is former state Senate President Joel Chaisson, the Democratic lawmaker who presided over the legislature’s upper chamber from 2008 through 2012. Today, he is the District Attorney in his native St. Charles Parish).

“There is nowhere else that has the flavor and the sensibilities of New Orleans— the way it is put together with such particular flair and taste and sophistication and history.” – Hunt Slonem

New Orleans, of course, is what first drew him to Louisiana, nearly fifty years ago, when he was a wide-eyed college student still trying to figure out the beginning of his life’s journey.

But unlike other prominent artists who visit Louisiana, Slonem hasn’t limited his shows, or his love of Louisiana, to New Orleans.

He’s hosted multiple major museum exhibitions in Shreveport, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria. He’s even hosted an exhibition in New Iberia and participated in another one in New Roads.

Slonem has always enjoyed traveling to far-flung destinations. Officially, he’s a native of Kittery, Maine, a seaside village near the New Hampshire border, but because his father was in the military, Slonem’s childhood was spent bouncing all around the country.

In high school, he spent a few months in Nicaragua as an exchange student, and before his time at Tulane, he spent a year in San Andrés Cholula, in the central highlands of Mexico.

A collection of Hunt Slonem’s bunny sculptures arranged in front of a wall of the artist’s Louisiana bayou paintings. Used with permission of Hunt Slonem Studio.

***

Among critics who ascribe to the Aristotelian maxim that art must be placed into categories, Slonem’s work is considered American Neo-Expressionist. He calls his audacious style “exotica,” though he also likes the neologism “non-category” as well.

Henry Geldzahler, the powerful and controversial contemporary art curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, named Slonem among his 14 favorite artists, and shortly before his death in 1994, asked for Slonem’s work to be displayed in his hospital room when he died.  

Although you won’t find his signature on the front of any of his works, Slonem’s art is distinctly his own and somehow still remains instantly recognizable. 

When asked about his influences, Slonem often mentions Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Like Picasso, Slonem also has a portfolio of incredible homes, which he purchased because of their architectural significance and beauty. Most of his homes are way off the beaten path, beacons of bygone architectural triumph on the cusp of ruin that he has saved and painstakingly preserved.

Like Matissse, Slonem draws inspiration from the things he collected inside of his own studio as well as from the studio itself.

But more than anyone else, the person who inevitably draws comparisons is Andy Warhol, the iconic pop artist and polymath who helped to shape the American zeitgeist of his time.

Slonem, who first established his career as an artist in 1977, had actually known Andy Warhol. Like others who belonged to the generation that followed Warhol, Slonem frequently and graciously acknowledges how he’s been influenced by the pop art movement. Slonem’s brother, the immensely talented and well known journalist and reporter Jeffrey Slonim, who passed away unexpectedly in 2016, even worked for Warhol at Interview Magazine. And his cousin, the novelist Tama Janowitz wrote the book Slaves of New York, which Warhol intended to make into a movie.

A few years ago, the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge had heavily promoted “Antebellum Pop,” an exhibition of Slonem’s work.

In 1974, photographer Annie Leibowitz captured this famous portrait of Andy Warhol (left) and Truman Capote (right). Warhol’s almost obsessive fascination with Capote as a subject matter informed the pop artist’s work and led to a close friendship between the two men, as Warhol documented in hundreds of hours of taped audio recordings. The two men, who were acquainted with Hunt Slonem, are frequently mentioned in stories about Slonem’s work. Image source: Pinterest.

There’s another name that inevitably comes up in stories about Slonem: The prodigiously gifted writer and icon of the American avant-garde, Truman Capote. Although neither of his most memorable works, In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, were set in the Deep South and despite spending the entirety of his adult life elsewhere, Capote could never escape the gothic south of his childhood.

Filmmaker Albert Maysles, whose work included the acclaimed short film With Love from Truman, started on a documentary about the artistically prodigious Hunt Slonem. Maysles had been working on the project until his untimely death in 2015.

A snapshot of a small part of Slonem’s massive aviary. Courtesy of the artist.

Slonem’s studio in Brooklyn is a tour-de-force for the senses. Even the sound is curated.

When we spoke on the phone in March, there was a concert of tropical birds playing in the background. His legendary menagerie of more than 60 rare and exotic birds all live in the personal aviary Slonem installed inside of the 30,000-square-foot studio. Almost all of his birds were unwanted pets or adoptions, and some are up to 80 years old.

His passions—for art, for his birds, for collecting things, and for architecture- animate his creativity.

“I collect top hats, scent bottles, Old Paris Porcelain, marble busts, chandeliers, 19th century paintings, and earlier, all kinds of furniture, I am just insatiable, and I am able to house it and work with it, it doesn’t go into storage,” he says.

He then makes what strikes me as a profound insight about the artistic impulse to collect. “Collecting is a passion that so many artists have,” he explains. “Damien Hurst is a collector of manors and period furniture. Andy Warhol was an insatiable collector. Andre Serrano, even Rembrandt was a collector. I think to be an artist somehow you are a gatherer and a forager, and this is a practice that has been going on forever.”

Slonem's world renowned collection of gothic scent bottles, displayed at Lakeside.

