All told, in 2019, the Bayou Brief welcomed more than 1.2 million unique visitors to our online home. Some of you showed up to get the scoop on the gubernatorial race. Others arrived to learn about Louisiana’s remarkable history, inimitable culture, and the men and women whose contributions were invaluable but whose stories had been largely forgotten. And many of you came here to read about a storm named Barry.

On behalf of our entire team, thank you to all of our readers and to everyone of you who liked, shared, commented, or retweeted our work on social media. Of course, none of our work would be possible without our extraordinary benefactors and supporters. Their generosity allows us the ability to provide all of our content free of charge to readers, without the need for a paywall or a subscription, and free from advertisements and spam mail. Our supporters are all people who share our passion about Louisiana and recognize the enormous value of fact-based, independent journalism and commentary, which is especially critical at a time in which corporate consolidation has decimated local newsrooms across the state and disinformation has become rampant online.

In 2019, the Bayou Brief‘s reporting made headlines on the Drudge Report and was mentioned in the pages of the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic, Raw Story, the Advocate, the Times-Picayune, and Christianity Today. Students at Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota, Southeastern Louisiana University, Xavier University, George Washington University, and at least one of the sixteen campuses of Kentucky’s Community and Technical College System visited the Bayou Brief to read their homework assignments. Our election coverage inspired mailers and radio ads and more than a couple of television commercials about Eddie Rispone.

Someone even bought a billboard on I-10 that referenced our reporting on car insurance premiums.

Last year, our reporting made a difference, and as we settle into 2020, another hugely consequential election year, I can guarantee one thing for certain: The Bayou Brief will only get better.

On a personal note, during 2019, as we wrapped up the decade, I was honored and enormously grateful to receive two awards for my work here on the Bayou Brief. Gambit, one of the nation’s very best weekly publications and a New Orleans institution for nearly forty years, put me on their Top 40 Under 40 list. It was a tremendous privilege to be included in a roster of vastly more impressive artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and civic leaders, and it was especially meaningful to have been chosen by a group of writers whose work I’ve always admired. I even brought along my mama, who flew in from Texas, to the awards banquet.

Incidentally, one of the other honorees was the 19-year-old filmmaker Phillip Youmans, whose debut feature film “Burning Cane” won the top prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. I was recently able to catch his movie on Netflix, and it’s a beautiful and profound meditation on spirituality and suffering in a forgotten corner of South Louisiana. It’s made even more astonishing when you consider the film was written and directed by a teenager. He also brought his mama to the awards banquet.

I am equally thankful to the hosts of the Millennial Awards, who selected me as 2019’s Outstanding Millennial Journalist. I didn’t expect to win, so I stupidly neglected to write an acceptance speech. Instead, I just told the audience, “It’s www.BayouBrief.com.” But as I later mentioned on social media, although I was born and raised in Louisiana, I moved to New Orleans only a couple of years ago, and I will always be grateful for how this city has given me a home and allowed me the ability to share my voice alongside the most diverse and most unique community in the entire country.

Speaking of awards, we have a few more to hand out here before we completely close the book on 2019. But first, we look back on our own coverage during the 21^st century’s final year as a teenager.

In gratitude,

Lamar

A little more than a year ago, at the strike of midnight on Dec. 22, 2018, the federal government officially began the longest shutdown in American history, 35 days, after President Donald Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that didn’t include billions of dollars to construct a wall on the border between Mexico and the United States.

As a candidate, Trump had put the proposed border wall at the center of his campaign and had famously told voters that Mexico would foot the bill. But two years later, with Nancy Pelosi set to take the Speaker’s gavel back from John Boehner, some of the president’s most influential advisors- that is, the rotating roster of right-wing pundits who appeared every night on Fox News- ramped up pressure for border wall funding.

Ultimately, the impasse was resolved, though not without significant controversy, when Trump declared an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, allowing him the ability to move money that had already been appropriated for other projects to his wall.

Two months before the shutdown, in October of 2018, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, a Republican from Louisiana’s Fifth District, quietly removed Terry Finley’s 2014 letter to the editor of The News Star from his campaign website. Finley’s letter praised the congressman for a promise he had made during his first election. Abraham had vowed to give every dime he earned to a hospital that treats children with cancer, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and the Independence Fund, an organization that helps double-amputee combat veterans. In his first term, that amounted to $348,000. In total, Abraham should have contributed at least $696,000 to the two charities.

But as it turned out, he didn’t make good on that promise, and if the federal government hadn’t shut down, it’s likely we would have never known the congressman had broken his word. That’s because a reporter surveyed members of Louisiana’s federal delegation to ask whether they would continue to collect their paychecks during the shutdown. Abraham’s office confirmed that yes, in fact, the congressman would take his salary, thank you very much. In doing so, they unwittingly revealed that meant Abraham had abandoned the pledge he made on the campaign trail. In many ways, it was his promise to donate a taxpayer-provided fortune to charity that distinguished him from the two other Republican candidates, the incumbent Vance McAllister and Zach Dasher, a cousin of the Duck Dynasty clan.

It was also the first major story of the 2019 gubernatorial election, because even before Abraham had been sworn in for another term in Congress, he announced his candidacy for governor. Here on the Bayou Brief, we called it the “Abrascam.”

Abraham Won By Pledging Salary to Veterans Group and St. Jude’s Hospital. He Now Owes Them Between $348K – $696K.

Abrascam: Rep. Ralph Abraham has not refuted reports he deceived voters with pledge to donate salary to charity

Abrascam | On Eve of 2014 Election, Ralph Abraham Discusses His Pledge to Donate Salary

Two days after the Abrascam story broke, a different kind of scam dominated the news here in Louisiana: The referees who officiated the NFC Championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints had missed a critical pass interference penalty that, if called, would have likely resulted in the Saints moving onto their second-ever Super Bowl.

Protests were held. Lawsuits were filed. The Rams player who had committed the penalty was fined. Saints fans refused to tune into Super Bowl LIII, which- fittingly- was only one letter off of the word “lie.”

In New Orleans, there was even a “Boycott Bowl,” a day-long, completely sold-out concert featuring Big Freedia, Dash Rip Rock, and Kermit Ruffins, among others.

Abrascam wasn’t the only featured series we debuted last January. During the very first week of 2019, the Bayou Brief’s Sue Lincoln introduced readers to the “Erector Set,” a small cabal of Baton Rouge-based construction magnates who had spent decades amassing their own fortunes and quietly accumulating enormous political influence and were now hoping to install one of their own, Eddie Rispone, as the state’s next governor.

Over the course of 2019, we published 30 different reports about the Erector Set, but throughout the year, we would continually return back to Sue’s initial four stories from January.

Who Runs Louisiana?

The Business of Running State Government

Erector Set: The Power Behind the (Hoped-For) Throne

Erector Set: Not So Fast, Eddie

Not everything last January was either politics or football. We also published the first three chapters of a five-part series about the legendary Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter, none of which would have been possible without the insight and the contributions of the writer Ruth Laney and the foremost authority on Hunter’s life and career, long-time Northwestern State University professor Tom Whitehead.

Clementine’s Hunters: Chapter 1 | In Her Own Words

Clementine’s Hunters: Chapter 2 | Coincoin and Cammie

Clementine’s Hunters: Chapter 3 | The Lucky Art Dealer and His Collection of Toyes

In February, we kicked off the first season of our podcast “Briefly Speaking” by interviewing three of the most well-known political podcasters in the nation: Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America.