Slonem’s world renowned collection of gothic scent bottles, displayed at Lakeside.

A small selection of Slonem's top hat collection, from the artist's bedroom closet at Albania.

A small selection of Slonem’s top hat collection, from the artist’s bedroom closet at Albania.

A small part of Slonem's prolific conch shell collection at Lakeside.

A small part of Slonem’s prolific conch shell collection at Lakeside.

Slonem's shell collection, artfully displayed at Albania.

Slonem’s shell collection, artfully displayed at Albania.

Slonem's collection of antique wax silhouettes from his dining room at Albania.

Slonem’s collection of antique wax silhouettes from his dining room at Albania.

Above: A gallery of Hunt Slonem’s collections in his Louisiana homes.

Sunlight peering through a canopy of oak trees line the entrance to Albania Plantation In Jeanerette, Louisiana. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger, Bayou Brief.

“I believe in the magic of Louisiana so enormously that it brings tears to my eyes. I have come back to Louisiana every year since I graduated from Tulane in 1973,” Hunt Slonem tells me. “I’ve been fascinated by Louisiana and its history and just mesmerized since the day I arrived to go to Tulane.”

Even though I had never spoken with Slonem before— and still haven’t met him in person, he treated our conversation with the warmth most people only reserve for a lifelong friend. I’d initially approached him with questions about art and architecture, but we ended up speaking about spirituality, grace, and how he finds purpose and joy.

“Bayou Teche,” by Hunt Slonem, from Slonem’s Yellow Bayou Room at Albania, photo courtesy LouisianaArt.com.

As a fellow graduate, I saw my conversation with Slonem as a way of shining a spotlight on Tulane University’s most important living artistic alumnus. It was also an opportunity, more broadly, to explore Slonem’s strong connection to Louisiana and his artistic legacy.

First, though, I wanted to know why he had been drawn to Louisiana. “There is just this uncertain survival aspect to Louisiana which makes it even more romantic,” he says. “The stories, the dusting of cobwebs with gold for wedding parties, just the whole magic of all of it captivated and mesmerized me real early on. Listening to all these stories and the remnants of it that still exist and that you participate in are just magic.”

Slonem’s love affair with the state is plainly evident in his artwork.

Nearly 80 years ago, writer Horace Reynolds described the area around Bayou Teche as “a land of ghostly cypresses, sleepy waters, noisy birds, and deep skies.” Slonem captures the ethos of the Bayou in paint as eloquently as Reynolds had in the written word.

He tells me about helping to plan a solo exhibition in Lafayette’s Paul and Lulu Hillard Univerosty Art Museum about a decade ago. He’d recently purchased Albania Plantation in Jeanerette, 35 miles down the road. The exhibit was a tribute to the natural beauty of Bayou Teche, the waterway that serves as the center of Acadian civilization.

“I was so impressed with the (museum’s) space,” he says. “It is just magnificent.”

He poured all of his energy into creating an exhibit that would appear it had always belonged there, working to the point of exhaustion.

Ultimately, the exhibit culminated into 22 individual square paintings, each one spanning nine feet by nine feet. To put this into context, that’s approximately half the size of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, which took Michelangelo more than four years to complete.

Slonem spent a year creating his exhibit at the Hillard.

“It was a pretty ambitious body of work,” Slonem recalls. “(The experience) revived my interest in painting landscape, particularly bayous, which I had done while I was in school. Nothing really leaves my work. It was a revival with a new twist, and everything seems to stem from the waterways of Louisiana. I live on two Bayous, LaFourche and Teche, and Teche has so much ancient history connected to it.”

Today, the paintings are on permanent display at the Jefferson Parish Performing Art Center.

An massive portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, whose popularity has been revived by the Broadway production ‘Hamilton’, by the renowned German-American painter Emanuel Leutze. Leutze is best known for painting the iconic American masterpiece, ’Washington Crossing the Delaware.‘ Slonem brought the portrait to Albania Plantation. Leutze’s connection to the portrait’s provenance was not known at the time Slonem acquired the work. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger, Bayou Brief.

In addition to Albania Plantation, Slonem has also spent considerable time, toil, and treasure restoring Lakeside Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, a home that been given to the Marquis de Lafayette as a gift, and Madewood, famed architect Henry Howard’s crowning achievement and considered to be the finest example of Greek Revival architecture in the American South.

There was, of course, a terrible price that was paid for all the beauty that remains. Slonem understands this.

“I once changed the name of Madewood Plantation to ‘Madewood Mansion.’ But as someone told me, ‘You can change the name of Auschwitz, but it is still Auschwitz.’”

Louisiana continues to grapple with the complicated legacies that these homes carry. Until the recent restoration of the Whitney Plantation and its reopening as a museum honoring the lives of those enslaved on its grounds, there had been a tendency to avoid the subject entirely in most of grand homes that open their doors to the public. As recently as the 1990s, schoolchildren were sometimes taught a sanitized version of history that excused the institution of slavery as an economic necessity and presented those who fought to prevent emancipation as noble and distinguished men who should not be judged.

Slonem’s homes are not tourist destinations, nor are they museums glorifying a distorted version of history.