The Bayou Brief, in our debut edition of our podcast Briefly Speaking, interviews Pod Save America.

Although his corner of the Bayou Brief would later become known as the 13th Ward Rambler, Peter Athas published a pair of columns in February about one of his favorite subjects, Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Confessions of a Krewe du Vieux Member

The Zulu Conundrum

With much of the state in the throes of Mardi Gras, another grand Louisiana tradition- campaign season- was slightly interrupted, which provided the Bayou Brief with the perfect opportunity to tell the stories of two men from Louisiana’s past who were once again in the headlines.

On a forgotten patch of land in the outskirts of Pineville, a group of local historic preservationists commemorated the installation of a new landmark sign, and if you weren’t otherwise familiar with the unlikely backstory, then you’d be forgiven if you thought that it seems like the last place to expect to find a sign honoring Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

As the Deep South confronts Confederate monuments, a small town in Louisiana honors a Union General

While the folks in CenLa were honoring “Cump,” those gathered inside of a federal courtroom in New Orleans witnessed another blast from Louisiana’s past, as Kenny Knight, David Duke’s former campaign manager, pleaded guilty to three felony counts related to his operation of a pill mill.

Kenny Knight Keelhauled: The Past Is Never Dead.

We wrapped up February in North Louisiana, with a report from Sue Lincoln about the ongoing saga involving orphan wells, natural gas, and an environmental emergency that had been declared but never publicly announced.

DeSoto Parish Emergency: All Out Of Funds

At the beginning of March, we published the kind of story that seems to occur once every three or four years in Louisiana: A politico with ties to a prostitution scandal. In this case, however, the scandal wasn’t about the politician himself; it centered around an aide to U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins. And it didn’t involve prostitution; the allegations were about something much more serious and troubling: A human trafficking ring.

District Director for U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins at the Center of Alleged Human Trafficking Ring

A few days later, another Louisianian made headlines for being involved in a different kind of scandal. Cynthia Fierro Harvey, the Bishop of Louisiana’s United Methodist Church, had the unenviable assignment of presiding over a vote at the church’s global conference in which hard-line, conservative delegates- a plurality of whom were from Africa- succeeded in adopting an anti-LGBTQ plan. As a result, the church now seems all but certain to permanently break apart.

Louisiana Bishop Presides Over Vote That Divides the United Methodist Church

After a drunk driver barreled into a group of bicyclists leaving the Endymion Parade, injuring several and killing two, Elizabeth Freudmann attended the funeral services for one of the victims, Sharree Walls, and shared with readers why Walls’ contributions to New Orleans were so remarkable and why so many were left devastated by her death.

In New Orleans, Hundreds Gather to Celebrate Sharree Walls, Whose Impact “Will Last a Lifetime.”

Sue Lincoln returned with another installment in the Erector Set series, and although this particular report wouldn’t receive much attention until the waning days of the runoff election, it is perhaps the most critical in understanding the close friendship between Eddie Rispone and Lane Grigsby.

Rispone and the Erector Set: Best. Advice. Ever.

There are three other stories from last March that are worth particular attention.

After Jeff Landry attempted to force the governor to appoint Carolyn Prator, a conservative political operative and the wife of Caddo Parish’s Republican Sheriff, to the Red River Waterway Commission by issuing a laughable advisory opinion that asserted procedural ambiguity negated the governor’s appointing authority, a judge ruled in favor of the governor, effectively telling Landry to stay in his own lane.

Court Rejects Landry’s Attempted Power Grab of Red River Waterway Commission

Trey Poche’ explored the trade-offs as well as the pros and cons of the charter school movement in New Orleans.

A Recovery from the Recovery: Has the Charter School Movement Traded One Set of Problems for Another?

And finally, we unpacked the ways in which Republican legislators attempted to use a phony audit to smear Medicaid expansion in Louisiana.

How Republicans Have Used a Phony Audit to Smear Medicaid Expansion in Louisiana

We were kept busy in April, as legislators descended back to the state Capitol for another session and we debuted “Wrecked,” a major investigative series on the high price of car insurance in Louisiana. But the month kicked off with another installment in ongoing series “Abrascam.”

After a Pipeline Ravaged His Farm, Rep. Ralph Abraham Sued Big Oil

Dr. Barbara Forrest contributed a fascinating report about Bro. Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum and the ways in which an obscure set of beliefs known as Seven Mountain Dominionism has informed the powerful religious-right organization’s agenda.

Gimme that Ol’ Time Dominionism: How Gene Mills Is Using Democracy to Make Louisiana a Theocracy

Bro. Gene later referred Dr. Forrest’s report in a letter to his mailing list, urging recipients to send his organization money. Unfortunately, his fundraising pitch provided an incorrect link to Dr. Forrest’s report and grossly distorted her findings, brazenly inventing statements he then misattributed to her in order to bolster the ludicrous claim that he was somehow the victim of a vast conspiracy.

Casey Parks explored the ways in which LSU’s now-outgoing President F. King Alexander had prioritized diversity not only as a moral imperative but also as a financial necessity.

At LSU, Racial Diversity Is a Financial Necessity

Sue Lincoln told the riveting story of St. Rosalie, Louisiana in this two-part report.

The Saga of St. Rosalie: A None-Too-Rosy Past

Saga of St. Rosalie: The Deal of 4/5 of the Century

Like millions across the globe, we were also horrified by the fire-bombings of historic African American churches in Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish.

Holden and the Phonies

As we mentioned earlier, April was also when we debuted the series “Wrecked,” and if you didn’t catch it the first time, you should consider taking the time to read the entire series soon, as it appears the legislature will once again consider the same bogus solutions it rejected last year.

Wrecked: How Auto Insurance Takes Louisiana for a Ride

Wrecked: A “Premium Reduction” Bill That Would Only Reduce Car Insurance Accountability, Protections for Injured

In Louisiana, Widows Pay As Much As 15% More for Auto Insurance

In Louisiana, Auto Insurers Charge Wealthy Drivers with a DWI Staggeringly Less Than Drivers with a Spotless Record but Poor Credit.

In Louisiana, Auto Insurers Have a License to Discriminate

Last but certainly not least, Peter Athas assembled this must-read/must-watch list of the Top 40 films set in Louisiana.

Set in Louisiana: Top 40 Movies, 1938- Present

At the beginning of May, the media landscape in Louisiana changed forever when the Advocate’s owner, John Georges, a mega-wealthy entrepreneur and erstwhile political candidate who had turned his family-owned grocery distribution company into a multi-billion dollar video poker empire, announced he had purchased the Times-Picayune.

David Grows Into Goliath: The Advocate Purchases the Times-Picayune

In May, we also continued our series “Wrecked” with five additional reports.

Driven Into the Ground

VIDEO: Douglas Heller, Nationally-Acclaimed Auto Insurance Expert, Eviscerates LABI-Backed “Reform” Bill

The Task Farce: What a Missing Report Reveals About the Insurance Industry’s Failed Effort to Avoid Accountability

Major Insurers Charge Louisiana’s Blue-Collar Workers More for Basic Coverage Than White-Collar Workers

Insurance Commissioner Donelon Accepts $20K from Man Indicted for Attempting to Bribe NC Commissioner

And U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham continued to provide ample material for another ongoing series, “Abrascam.”

How Ralph Abraham and His Family Have Made a Fortune by Farming for Government Subsidies

It was only a matter of time before one of Lamar’s favorite subjects, Louisiana College, made headlines again.

Louisiana College Professor Resigns in Protest After School Leaders Conceal Lewd, Sexist Comments by Prominent Dean

And finally, Peter Athas followed up his list of the Top 40 films set in Louisiana with this must-read/must-listen list of the Top 50 Louisiana Tunes.

Louisiana Tunes: The Top 50* Songs About the Gret Stet

We kicked off the month of June with a pair of opinion columns about an issue that continues to divide the nation and had threatened to fracture the Louisiana Democratic Party.

If We Want a Pro-Choice Governor, We First Need a Pro-Choice Electorate

I’m a Pro-Life Louisiana Democrat Who Opposes Outlawing Abortion.

Later that month, Sue Lincoln opened up to readers about the devastating loss of her husband Don, who had passed away in early May from a bacterial infection while awaiting a heart transplant, publishing this poignant tribute to his remarkable life and career.

The Heart of Everyman

We made a number of changes to the website in June, debuting a new template, a new masthead, and a series of new logos.

June was also National Pride Month, and Dylan Waguespack, a friend to our entire team and Louisiana’s most prominent trans advocate, wrote this extraordinary opinion column about why LGBTQ people and their allies “must name and claim Louisiana for the future of all.”

The Rainbow Means Never Again Another Flood of Hate

There was another major report in our investigative series “Wrecked.”

Deployment Penalty: How Big Auto Insurers Hike Premiums on Returning Vets

And an important addition to the “Erector Set” series.

There’s a Reason Eddie Rispone Supports Louisiana’s Corrupt and Failing School Voucher Program

We ended the month with a meditation about and a reaffirmation of Louisiana’s magic.

Réaffirmer la Magie de la Louisiane

When we launched the Bayou Brief, we vowed to do as much as we possibly could to amplify the important stories that are too often overlooked by a state media largely centered around Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In July, Sue Lincoln brought readers the saga of a power struggle between the Chief of Police and the Mayor of the small but mighty town of Many (Man-e) in Sabine Parish, located about thirty miles west of Natchitoches (if you can’t pronounce Natchitoches, chances are you don’t know where it is on a map either).

Many Fireworks: Sparks Fly Between Police Chief and Mayor

It wasn’t the only geography lesson Sue would provide that month. She followed up her report on the fireworks in Many with a travelogue of sorts.

Campaign 2019: Road-Tripping with Gov. John Bel Edwards

In July, as Louisiana braced itself for Barry, we also featured this astonishing debut story from the Bayou Brief’s cultural editor, Lydia Y. Nichols.

Listen to the River: A Change Is Gonna Come

And speaking of Barry, our criticism of the parachute press and its demonstrably over-hyped coverage of the looming storm became our most-read story of all-time.

National News Coverage of Tropical Storm Barry Is Its Own Disaster

Although the storm was a dud, the campaign season continued to entertain, and we continued to ramp up election coverage.

There was this report by Sue Lincoln about Ralph Abraham continuing to operate a medical practice, despite his promises to the contrary.

Doc Abraham Claims He “Gave Up His Practice,” Also Claims Income from New Clinic

And there were three others about Abraham’s fellow Republican opponent, Eddie Rispone.

Running Away from His Values

Rispone: Insider Background Contradicts Outsider Claims

Eddie Rispone Relies on Controversial Program That Outsources Jobs to Foreign Workers

Finally, after a months-long investigation, Lamar shared his findings about the ways in which Alexandria had turned an award-winning city festival into an embarrassing debacle.

Why Alexandria’s New Festival Drowned in the Red

In August, we lost two extraordinary Louisianians, the New Orleans-based “superconnector” Ray Nichols and the beloved trailblazing Queen Bee, former Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

Ray Nichols, Superconnector and One of Louisiana’s Most Prominent and Innovative Voices on Social Media, Dies at 73.

Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, Trailblazer and Tireless Champion of Louisiana, Dies at 76.

Sue camped out at the Secretary of State’s office and provided us with dispatches about what was happening behind-the-scenes as candidates lined up for qualifying.

2019 Election Qualifying Day One: Here’s Your Sign

Qualifying Quickies: 2019 State Elections, Day 2

Qualifying Concludes: Short Takes and Synopsis

She also gave us the skinny on the races for the State Senate, Insurance Commissioner, and Agriculture Commissioner.

Politics, Physics, and Attempted Musical Chairs: State Senate Races

Insurance Commissioner Race Could Be a Circus

Cultivating Campaigns for Agriculture Commissioner

Lamar shared the timeless classic about the Louisiana mayor who hoped to get his city into the catfish farming business by transforming an old city swimming pool into a fully-stocked catfish pond but whose bold vision had one tragic blind spot: The pool-turned-pond’s razor-sharp fan blades.

Tilly Snyder Is Missing Again

Troy Gilbert also dove deeply into Louisiana’s past and retold a story that had once fascinated the entire world but had since been all but forgotten for nearly 150 years.

The Dark and Forgotten Fate of the Florinda

Lamar’s friends at Louisiana College would make another round of headlines in August after he revealed the school’s new draconian policy on social media use.

Louisiana College’s Draconian Policies on Social Media Use Horrifies Students, Professors, and Alumni

But without question, the most consequential report in August was about two small pharmacies in rural Louisiana, a massive quantity of opioids, and a congressman who was running for governor.

Pharmland

With the jungle primary now only a month away, Lamar’s series “Pharmland” would dominate the Bayou Brief’s coverage for most of September.

Excuses for the Doctor

Apples to Apples: A Tale of Two Pharmacies

A Bountiful Harvest

Also in September, the Bayou Brief’s Cayman Clevenger decided to take a trip to Lafayette to learn about the story and the artist behind the year’s iconic “I Voted” sticker.

King George

And Lamar took a trip through the forgotten pages of Louisiana history in order to tell the harrowing story of a massacre on Alexandria’s Lee Street.

The Beginning of Hell

With the jungle primary finally within sight, we kicked off the month of October with- what else?- a biographical essay about the life of LSU’s “founder,” George Mason Graham, and a fascinating story by Troy Gilbert about the “negro captains” that had helped rebuild Louisiana in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The Other General

Taking the Helm: The “Negro Captains” and Crews of the Post-Civil War Gulf Coast

There was one critical race that we had neglected until only a week before Election Day: Acadia Parish Clerk of Court. But in all seriousness, the race between the incumbent Robby Barousse and challenger Emily Stoma provided us with the opportunity to tell the story of how the Barousse family has dominated Acadia Parish since before the place even had a proper name and how three consecutive generations of Barousse men have controlled the clerk’s office in Crowley like the Crawley family control Downton Abbey in Yorkshire.

In Acadia Parish, A Family Empire Built Through the Clerk of Court’s Office

And speaking of aristocracy and Crowley, in October, we also published a series of colorized photographs of John and Jackie Kennedy’s epic 1959 visit to the 23rd annual Rice Festival. With an estimated attendance of anywhere between 97,000 and 125,000 people, it wasn’t just the single-largest campaign event of the entire 1960 presidential election season; since then, with the exception of presidential inaugurations, no other American political candidate has drawn more people to a single event. (This will be the subject of an upcoming story).

60 Years Ago, JFK Attended the 23rd International Rice Festival in Crowley. For the First Time, Here Are the Color Photos.

Prior to Election Day, we featured a lengthy recap of our campaign coverage.