“My interest begins and ends with the architecture of these structures,” he explains. Slonem has gone to great lengths to transform the energy of the homes. His homes now celebrate color, art, and architecture, and of course, Abraham Lincoln, a man the properties’ previous owners likely reviled.

“Lincoln was one of our greatest Presidents. He was a complete free-being and a great soul, and he changed American life in ways that were profound and wonderful. I am fascinated by who he is and who he continues to be in our popular culture,” he says. “More than any other President, he’s had a profound and lasting effect on America.”

Abraham Lincoln is more than a historical curiosity to Slonem. To the artist, there’s a kind of spiritual connection between the two men. “I have always been sneered at for being metaphysical and talking about spirit and the divine and joy. These are not loved subjects in the art world,” he explains.

Slonem’s paintings have given new life to Lincoln, presenting him in the vernacular of modernism and pop art.

President Lincoln by Hunt Slonem. Courtesy of LouisianaArt.com.

When Slonem was a student at Tulane, for the first time in his life, he was able to study art, history, and architecture, subjects that would define his career.

“When I got to Tulane I was able to take courses that mesmerized me. I got an A in Italian Renaissance Art History from Professor Shapiro which I consider the greatest accomplishment of my life,” jokes Slonem. “My favorite Tulane memory was taking Louisiana architecture from Sam Wilson.”

Wilson, who is responsible for ensuring the rehabilitation of the Cabildo and the Pontalba buildings in Jackson Square, was widely considered to be the “dean of historic preservation” in New Orleans.

“Look what it led to later in my life,” Slonem tells me.

Looking back at his time at Tulane, he says, ”It was a rich lifestyle just being enveloped by history, and not to be tacky, but ‘vestiges of grandeur,’ to quote Richard Sexton. It gave me a sensibility that has lasted my entire adult life of patina and the mixture of periods.”

Slonem waves from the front entrance at Madewood with his partner, courtesy Hunt Slonem.

In Wilson’s class, Slonem visited Madewood, the home he would one day own.

Some of Slonem’s fondest Louisiana memories came while he was a student at Tulane University. It was there where he first developed a passion for architecture, graduating among the top of his class with degrees in art history and painting.

***

An Excellent Example of Cross-Hatching in Slonem’s work: “Bayou Teche,” by Hunt Slonem, courtesy LouisianaArt.com.

Slonem is the first modern artist to utilize both ends of the paintbrush, pioneering an artistic method he dubbed “cross-hatching.” This contemporary take on sgraffito, the Italian word meaning “to scratch,” involves scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting color.

I asked Slonem about how he pioneered the artistic process. “It was not an abstraction. It was a play on realism,” he explains. “ It was the most daring thing I had done in my career: I am very traditional with my use of the brush most of the time, but now I use it to paint whiskers on bunnies and to portray bird cages.”

Slonem also uses his cross-hatch method to portray the world through the lens with which he became quite familiar: Seeing things through the grid of a cage. “I noticed that I had been living with a 40-foot bird cage for 45 years, and I came up with the idea as nod to modernism. The grid is such a mark-maker of modern painting.”

Slonem explains the technique. ”I just picked up the back of the brush, and at first just used the back of the brush to make the marks of the cage as if I was watching everything through It. Then I started whittling the brush and doing a finer pattern,” he says. ”Originally it was a five-part process of lines going in every direction and completely repetitive and completely the same. I sometimes feel like a robot making these marks, but I have simplified it in my work since then to preserve more color.”

Another artistic mark of a Slonem work is the antique, intricate, often gilded frames that accompany his modern, vibrant paintings.

“It came from necessity. I had a show at VCU in Richmond and they wanted every piece to be framed, and at the time, I could not afford contemporary framing,” he tells me. “I have been a devotee of flea markets in New York since the early 70’s, and I discovered that many antique frames fit the painting sizes I was using, particularly 8×10’s. So, I framed this show 99% in antique frames and loved them. It is part of my art form to collect, and collect rare, antique, and unique frames.”

As a way of displaying his collection of frames, he created ”bunny walls,” which are now a major part of the Hunt Slonem brand.

“They have even made wallpapers out of my bunny walls,” he says.

The Bunny Wall in Hunt Slonem’s Albania, Cayman Clevenger, Bayou Brief.

In Slonem’s work color abounds, but his love of color does not stop there- his homes, studio, and wardrobe are bursting with color- in a world of beige and grey, Hunt Slonem is a luminous advocate for the transformative power of color.

“The Egyptians and Romans painted sculptures bright colors. Then contemporary interior magazines came along and created beige, to beige out the world. Color has been used for centuries,” he tells me. “The color palates of the 18th and 19th century were wild. Louisiana has a history of painting houses (the color of) shrimp and pinks and lavenders and orange.”

“We are in a color revival,” Slonem declares. ”Color is candy for the eye, it is mystical: each color has its own propertIes of inspiration and joy. In an age of grimness and bad news, we need color.” Slonem makes a connection between the news that had forced him to remain in New York and interrupted our conversation earlier.

One attribute of a great artist is when their works are immediately distinguishable from anyone else‘s. Slonem— through his unique perspective, iconic subjects, use of color, and the cross-hatching technique that he invented—has managed the difficult task of being utterly singular and worthy of emulation.