Fear and Loathing in Louisiana

And afterward, with the gubernatorial field now winnowed down to John Bel Edwards and Eddie Rispone, we published a pair of stories unpacking some of the most interesting details contained within Rispone’s campaign finance reports.

Eddie Rispone Has Your Number… and Some of Your Receipts As Well.

Rispone Campaign Consultant Owns “Conservative News” Site That Criticized Ralph Abraham

But October’s most-read story wasn’t about any of the candidates running for office; it was about a man who described himself as a “kingmaker,” Lane Grigsby.

The Great Grigsby

Although the runoff election was imminent, we weren’t quite finished with the “Erector Set” series. In early November, after discovering a document that listed Rispone as a member of a company headquartered in Nevada, we reported on how he had established a shell company in the tax haven sometimes referred to as the Silver State in order to hold his Louisiana-based business’s retirement fund.

A Year Before Launching Gubernatorial Campaign, Eddie Rispone Quietly Moved Nevada Shell Company to Louisiana

Rispone’s Nevada Shell Company Controlled $73M in Retirement Funds

But the governor’s race wasn’t the only thing on our radar. We were also the first to report on how Louisiana Sec. of State Kyle Ardoin violated state law when he participated in a rally hosted by Donald Trump.

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin Violated Law When He Campaigned for Trump and Rispone

In our final report about candidate Eddie Rispone, we revealed secretly-recorded audio of Rispone at a high-dollar, closed-door fundraiser explaining why he decided to dodge all but one debate during the runoff election.

In Secret Recording, Eddie Rispone Claims High-Dollar Fundraisers “More Important” Than Attending Debates

And on the eve of the election, we reported on how early voting numbers presaged the emergence of a new electorate than the one that had shown up during the jungle primary. .

Out of the Jungle, A New Electorate Emerges

John Bel Edwards, of course, beat Eddie Rispone in the runoff and secured a second, four-year term as Louisiana governor.

Edwards Roars Back

Sue Lincoln provided her take on the campaign season’s biggest blind spot.

The Blind Spot in the 2019 Campaign

And Lynda Woolard explained the ways in which a ground game that fired on all cylinders proved to be critical to Edwards’ victory.

Ground Game

Although the election was now in the rear view mirror, there were a couple of more critical takeaways that demanded our attention. In “The Winning Message,” Lamar explored how John Bel Edwards benefitted from a well-disciplined messaging strategy and effectively neutralized Donald Trump’s effort to turn the race toward Rispone by simply never taking the bait.

The Winning Message

And Stephen Handwerk, the veteran executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, explained how Edwards’ campaign brilliantly utilized the party’s sophisticated data management tools.

Making It Count

Last month, we also debuted the first episode of our new limited podcast series “Combat in the Courtroom,” which is about the remarkable sixty year career of Louisiana criminal defense attorney Mike Fawer. In Episode One, Mike recalls his successful defense of Aaron Mintz, a well-known New Orleans furniture store owner who had been accused of murdering his wife Palma and whose 1984 trial became the city’s first TV show trial (despite the fact that cameras were not allowed in the courtroom).

“Combat in the Courtroom” Episode One: The Murder Trial of Aaron Mintz

2019 was a great year for Louisiana journalism and for journalism about Louisiana. The Advocate won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Local News Reporting and was named as a finalist for Best Editorial Writing. There were riveting stories about corrupt judges and corrupt district attorneys, about high school football in the tiny town of Erath, and about how petrochemical plants have polluted a part of the state now known as Cancer Alley.

There was also some truly terrible journalism about Louisiana, but truth be told, the worst reporting wasn’t published by a Louisiana outlet or written by a Louisiana reporter.

In Part One of our Year-End Brief, we revived a series of awards- the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly- that Bob Mann once handed out every year in the pages of the Times-Picayune. In the second and final installation, we are launching a new annual series of prizes, the Briefcase Awards, which recognizes the very best of Louisiana journalism.

That’s right. We’re not interested in lampooning our fellow Louisiana reporters and columnists, even if they definitely deserve a little good-natured ribbing (see: Dan Fagan’s column in the Advocate about Conrad Appel; see also: Dan Fagan’s other columns in the Advocate). Instead, we want to share some love and appreciation for the people and publications here in Louisiana and across the country that have enriched our knowledge and commanded our respect.

Its last two call letters may be “BS,” but there’s nothing inaccurate about the headline that one obviously bemused web editor at Shreveport’s ABC affiliate, KTBS, used to update their online followers about a legal challenge over outgoing state Rep. Barbara Norton’s residency.

Unable to seek another term in the state House due to term limits, Norton qualified to run for a seat in the state Senate. There was just one problem: Norton didn’t actually live in the district. And when her would-be opponent challenged her qualifications, Norton, who became somewhat of an internet sensation after a video of her introducing the state House to a performance of the song “Halle Berry” by her nephew Hurricane Chris went viral, concocted an elaborate and ludicrous plan to convince a judge otherwise.

As KTBS’s headline indicates, Norton claimed to reside in the same small home as a registered sex offender, and unfortunately for Norton, the sex offender had a parole officer who regularly checked in on the man and knew that his roommate was not a three-term state representative. The man actually lived alone, and Norton, as it turns out, didn’t even know his name.

But that’s not the only hilariously absurd part of the story. Barbara Norton, anticipating a visit from an officer of the court, arrived at the man’s home (presumably he was sub-letting it from her tenant), made herself a sleeping palette on the living room sofa and when the officer arrived in the morning, she greeted him at the door in a nightgown. She’d thought of everything except for one critical detail: She forgot her wigs.

The court ruled against Norton, disqualifying her as a candidate.

But the truly unfortunate thing about this whole story is that KTBS changed its epic headline within only a few hours of publication.

When Scott Ploof founded the digital publication Big Easy Magazine in 2018, he didn’t exactly attempt to conceal its political perspective. “Unapologetically progressive,” Ploof announced. It became the online magazine’s calling card; they even sell t-shirts of the slogan.

But in New Orleans, there’s nothing necessarily controversial about being “unapologetically progressive.” There is, however, one inviolable, albeit unwritten commandment in The City That Care Forgot: Thou shalt not bear false witness against Saint Drew Brees.

Last year, Ploof’s publication made national headlines after its editor and contributing writer, Kentucky-transplant Jenn Bentley, helpfully pointed out to Brees that he had a years-long history of promoting the virulently anti-LGBTQ organization Focus on the Family, led by Madame Tussaud’s James Dobson. To be sure, the initial iteration of Bentley’s article, which quickly went viral, was considerably more skeptical about Brees’ mens rea (that’s Latin for “guilty mind”), and presumably after being made aware of Brees’ not-so-great record of off-the-field gullibility (believe it or not, a word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary), she decided to retool the report and provide him with enough room to avoid the sack and throw a strike downfield. (Incidentally, all of this was set into motion because of a tweet from the Bayou Brief’s own Ed Branley).

Instead, Brees scrambled, sharing a video on social media of him reading an over-workshopped word salad that managed to take every side of the issue while presenting himself as an earnest do-gooder and Big Easy Magazine as big ol’ meanies who traffic in “click bait.” It was a clueless sport agent’s idea of crisis communication.