Butterflies, 2020, by Hunt Slonem, LouisianaArt.com.

I ask Slonem about how he developed his aesthetic. “It was always my goal to develop my own unique style and vision. It is hard to say how you arrive at where you are: from travels, from seeing things in every corner of the planet,” he says. ”I lived in Hawaii as a kid and I was influenced by nature. My style was an evolution, like the rainforest, 69 years of evolution and constantly painting.”

Today, Slonem is widely acknowledged as one of the most prodigious and in-demand living American artists. A productive day in the studio for him can yield numerous small paintings. He often spends days, sometimes weeks, perfecting larger works.

“I am able to experiment with mediums a lot more, like diamond dust and metallics, because I am not struggling with endless subject matter searches,” he says. Indeed, although there are a number of subjects in Slonem’s repertoire, he frequently returns to his favorites.

“I decided repetition was not a dirty word. I talk about the connection to the divine when looking at nature. When I was in India, I would go on japa walks and look at nature— everything from the blades of grass to leaves on trees. And these things are completely dissimilar yet they add up to something that’s recognizable and beautiful.”

It’s an apt metaphor for how Slonem approaches his artwork.

Slonem has studied the power of repetition across religious traditions throughout the world. Incantations, mantras, prayers, liturgies, and song, all sharing the commonality of repetition.

“I repeat subjects that mean a lot to me, like repeating a divine name or mantra, and I often say mantras while I am working.”

Slonem’s credo echoes the landmark scholarship of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, who argued that the power of ritual is at the foundation of the religious experience.

“There is power that is built up through repetition. Like Tirupati (the city) in India where the thousand names of God have been repeated endlessly for 1,200 years, and the power that builds up from it.” – Hunt Slonem

Slonem paints birds, butterflies, bunnies, bayous, flowers, and other aspects of the natural world. His life’s work is a celebration of nature, so naturally, he is passionate about environmental conservation and wildlife preservation, both of which are critical issues in Louisiana.

Slonem begins his days by creating 8×10 bunnies, repeating a mantra as he paints. Courtesy Hunt Slonem Studio.

“I think they are among the most important causes,” he says. “I am still recovering from the burning of the rainforest in Brazil and the loss of a billion animals in Australia. Conservation is profoundly important. The rainforests are the lungs of the universe. I am not sure why anyone dares tamper with it. The Sahara used to be green and tropical, and they cut all the trees of the great forests.“

He connects the issue back to Louisiana. “Louisiana has suffered from deforestation as well,” he explains. “What a cypress tree looks like at 1,000 years old is little-known. There are only a few of them in the Lake Martin Preserve (in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya National Heritage Area), and they’re pretty magnificent. But they should be everywhere.“

As our conversation draws to a close, Slonem reflects on the connections between his work and the natural world.

“I am not a naturalist painter. I am a painter of the inspiration of nature and its energy and more of a metaphysical recorder of nature than an absolute documenter of it,” he says. ”Nature is a joyous gift to mankind, a great beauty that influences fashion and art and music, gifts from the divine realm to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth. We should treat them as such.”

For me, the conversation with Slonem was a lot like his art. It provided a much needed escape from the less-than-joyous realities we are confronting every day.

On the subject of art and life, he left me with one final musing.

“Joy,” he tells me, ”is precisely what we need right now. People gravitate to art because of the joy that comes out of it. In times of trouble, we turn to art, and we see art’s true value.”

The artist in his Brooklyn Studio, courtesy Hunt Slonem, April 28, 2020.

Acknowledgements: In addition to Cayman Clevenger, publisher Lamar White, Jr. served as a contributing writer in drafting this profile of Hunt Slonem. On behalf of the Bayou Brief, Clevenger and White wish to express their gratitude for Louisiana native Catherine Casanova, who works as Hunt Slonem’s Gallery Liaison and Project Manager, for her unwavering support and kindness throughout this process. And a special thank you to Butch Bailey, who graciously gave us a fascinating tour of Albania during a global pandemic. We would also like to thank the caretakers of Lakeside Plantation for providing access to the property in March. Finally, we are grateful for Wally Pierce, whose profile of Slonem in the Acadiana alt-weekly The Independent provided a valuable template in approaching the subject, as well as Dr. Richard Gruber for the brief but insightful biographical profile of Slonem he contributed to the publication 64 Parishes.

Demagoguery for Democracy: Still Striving Toward Voter Suppression

When COVID-19 prompted indefinite suspension of Louisiana’s 2020 legislative session after just one week, I must admit I felt an idiosyncratic frisson of hope. As terrifying and deadly as the global pandemic is, as a longtime Louisiana politics reporter, I found a source of optimism in the fact that this new group of lawmakers would now have some time to ponder their place in humanity and the fragility of life, before returning to their lawmaking duties. After all, the people and politicians of this state have extensive history and experience dealing with disasters in benevolent ways, and maybe – just maybe– the body politic would return to working together for the greater good, rather than entangling themselves in party zealotry.

Unfortunately, the hoped-for altruism has yet to completely manifest, as became abundantly obvious during attempts to gain legislative committee approvals of an emergency plan for conducting spring elections, now pushed back to summer by the needs for social distancing to minimize coronavirus infections. Complicating the discussions are two crucial facts. The election pushed back from April 4 to July 11 is the Democratic Party presidential preference primary.

As Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin frankly admitted to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee during the April 15th hearing, “We talked about once Senator Sanders withdrew, did we even need to have the Presidential preference primary? Yes, because the parties have to determine how delegates will be allocated, and they can’t be allocated if there’s not been any expressed will of the people in the state, whether by caucus or election.”

In addition, the committees vetting the emergency election plans are Republican chaired, with a majority of Republican members, and a fair proportion of those presenting themselves as far right ideologues.

As a result, the plan to expand the allowable reasons for absentee balloting (vote-by mail) for the presidential preference primary now rescheduled to July 11 and the municipal elections reset from May to August 15. has been altered to narrow eligibility.

Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin appears before the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Screen capture by Sue Lincoln.

Not that Louisiana has ever allowed much in the way of mail-in balloting. As Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin told the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee on April 15, “the maximum percentage of absentee ballots Louisiana has ever had was 3.7%.”

Ardoin assured the Senate’s and House’s Governmental Affairs committees, when he met with them sequentially on Wednesday, April 22, there wouldn’t be an explosion in the percentage of mail-in votes.

“The plan went from eight excuses for COVID, down to five,” the Secretary of State said.

The original version of the plan, which Ardoin had worked out in consultation with the Governor’s office and presented to each of the committees the week prior, had allowed those 60 or older, those without available childcare, and those who feared imminent infection with the virus. That last reason – especially – greatly perturbed Sen. Barry Milligan.

“The heartburn I have is related to simply the expansion of the absentee ballots,” the Shreveport Republican said during the April 15 meeting of the Senate and Governmental Affairs committee. “It is extremely broad and basically covers everybody in Louisiana, so anybody could say, ‘Hey, I’m scared to death,’ and they could absentee vote. There is not an election cycle that we go through that we don’t wake up to the news that votes are found in somebody’s garage or trunk. “

“Outside of this state, right?” Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin asked, with a laugh.

Milligan, a freshman lawmaker, but the vice-chair of the committee, was unamused.

“I’m hoping that’s the case,” he responded, with a deadpan expression. “It seems like we’re looking at a situation where any reason to expand absentee ballots should require more of a trigger mechanism than this. Those folks who are hospitalized, those folks who are diagnosed and have been asked to stay home, those folks can provide legitimate documentation and furnish that for their absentee ballot, they can prove that situation exists, versus basically saying we want to give everybody the right.” Then he added, “I’m really worried for the risk for our voting, for the sanctity of our elections.”

Did you catch the coded words and phrases? Legitimate documentation. Prove rather than give everybody the right. And then following it up with saying he’s worried...for the sanctity of our elections.

Implying rampant and intentional fraud by voters to block expanding ballot access, all while standing on the patriotic and moral ground of “election sanctity,” is the new and improved form of voter suppression strategy that goes back to the Jim Crow era and beyond. The literacy tests and poll taxes of old have morphed to present day requirements for showing government-issued ID and – in this time of coronavirus – a push for requiring a doctor’s note to prove you are, or are suspected of, being COVID positive.

Milligan’s concerns were seconded by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Sharon Hewitt (R-Slidell), and led to the April 15th rejection of the election plan by the Senate and Governmental Affairs committee.

Based on Secretary of State Ardoin’s presentations to the committees this week, we know a bit about what transpired in between.

“I want to speak complimentary words and kind notes about our Speaker, Chairman Dwight, the Senate President, Committee Chairwoman Hewitt and the Attorney General for what is truly a bi-partisan plan. Monday, after three hours, we worked out a plan that we believe fits the needs of our state. It’s not a perfect plan,” Ardoin said, “But we have come together, and should be proud that we can work this out and not fight it out in the courts.”

The Senate committee gave the new plan a unanimous nod. House committee members were less enamored.

Ardoin answering questions from the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Screen capture by Sue Lincoln.

“Did you remove the requirement to provide a doctor’s order?,” Rep. Dodie Horton (R-Haughton) wanted to know. “I am concerned that they will not have to prove they have it.”

Ardoin replied, “The new proposed application requires they attest that they qualify for absentee voting, and acknowledge they are subject to $2000 fine and up to two years in jail if their statement is proven to be false.”

From the other side of the aisle, the vice chairman of the House and Governmental Affairs committee had some pointed questions for the Secretary of State.

“We’re here again this week because, as you have said, we need a plan that addresses the two concerns of fraud and health,” Rep. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans) began. “Last week, you said the plan was bipartisan and would protect health?”

“Well, it probably wasn’t bipartisan enough,” Ardoin said. “Senate committee members felt they had not had sufficient opportunity for input, and so in the last week we have been working on it with leaders in this legislature and the Attorney General.”

“Interesting,” Duplessis remarked. “I didn’t get anything about it until noon yesterday. You mentioned the Attorney General: why is he involved?”

“He is the one who will have to defend the plan if we are sued over it, and he says this is perfectly defensible.,” the Secretary of State answered.

“So this version of the plan was developed to be lawsuit-proof. What have you done to make it health-proof?” Duplessis asked. “Did you consult with the Louisiana Department of Health?”