Suffice it to say, it was not his finest performance. In fact, he managed to only make things worse. Ploof and Bentley were both bombarded with hate mail from sycophantic Brees fans who apparently never paid attention during Sunday School, and instead of serving as his final word on the kerfuffle, the ham-handed video opened Brees up to a second and third round of questions: How could he not be aware of Focus on the Family’s track record? How could he square his claim that he’d never support an organization that promoted intolerance against LGBTQ Americans with his promotion of Focus on the Family? Brees attempted to suggest that the criticism had solely concerned his most recent video on behalf of the organization’s Bring Your Bible to School Day, which, incidentally, is a right that has never been infringed- on any day- in any public school in America, but Big Easy Magazine’s report wasn’t just about the most recent video; it was about his years-long advocacy on behalf of Focus on the Family.

Ultimately, Brees acknowledged that he hadn’t been previously aware of the controversial and divisive positions the organization has taken on LGBTQ rights, and undoubtedly, he won’t ever cut a commercial for Focus on the Family again. Regrettably, he didn’t retract his criticism of Big Easy Magazine, the locally-owned independent publication that brought the issue to his attention, but considering he is the greatest quarterback of all-time and led the Saints to victory in their first-ever Super Bowl, we’re okay with cutting the guy some slack.

At its very best, sports reporting can be a sublime and profound meditation on the vicissitudes of life, human triumphs and tragedies, and the lingering and sometimes oppressive residue of history. At its very best, sports reporting can transcend its genre so much that the label “sports reporting” seems to cheapen or trivialize what the story is really about. At its very best, sports reporting doesn’t require the reader to know a damn thing about sports.

Jeré Longman’s story about his old high school football team, the Eunice High Bobcats, and his old high school football coach, Joe Nagata, is more of a personal essay than it is a dispatch from the gridiron, but at its core, there’s still a game being played. And Longman is, in fact, a sports reporter.

In order to tell this story, which is about football but also about the lifelong friendship between an Asian American coach and an African American player, Longman, who is himself white, first has to return to his hometown of Eunice, Louisiana, a small city cradled in between St. Landry and Acadia Parishes— 30 miles northwest of Lafayette as the crow flies, 44 miles as the road winds.

There’s no need to spoil anything about Longman’s story, except to say that by the time you reach its ending, many of you will undoubtedly disagree with notion of characterizing it as sports reporting. We agree. It’s much more than that.

It’s true: This story did appear in the Bayou Brief, and it was written by Casey Parks, who is listed somewhere on our masthead as a contributing editor. But we’re not violating our own self-imposed prohibition against self-dealing because this particular story was first published by the Hechinger Report, a fantastic nonprofit outlet that covers education policy both across the planet and right here in our backyard.

Casey tells the remarkable true story of Danielle Metz, a New Orleans native who was able to turn her life around following a stint behind bars and graduate from college near the top of her class, all thanks to a pair of massively consequential actions, one undertaken by former President Barack Obama and the other by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.

During Obama’s final year in the White House, he commuted the life sentence Metz had been given in 1993 for her involvement in a cocaine ring operated by her then-husband, a man she described as physically and psychologically abusive. A year later, John Bel Edwards signed into a law a bill that prohibited public colleges from asking about an applicant’s prior criminal history, making Louisiana the very first state in the country to successfully “ban the box” from college applications.

There’s a fantastic coda to this: Casey’s story about Danielle Metz eventually made its way onto the pages of USA Today, which is how it caught the attention of former President Obama, who graciously sent an encouraging handwritten note of congratulations to Metz.

Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives full-time, and despite the fact that he even wrote an entire book about the New England Patriots, there are very few- if any- national political columnists who possess the kind of command about Louisiana politics, both past and present, like Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce. “There absolutely is not enough gild in the world for this lily,” Pierce wrote about the 2015 story, first broken by the Bayou Brief’s Lamar White, Jr., of how David Vitter’s paid spy was caught eavesdropping on Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand by Newell’s friend, who also happened to be a paid spy. “God love Louisiana.”

Throughout Bobby Jindal’s eight tumultuous years as governor, Pierce paid close attention, and every now and then, whenever he felt inspired, he’d turn his pen against Jindal with devastating, laser-like precision. “There is no bottom to the barrel that is ‘Bobby’ Jindal, wandering governor of Louisiana and walking asterisk in the presidential contest,” he once wrote. “There is no national tragedy that this charlatan cannot make worse.” Jindal was like “the battered bit of old presidential timber presently warping out behind the bait shoppe.”

During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Pierce stood with our delegation during President Obama’s speech. “On the crowded convention floor on Wednesday night, as the President of the United States gave his heart and his soul to the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed him, I found a spot to stand with the delegation from Louisiana, which has been the center of so much heartbreak and redemption over the past 10 years, and which also is the place where the American concept of cool was born, the one that captured the world through a million silver trumpets,” Pierce wrote.

But Pierce isn’t getting our Lifetime Achievement Award (that belongs to someone else). This year, after watching the one and only runoff debate between Eddie Rispone and John Bel Edwards, Pierce said what most political writers in Louisiana had been either too polite or too muzzled to admit openly: Eddie Rispone knows nothing about government. Zero.

Pardon the extended quote:

“On Wednesday night, while Game Seven was in commercial, I switched over to Louisiana Public Broadcasting to catch some of the debate between Edwards and Rispone. I thereupon missed most of the middle innings because I couldn’t look away. Some debates are car wrecks. This was Figure-8 racing from Islip, Long Island. Every candidate cranks up the old fog machine in the latter stages of a campaign, but Rispone’s is a threat to commercial aviation. 

“The man knows nothing about government. Not in the sense of ‘unfamiliar with the nuances of how political institutions operate,’ but in the sense of ‘ab-so-fcking-lute-ly nothing.’ His entire campaign seems to be based on the phrase, ‘I’m a businessman and I know how to get things done.’ (Huey Long would be appalled.) On occasion, Edwards had to use up half his allotted time to answer for the purposes of explaining to Rispone that, no, votes in the state legislature are not decided by rock-paper-scissors. For his part, Edwards, who was handed a dead fish by outgoing governor Bobby Jindal, defended his record and tried to get Rispone to respond to a question without sounding like he’d beamed in from Alpha Centauri.

“‘I am a person,’ Rispone replied on one occasion, ‘of myself.’”

In their absolutely essential multi-part series “Polluter’s Paradise,” reporters with ProPublica, the Times-Picayune, and the Advocate* reveal the frightening truths about Cancer Alley, the carcinogenic corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans home to the nation’s largest concentration of oil and gas and petrochemical plants.

Throughout the series, a team of investigative reporters use the harrowing accounts of people living in a part of the country that has produced unimaginable wealth for a handful of multinational conglomerates to tell a larger story about government and corporate negligence, greed, and multigenerational poverty. Some of these stories may be familiar. For example, they spend time in St. Rosalie, Louisiana, the community that Sue Lincoln chronicled earlier in the year for the Bayou Brief. But much of their reporting is new and urgent.

*As a general rule, when a reporter’s byline includes the Times-Picayune and the Advocate, publications that are under the same ownership and feature the same content, the Bayou Brief lists only the Times-Picayune in order to avoid the confusion created by its publisher’s frivolous attempt at co-branding.

The wild and sordid saga of the Knight brothers- Bryan and Mark- is already well-known to the people of Acadiana, largely thanks to the diligent and exhaustive reporting of the local media. Still, it’s somewhat surprising that it wasn’t until this year that the Brothers Knight earned national attention.