“No,” Ardoin said. “But it is centered around the CDC guidance on who is at greatest risk.”

“Yet this plan went from eight categories eligible for absentee ballots to five categories. Hypertension is not on list, yet 56% of deaths are known to be in conjunction with high blood pressure,” Duplessis commented, obliquely challenging the assertion. “Also, it’s been suggested that voters might need a doctor’s note? Does that mean they would be required to pay for a doctor visit in order to get that?”

(Wait a minute. Couldn’t that be viewed as a form of poll tax?)

“I see applicants for absentee ballots are required to say who they’re caregiving for, and what they have that makes them a risk under CDC guidelines. How does that fit with HIPAA?” Duplessis wondered. “Who is going to be seeing this info?”

“Registrars will be seeing it,” Ardoin replied.

“So it’s public record?” Duplessis asked.

“It’ll be redacted,” Ardoin said.

Freshman Rep. Rodney Schamerhorn, a Republican from the town of Hornbeck near Ft. Polk, had his own set of reasons for opposing the emergency election plan.

“I appreciate all the work you’ve done, but I don’t believe the system is broke,” Schamerhorn said. “People in my district, my constituents in Vernon, Sabine and Natchitoches parishes, think this is going to go away and take care of itself. This is just scaring the public.”

“I understand some areas of the state are not as concerned about the virus, but other areas of the state are extremely concerned,” the Secretary of State replied. “You represent your area, but I would hope you would support this for the greater good of all.”

At the invitation of House and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Stephen Dwight (R-Lake Charles), Secretary of State Ardoin then gave a lengthy – and ultimately tearful – speech as a final urging for the House committee’s favorable vote on the emergency plan.

Here is a transcription [with parenthetical commentary from me] of the speech, in its entirety.

“I realize this is not an easy time for any of us. This is certainly not anything I believed I would be facing as your elected Secretary of State, when I ran, or when I took the oath of office at the beginning of this year.

“From the very founding of our country, our greatest leaders have reminded us that our government is one ‘of the people.’ In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ George Washington said, ‘The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.’ And some of the greatest debates at the Constitutional Convention concerned the best way for the voice of the American people to be represented.

“The American experiment is tied to the idea that the people rule.”

[While George Washington stated, “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness,” right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society have co-opted the term “the American experiment,” and now it’s part of the conservatives’ loaded language code.]

“We can look back at our history and see that there were those always fighting to make sure everyone had their voices heard. People like Frederick Douglass, a former slave who escaped to freedom, who spent his entire life fighting for freedom and equal rights for all, arguing that all men and women deserve the right to vote and to share in the American experiment. People like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for women’s suffrage for more than 70 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.

“The American experiment is purchased with the blood of its patriots. From Bunker Hill to Gettysburg, to Normandy, to anywhere they are called, the brave men and women of our Armed Forces, throughout our history have insured our continued freedom, while spreading freedom and the right of self-governance to others around the world.

“Recently, the people of Hong Kong, suffering under an increasingly tyrannical China, took to their streets to protest while flying American flags and singing the Star Spangled Banner.”

[Not exactly. The flag-waving and singing was part of a November 28, 2019, demonstration celebrating President Trump signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would seek to ensure that Hong Kong has sufficient autonomy from China to maintain favorable trading terms with the United States. In other words, it’s a promise to try and keep our favorable trade going with Hong Kong, even though Trump has been waving his sword at the dragon of China.]

“For millions around the world, the Stars and Stripes represent the right of the people to have a say in their government – thanks to the sacrifice of those who have served under our banner.

“The American experiment is entrusted to each and every one of us. We are the heirs of a promise made in the words, ‘we the people.’ It is the responsibility and the right of all of us to make our voice heard at every level of government.

“And for those of us in this room, we hold the great responsibility of being the representatives to the great citizens of our great state. They entrust us to ensure they can vote safely and fairly – a duty not to be taken lightly. They entrust us to hold honest and accountable and accessible elections, even in difficult times like we face today. Let us not skirt our responsibility, but rather work together to make good on the promise made over 200 years ago – a promise of ‘a government of, by, and for the people.’

[Ardoin starts getting choked up a bit here.] “I ask you: Stand tall. Be the leaders. And vote for this plan – this temporary plan to provide the access under the circumstances we never foresaw. And I’m asking you – I know this is a difficult vote. I know your phones have been ringing off the hook. I know your emails have been blowing up. I know your text messages have been blowing up. But the fact of the matter comes down to we must lead. It’s a temporary plan. It is not a permanent solution. We’ll leave that for the months ahead. But rest assured, you could go home and you can tell your constituents, ‘I stood up for the entire state, for the right thing, to move our state forward.’ To do the right thing takes a lot of hard work, [swallows his tears manfully here] and a lot of effort, and a lot of guts.

“Monday, after three hours, we worked out a plan that we believe fits the needs of our state. It’s not a perfect plan. I’ve never seen a piece of perfect legislation pass out of either of the two bodies. But that’s why we’re a democracy, because we keep working at it. We look back and we see what may have been the worst, and we work to make it better. And those things that we do great, we continue working hard to be great at it.