We will defer to the Current’s Leslie Turk to set up the story. From her interview with writer Ian Frisch:

“There is so much we didn’t know outside of the narrative investigators painted: In a fit of desperation to keep control of the lucrative family business, a filthy rich oilfield CEO allegedly hires a bumbling fool and two dirty cops to set his younger brother up in a June 2014 drug bust. 

“Red flags everywhere, prosecutors opt not to pursue the charges the following January.

“A few months later, after being threatened by said bumbling fool, a frightened company employee tips off (legit) law enforcement, and the perps are arrested and charged in the conspiracy. 

“The story dropped like a bombshell, rocking the community. It was the beginning of the end of Knight Oil Tools. 

“Now comes a detailed story of what led to the sibling rivalry that left a mother and sister caught in the middle and ultimately stripped each sibling of tens of millions of dollars of net worth.”

Read Frisch’s story in New York Magazine here.

When Jim Beam was 10 years old, Old Tub Distillery of Clermont, Kentucky decided rebrand itself in honor of Col. James Beauregard Beam, the great-great-grandson of the distillery’s founder Jacob Beam and the man who saved the family-owned company from the brink of ruin during Prohibition. Henceforth, the distillery and its signature bourbon would be known simply as Jim Beam, which has either been an occasional source of amusement or a constant annoyance for the younger Beam.

The rebranded distillery slapped the slogan “None genuine without my signature” on every bottle of bourbon that made its way out of Clermont, Kentucky, which, in another context, may have proven to be a huge problem for a writer who signed the same name on everything he wrote as well.

Around 20 years ago, in the Alexandria Daily Town Talk, you could occasionally find a syndicated column by Jim Beam published alongside a letter to editor by the prolific local epistolarian, Jack Daniels. No doubt, Daniels’ chances of finding his letter in the paper were directly correlated to Beams’ decision to find something worth writing about.

At 86, the long-serving columnist for the Lake Charles American Press is more than a familiar name; he is a Louisiana institution. Six years ago, he was inducted into the state’s political hall of fame. Last September, outgoing state Senate President John Alario donated $15,000 to McNeese State University Jim Beam Scholarship in Journalism. And last year, Beam was prodigious, relentless, informed, and razor-sharp in his analysis of the issues and the cast of characters that comprised the governor’s race.

He is the dean of the Louisiana media, a hard-working columnist- perhaps the hardest-working columnist in the state- and someone who is always ready with an opinion but never unnecessarily cruel or hasty.

We could think of no one better to honor than the legendary Jim Beam, a voice that those in the news business in Louisiana recognize as wise, decent, and, yes, genuine.

The Saints were robbed, but the state’s budget was saved. The parachute press panicked over a pitiful hurricane, but the Advocate won the Pulitzer for exemplifying the very best about local news reporting. Louisiana lost one of its champions, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, but not before she received the long overdue gratitude of a state that was enriched by her lifetime of trailblazing leadership and selfless service. Trump came to town, but as for the President, God bless his heart.

Here on the Bayou Brief, we told the true stories of an Erector Set and an Abrascam, but we began the year with an ode to Clementine. When we weren’t covering the election, we shared the tales of a long-lost ship wreck and the forgotten but remarkable lives of the black captains and watermen who built Louisiana back from the ruin of the Civil War. We reintroduced the state to a mayor named Tilly who hoped to bring his city into the catfish farming business and tried to turn a swimming pool into a fishing pond, but ended up leading the bottom-feeders into a massacre.

We traced back the beginning of the Old War Skule to a Union general and a Confederate planter who carried the name of a Founding Father. There were lyrical stories about listening to the river and about a small town named after a saint and ravaged by sinners. And there were stories about the movies and the music that have defined and inspired us.

Before we enter 2020, some hindsight is important. In Part One of this two-part series, we take inventory of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Louisiana politics in 2019.

A few years ago, Bob Mann, the popular LSU political communications professor, biographer, and erstwhile opinion columnist at the Times-Picayune, created his own annual awards, which he would dole out at the end of the year in the pages of the newspaper and on his blog site “Something Like the Truth.” He named the competition after Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

With his permission, we are reviving this annual tradition with many of the same categories that he created years ago.

In 2015, after he trounced the most powerful Republican in the state, the far-right pilloried John Bel Edwards as the “accidental governor,” serving up a giant dish of revisionist history to console themselves once voters finally had enough of David Vitter.

On the day he took office, Edwards inherited a $2.1 billion budget shortfall and a legislature still under the spell of their most vituperative and mendacious members. Indeed, the very people most responsible for negligently squandering the money that the public had entrusted to their care would spend the entirety of John Bel Edwards’ first term as governor obstinately refusing to help fix what they had broken and repeatedly misrepresenting what was at stake.

While the state’s budgetary woes were the consequence of former Gov. Jindal and this small cadre of the state’s most virulent right-wing partisans, Louisianians could have been spared much of the gridlock and dysfunction four years ago had it not been for a Democratic state representative from New Orleans, Neil Abramson, lining up against the election of a fellow New Orleans Democrat, Walt Leger III, for Speaker of the House. Abramson may have not been the deciding vote, but by turning his back on the newly-elected Democratic governor and his colleague from New Orleans, he nonetheless played a pivotal role in guaranteeing Leger’s defeat and in justifying support for the feckless Taylor Barras. In exchange for his defection, Abramson was given a plum assignment as Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, a role that proved to be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. (Incidentally, Abramson’s Wikipedia page was altered to include the laughable claim that his constituents and his district were better-served as a result of his support for Barras. Although those edits have not yet been removed, the user who made them was banned from Wikipedia).

“(Barras) empowered a caucus-led House where party became more important than process,” the Advocate’s Lanny Keller succinctly explained, noting that Barras was also, arguably, the “nicest guy in the state Capitol.” “Politics — above all, not agreeing with Edwards — was even more pernicious in the House. The rules became obstructions to the legislative process.”

Shortly after Barras was elected Speaker, breaking from decades of tradition in which the legislature deferred to the governor for guidance on selecting leadership, House Republican Caucus Chairman Lance Harris touted the importance of an “independent” legislature, but as the past four years definitively proved, Barras’ tenure as Speaker did not usher in a new era of principled independence; instead, the legislature, particularly the House, were dominated by obstructionists.

Nonetheless, despite the inability of some in the House to operate in good faith, Gov. Edwards managed to rack up a remarkable list of accomplishments and resuscitate state government from the disastrous and negligent decisions made during Jindal’s two terms. The $2.1 billion shortfall with which Jindal had saddled the state on his way out is now a $500 million surplus, and as a result of Edwards reversing course and accepting federal funding for Medicaid expansion, nearly 500,000 Louisianians now have health insurance for the first time. Edwards has repeatedly characterized Medicaid expansion as “the easiest big decision” he has ever made in his life.

In a rare bipartisan victory, Edwards and the legislature worked together to usher in a sweeping set of criminal justice reforms that ensured Louisiana was no longer the world’s leader in incarcerating its own citizens.

Although he had preferred to address the state’s budgetary woes by enacting a series of structural tax reforms and avoiding the hike in sales taxes favored by Republicans, his decision to provide local governments more control over who is awarded ITEP (Industrial Tax Exemption Program) incentives helps provide an additional layer of accountability and scrutiny to a program that has proven to be ripe for abuse.