[Fighting the tears now, Ardoin is becoming more emotional] “It would have been easy for me – easy, for me – to have just said no. To do what my colleague in Florida had to do, to do what Wisconsin had to do on the spur of the moment, to create mega-precincts because they had no workers. Think about it, as an elected official, in charge of elections, I don’t want to be part of a system where people have to wait four hours to exercise their right to vote. Or to put themselves in harm’s way because we didn’t have enough PPE.

“I’m being torn up on radio, in emails; praised by the liberal press which doesn’t help my conservative credentials, because I’m leading. I was elected to lead. And I took an oath, under God, to do the best that I could possibly do, to the best of my understanding and ability.

[Clearly crying, wiping his eyes and ducking his head] “I have watched my staff work for hours and hours and hours, plan after plan after plan to deliver democracy to the voters of Louisiana. It takes true dedication to do that, because the pay is not great.

“We need your help. We need your leadership. And it may not be popular. We weren’t sent here to be popular. We were sent here to lead.

“I’m asking you to take this vote today. Vote yes. Be the leader. And together we stand, and we speak out, and we tell the people of Louisiana, this isn’t the best plan. But it’s the best we have today, and we’ll get better tomorrow. God bless you. God bless our great state.”

Ardoin’s impassioned speech got the emergency voting plan passed by the House committee, with 11 members voting yea. It wasn’t enough to sway them all, however. Five representatives – Foy Gadberry (R-West Monroe), Valarie Hodges (R-Denham Springs), Dodie Horton (R-Haughton), Mike Johnson (R-Pineville), and Rodney Schamerhorn (R-Hornbeck) – voted against the plan.

The next steps for the plan point out the absolute sophistry in the majority of the arguments that have been used to stall and negate and narrow the parameters for expanding mail-in balloting in view of the COVID pandemic. You see, all the members of the House and Senate will be voting on the plan by 5 p.m. on Monday, April 27 – via email ballots.

Breaking Tony’s Spell

By now, it should be plainly obvious to anyone who has followed the news about Baton Rouge-area pastor Tony Spell that he’s pretty obviously the worst kind of charlatan.

No, it’s not an attack on anyone’s religious liberties to point out the newly-minted celebrity is nothing more than an outlandishly delusional huckster who has commanded the predominately poor and working class members of his breakaway Pentecostal church in suburban Baton Rouge- Life Tabernacle- to break the law, endanger their health, jeopardize the lives of those in their community, and keep showing up every Sunday to hear him speak.

Disabuse yourself of the idea that Spell’s motives have anything to do at all with politics or the United States Constitution. He realized long ago that his gravy train runs on the collection plate he passes out once a week.

But if there had been any doubt that the man was about something other than enriching himself, that was put to rest after he recently encouraged members to also sign over their stimulus checks to him as a condition of insuring against eternal damnation. Today, Spell’s wife posed for a few helpful photographs, just in case you are more of a visual learner.

Guaranty Bank may want to consider asking the couple to move their accounts somewhere else. Photo credit: AP.

And until recently, he’d been able to simply over-apply some hair gel and memorize a couple of dozen verses from the Bible without anyone pointing out the obvious: That his routine is just a cheaply-produced, grotesque imitation of Houston mega-church pastor Joel Osteen.

Considering the backlash Osteen received after getting caught lying about why he refused to allow people to shelter inside of the basketball arena he converted into his church’s new home when Houston was devastated by Hurricane Harvey, he must be thankful Tony Spell is dumb enough to want to take over the role of villain.

Jimmy Swaggart, a few miles down the road from Spell, will never need to worry again about anyone claiming his adultery scandal was the biggest embarrassment ever for those in the Baton Rouge evangelical community. Swaggart never endangered the lives of his flock, and the overwhelming majority of his fortune wasn’t made by passing around an offering plate but through the church’s donation hotline.

The late comedian Phil Hartmann parodying Baton Rouge televangelist Jimmy Swaggart after the pastor’s tearful confession of an affair.

Yes, Brother Jimmy, you are forgiven.

TMZ has been having a field day with Spell; they specialize in mocking trashy wannabes, and this guy showed up already in costume for them, delivering lines more absurd and idiotic than they could have ever scripted themselves.

And amazingly, without even asking for it, Tony Spell got himself arrested on Tuesday, a necessity in any great tabloid story. Spell, to borrow a word from fellow hair gel enthusiast Donald Trump Jr., was triggered over a handwritten protest sign. What a snowflake!

If any of this seems hyperbolic or, pardon the pun, overindulgent, consider the parade of terribles that Spell has marched through the news recently.

He generated notoriety by being one of the first in the nation to exploit his status as a religious leader to undermine the efforts to curb the spread of a pandemic that has infected millions across the globe. In the United States, the pandemic has especially ravaged Louisiana.

As of Thursday, more Louisiana residents have been killed because of the COVID-19 pandemic than were killed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the failure of the federally-owned levee system surrounding New Orleans flooded 80% of the city. The current death toll is now nearly three times larger than the death toll in the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, and with the exception of the Civil War, has now killed more people on the state’s soil than anything since the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853.

According to analysis compiled by the nonprofit group PAR Louisiana and based on data from the state Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, when one compares the average causes of death from the same week in previous years with the deaths caused in 2020 by COVID-19, it’s not even close.

Frances Spencer, a freelance photojournalist and writer, has spent a considerable amount of time researching Spell’s distortion of the Christian faith. She’d been familiar with the kind of damage men like Spell can inflict on the institutions they lead. As a proud graduate of Louisiana College, Spencer had been horrified by the man who replaced the school’s longtime president. Fortunately, Joe Aguillard’s Reign of Terror has ended, in no small part because of the efforts of graduates like Spencer.

When Tony Spell began to defy the law and hold regular Sunday services, Spencer decided to perch herself at a safe distance to snap some photographs of the church’s front door and parking lot. According to Spencer, reports that as many as 1,300 people had heeded Spell’s mandatory attendance order were wildly inaccurate; the real number appeared to be about a quarter of that. And while it was true that Spell had a fleet of buses driving up to the church’s entrance, many- if not the majority- of the busses arrived without passengers.

Still, there’s no denying Spell has continued to attract an audience.

Late-arriving worshippers enter Life Tabernacle Church Sunday, April 19. The Central, La., church has continued to meet in large numbers despite state orders to limit gathering to less than 10 to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. The church’s pastor Tony Spell, who was previously cited for holding mass gathering, was arrested Tuesday, April 21 for allegedly trying to back a bus over a protester on the previous Sunday. Photo and caption credit: Frances Y. Spencer/Spencer Media Solutions.

Spencer also happened to get a few photos of the lone protestor whose homemade sign had infuriated the pastor to the brink of violence.

39-year-old Trey Bennett lives in the same community as Spell’s church and had been understandably concerned that the pastor was recklessly endangering people’s lives. His concerns, as he learned personally last Sunday, were well-placed.

In Bennett’s hometown, which named itself Central, LA after incorporating in 2005 (somehow without having any awareness of its own geography in the state or the fact that there is an entire region 90 miles away that’s named Central Louisiana), simply being a nonbeliever is enough to inspire Woody Jenkins, the town crier and the sorest loser in state history, to declare you to be just as bad as someone as vile as Tony Spell.


Trey Bennett of Central protests Sunday, April 12 outside the grounds of Life Tabernacle Church, a congregation that has continued to meet in violation of state orders to limit mass gathering to combat COVID-19 outbreak. Bennett’s sign lists historical instances of what he sees as church-related atrocities and then credits Christians for COVID-19. Rev. Tony Spell, pastor of Life Tabernacle, was accused of trying run over Bennett with one of the church’s buses the following Sunday and surrendered himself before being arrested Tuesday April 21 at the Central police station. Photo and image credit: Frances Y. Spencer/Spencer Media Solutions

Jenkins, who is best known for losing a race for the U.S. Senate to Democrat Mary Landrieu and then spending months on a pathetic effort to contest the election’s results, posted a screed against Bennett on the Facebook page of his news publication, claiming, among other things, that the protestor was well-known as a ne’er-do-well atheist who had a long record of offending people in town.

He attached a few screenshots he had taken of the troublemaker’s personal Facebook account that he’d found particularly objectionable.

To most outside observers, Bennett’s comments were nothing especially noteworthy. If anything, Jenkins came across as more than a little creepy and unwittingly helped underscore the kind of petty and judgmental gossip that Jenkins tries to pass off as newsworthy.

All of that said, there’s no question Bennett understood the sign he held up outside of Spell’s church contained a provocative albeit unoriginal message facetiously thanking Christians for a series of historical atrocities. It’s a riff that Tony Spell may have heard before had he received any halfway decent education in religion.

Despite Jenkins’s characterizations of the protestor and his homemade sign, there isn’t any evidence that Bennett professes to be an atheist. His protest sign blamed people who professed to be Christians- not Christianity itself- for the horrors of the past.

Of course, so what if Bennett is an atheist anyway?

Spell deserves to be ridiculed and quickly released back to obscurity.

***

In the first of three letters the Apostle Paul wrote to his young colleague Timothy, he begins by reminding him of the advice he had given him the last time they’d spoken. “As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies,” he wrote.

He was just warming up. “Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.”

Later, Paul warned against men who claimed to be preachers but “have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions, and constant friction between people of corrupt mind.”

People like this, he told Timothy, rob their followers from the truth because they use their self-professed “godliness as means to financial gain.”

***

Already, at least one member of Spell’s church has died from COVID-19, and a lawyer representing the pastor was hospitalized after becoming infected with the virus. His other lawyer is accused pedophile and former Alabama judge Roy Moore.

Remember, Spell only earned his notoriety by being one of the first in the nation to exploit his status as a religious leader and convince congregants that their physical presence during church services was mandated by God and to disregard the governor’s orders.

The real lesson here isn’t that the Christian faith is to blame for all of history’s worst atrocities, which is a fairly unsophisticated understanding of the past two millennia and one that just completely disregards anything that ever occurred on the other side of the planet. If you don’t think there have been self-professed Buddhists who waged war and murdered people, you’d be sorely mistaken.

The lesson here is that the only way to stop men like Tony Spell, who exploit religion to justify their own quest for wealth and fame, the only way to ensure their credibility is diminished and their fraud is finally revealed is by not being afraid to call them out.