Similarly, Edwards’ support for the ongoing environmental litigation against oil and gas companies who illegally dredged canals and destroyed much of the state’s already-vulnerable coast, in direct violation of the permits they were issued, ensures that the wealthiest industry in the history of human civilization cannot bribe their way out of their responsibility to pay to fix what they broke. The oil and gas and petrochemical companies that dominate the landscape of coastal Louisiana and transformed the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans from River Road into Cancer Alley have- for far too long- been allowed to operate with impunity, and the residents who live in those communities deserve and demand justice.

As the White House reminded Louisiana voters prior to the bizarre campaign rallies that Donald Trump hosted in support of Eddie Rispone, the state’s economy is performing better than ever. Unemployment is the lowest it’s ever been, and over the course of the past four years, Edwards and his team at LED have landed a series of major economic development “wins,” including a 2,000-job tech facility in New Orleans, the biggest of its kind in the nation.

Although his list of accomplishments is impressive, particularly considering the obstructionism he has faced in the legislature, his decision to affirmatively sign into law the most draconian and punitive abortion law in the country, which sought to prohibit the procedure after five weeks and provided no exceptions in the cases of rape or incest, was rightfully criticized as cruel and brazenly unconstitutional. Indeed, because of a recent decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that involved a similar but less restrictive law that had recently passed in Mississippi, Louisiana’s law was rendered unenforceable. While it is true that Edwards had made his anti-choice position clear during his first election and that the bill that was sent to his desk had the support of a veto-proof majority in both chambers of the legislature, citizens have a justifiable concern whenever their elected leaders attempt to codify and impose their own religious beliefs on others, especially when they do so with the full knowledge that their actions are in direct violation of well-settled law and nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent.

Still, fortunately, most voters recognized the law’s futility, absent a complete reversal by the Supreme Court (which is certainly possible, but probably not plausible, even in the Court’s current composition), and they also recognized that Eddie Rispone represented a far more significant and much more immediate existential threat to healthcare in Louisiana. Among other things, Rispone pledged to enact an enrollment “freeze” for Medicaid applicants, which experts believe would have resulted in more than 300,000 Louisianians losing their health insurance coverage.

Although it may not make any difference to hard-liners in the legislature, this year, John Bel Edwards proved, once and for all, that his election in 2015 was not an accident. He squared off against two formidable Republican opponents, a well-liked conservative congressman and a wealthy political insider who spent $13.5 million of his own money on a campaign that hinged on ingratiating himself to supporters of the president. Indeed, Edwards didn’t just have to beat Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone; he also had to contend the hate machine of the Trump campaign, which invested an enormous amount of political capital in a state he had carried, only three years prior, by nearly twenty points.

In the end, voters rewarded Edwards for his steady, competent leadership and rejected the brand of toxic, vapid, and insult-driven partisanship that swept Donald Trump into a 77,000-vote Electoral College victory over the candidate who had received nearly three million more votes nationwide, Hillary Clinton.

Edwards’ victory proved that his support is much deeper than his opponents had believed and that Donald Trump’s support, even in Louisiana, is far more shallow than they had imagined.

Since our debut in 2017, we have made a conscientious decision to avoid publishing anything about the 45^th President of the United States unless it specifically involves Louisiana. Donald Trump‘s tenure has been characterized by an abandonment of moral leadership and dominated by an erratic, cruel, and profoundly ignorant series of decisions that embolden racists, weaken the rule of law, and undermine the foundational aspirations of this nation of immigrants.

He has appealed to and mimicked the leadership style of authoritarians and despots. He has regularly diminished the dignity of his office (his Twitter account is a never-ending stream of self-aggrandizing baseless braggadocio and unhinged jejune drivel), and although the economy has continued to perform well for some, there is nothing “great” about the America that has been made under his presidency.

But because our focus is on Louisiana, we haven’t had much reason to write about him. Despite the fact that we are led by a Democratic governor, Trump has never been outwardly or singularly antagonistic toward the Bayou State, and during the past three years, somewhat astonishingly, he has enjoyed a cordial working relationship with Gov. Edwards. In fact, John Bel Edwards was the only Democratic elected official invited to the White House for Trump’s very first State Dinner, which honored French President Emanuel Macron. Ironically, the Trump Tax Plan, enacted into law in December of 2017, helped open up an additional source of revenue for the state, triggering a Louisiana law that requires any decrease in federal income tax be offset with a corresponding increase in state income tax (and visa-versa).

That said, whatever marginal benefits Louisiana has gained by having a working relationship with the White House are a credit to our governor’s decency, not to Trump’s leadership, and they pale in comparison to the damage Trump has inflicted on the nation’s most marginalized communities.

That was underscored most prominently during the last month and a half of this year’s campaign season, when the president held three separate rallies in Louisiana to campaign against Edwards. And it was especially obvious in the two rallies he held during the runoff in support of Eddie Rispone, a man whose sycophancy toward the president was so over-the-top it seemed to make even Trump uncomfortable. Indeed, the White House struggled so much to justify his opposition to Edwards that it ended up inadvertently making the case for his re-election, blanketing its social media accounts with talking points about how well the state’s economy has performed during the past three years even though Rispone had been attempting to convince voters exactly the opposite.

In Trump’s final rally in Bossier City, he only stuck to the script once, reading from the teleprompter a series of prepared attack lines against Edwards that were so absurd that Trump, at one point, interrupted himself to let the audience know Edwards had always been good to him in person but others told him the governor “talked bad” about him behind his back. If you were paying close enough attention and recognized that the bluster had been written by a Rispone campaign operative, the subtext was clear: He didn’t believe a damn thing he was saying.

So, why was he even there in the first place?

Louisiana’s junior Senator, John Neely Kennedy, is a highly-educated lawyer with degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, but since arriving in D.C. in 2017, Kennedy has spent the bulk of his time honing his acting skills. He is the real-world version of Sophie Lennon, the character played by Jane Lynch in the Amazon series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Lennon, a Yale-educated actress, betrays her education and intelligence and becomes famous by performing the role of a gimmicky, frumpy, and crass comedienne from Queens. Everything about the “persona” that made her popular is fake: The accent, the jokes, the fat suit, even the connection to New York.

Kennedy, similarly, has made a name for himself in the Senate by recycling the same formulaic one-liners he used during his audition here as state Treasurer, all delivered with an accent that sounds more like East Texas than South Louisiana. Peter Athas refers to these as “Neelyisms.” The Beltway media has lapped it up, even if, back home, most of us already know the routine. (In fact, most of us remember when our junior Senator was an outspoken Democrat. It wasn’t that long ago). And Kennedy, for his part, has proven himself to be skilled at locating a spotlight and a microphone whenever he can.

It’d be a mistake to confuse his huckster persona with a lack of intelligence, as was made evident during his absolute evisceration of judicial nominee Matthew Petersen. But there is a difference between being an intellectual and being intellectually honest, and as hard as he tries to lampoon liberals as snobbish elites, the truth is that John Neely Kennedy is just as much of a “goats-milk-latte-drinking” elitist as the people he ridicules. Magna cum laude at Vanderbilt. Order of the Coif at UVA Law. First class honors at Oxford’s Magdalen College. He’s the author of an entire casebook on Louisiana Constitutional Law, and, among other things, a law review article titled “The Dimension of Time in the Louisiana Products Liability Act.”

During his eighteen-year stint as Louisiana state Treasurer, he ran for the United States Senate three times. In 2004, as a Democrat, he finished in third in the jungle primary behind fellow Democrat Chris John and Republican David Vitter, who won outright. Four years later, he ran again, this time as a Republican against incumbent Mary Landrieu, and Landrieu very effectively diminished his candidacy by branding his campaign as “Kennedy for Whatever.” She also won outright. But the third time was a charm in 2016, when, in a 24-person field that included two Republican congressmen, two well-funded Democrats, and former KKK grand wizard David Duke, Kennedy squeaked out a 25% first-place finish in the jungle primary and then trounced the second-place finisher, Democratic Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, in the runoff.

Initially, he didn’t seem to enjoy his new gig all that much, and almost as soon as he was sworn in, he signaled that he was entertaining a way out. He began testing the waters on a potential run for Louisiana governor, but very quickly, it became obvious that it’d be an uphill battle. Most polls had Edwards ahead of Kennedy in a head-to-head match, and perhaps most importantly, the deep-pocketed donors who had supported his run for Senate weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea of funding yet another Kennedy for Whatever campaign. So, eventually, he made it clear that he had cooled to the idea and would be staying put. However, that didn’t mean he had any intention of staying out. Throughout the campaign season, Kennedy took an unusually active interest in the affairs of state government, trolling Edwards whenever the opportunity presented itself, even if the facts weren’t on his side.

According to the New York Times, at least one member of Louisiana’s federal delegation with knowledge of the president’s decision to involve himself in this year’s gubernatorial campaign (almost certainly not its lone Democratic member, U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond), Kennedy shoulders much of the blame for convincing Trump to campaign against Edwards, despite the objections of White House political aides. This account matches what others have said on background to the Bayou Brief. Kennedy, allegedly, had misrepresented or cherry-picked polling data and voter surveys to make the case to Trump that Edwards was far more vulnerable than he appeared to be.

The gambit backfired: Even though Trump had essentially gone “all-in,” appearing in those three campaign rallies in Louisiana and dispatching both his son and Vice President Mike Pence, he barely made a dint in turning out voters for Rispone, and whatever positive effect he may have had was offset by the negative. Trump not only couldn’t claim a victory; he had actually helped increase Democratic enthusiasm for Edwards.

Even before this year’s legislative session was gaveled in, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), the trade association that has devolved into a powerful right-wing lobbying organization, had made it clear their top legislative priority was the passage of a bill that claimed to be about reducing the price of auto insurance premiums, something that nearly all Louisianians would enthusiastically support. But there was one small problem: The bill they were promoting, state Rep. Kirk Talbots’s HB 372, the so-called Auto Insurance Premium Reduction Act of 2019, had almost nothing to do with reducing the cost of car insurance and nearly everything to do with protecting the profits of the insurance industry through a series of so-called “tort reforms.”

In recent years, LABI has showered campaign cash on lawmakers with the best grades on its annual “scorecard,” funneling the contributions through one or more of its four political action committees, a questionable arrangement that may implicate the state’s ethics laws, according to two legal experts familiar with the practice. For its part, LABI claims that legislators who support its agenda are not automatically rewarded with financial support; in other words, correlation does not equal causation. But one thing is for certain: Because of its network of ancillary PACs, LABI is capable of single-handedly funding candidates to run against lawmakers who stand in their way. That creates an enormous disincentive for legislators who represent competitive districts to avoid outwardly antagonizing the organization.

Put simply, “tort reform” refers to any changes in the law that minimizes or eliminates a person’s ability to hold a wrongdoer accountable in the civil justice system. Although there is no evidence whatsoever that demonstrates any direct connection between the premiums individuals pay for car insurance in Louisiana and the amount of money the insurance industry as a whole spent on litigation in the state, the business lobby- specifically LABI and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce- have spent a veritable fortune attempting to convince the public that they are the victims of this stubborn little thing known as the law. No doubt, their case has been made easier by a small handful of personal injury attorneys who spend their own fortunes advertising how much money previous clients have received after being injured in a car wreck, often in misleading and sensational terms. (For example, instead of reporting the actual amount that an injured party received, they instead advertise the total damages awarded, conveniently leaving out the massive contingency fees their law firms typically collect).

LABI had, for years, attempted to find a legitimate public policy justification to implement an array of tort reforms, and with car insurance, they believed they finally had something they could sneak through the legislature, provided, of course, that no one asked too many questions about the bill itself.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Talbot’s HB 372 breezed through the House, but when it arrived in the state Senate, there was one member, in particular, who had read the bill thoroughly and done his homework, state Sen. Jay Luneau, a Democrat from Alexandria. Luneau is a lawyer by trade, but he isn’t the kind who advertises on billboards or day-time court TV shows. He simply wanted to know- mechanically- how Talbot’s bill would work, how it would change existing law, and the answer to a question no one had bothered to ask: What it would cost?

Up until that point, LABI had avoided labeling the bill as a “tort reform” measure, focusing exclusively on the too-good-to-be-true promise of reducing the cost of car insurance. But when Luneau began asking questions, it soon became readily apparent that the bill’s central premise- its primary public policy justification- was a ruse. As it turns out, none of the proposed changes had ever been proven to have any correlation with the price of insurance premiums. No one doubted that Louisiana drivers pay too much; the question was why. The Senate Judiciary A Committee, on which Luneau served as a member, heard testimony from a national insurance expert, Douglas Heller, who outlined a number of sleazy ways the industry inflated prices for customers that had nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s driving record. Separately, the Senate Insurace Committee heard from one of the state’s top insurance lobbyists, Kevin Cunningham, who was ostensibly there in support of the bill but then unwittingly revealed that the proposed legislation was entirely based on a false premise. “I think it’s a misnomer to ever really believe that your (car insurance) rates are ever going to go down,” Cunningham said.

Luneau had offered a separate bill that he then amended to include making a series of regulatory changes outlined by Heller, including ending the practice of discriminating against widows and widowers. That bill failed to make it out of committee.

But most importantly, Jay Luneau was successful at convincing his colleagues on the Judiciary A Committee to request a “fiscal note” from the state Legislative Auditor, in order to get an informed estimate of the financial costs and benefits of the proposed legislation. When the auditor’s office provided the report, it estimated that the savings were entirely speculative and, in any event, likely to be only very minimal at best, but the costs to taxpayers would total in the millions of dollars every year. The legislation would have resulted in a surge in the number of jury trials, inundating an already-overwhelmed civil justice system.

That proved to be the fatal blow for LABI’s “most important bill of the year;” HB 372 died in the Senate Judiciary A Committee.

However, LABI had hoped to have the last laugh against state Sen. Jay Luneau, directly funneling $10,000 to the campaign of his opponent, former one-term state Rep. Randy Wiggins, a State Farm Insurance agent. All told, Wiggins received nearly $27,000 from political action committees, and he personally loaned his campaign another $23,000. The vast majority of his individual donors were fellow insurance agents and brokers; though, altogether, they barely covered his personal loans.

On the night of the jungle primary, Luneau won reelection in a landslide, beating Wiggins 61% – 39% and by more than 6,000 votes.

Already, far-right legislators have signaled their intention to revive LABI’s half-baked auto insurance bill during next year’s session. This time, hopefully, lawmakers will spend more energy working toward an actual solution, instead of reflexively kowtowing to the demands of the insurance lobby. Either way, they should expect at least one state Senator to ask the tough questions.

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.

What had started as an effort to form a new school system turned into a years-long campaign to create a brand-new, affluent, and predominately white municipality in East Baton Rouge Parish. This year, a slight majority of voters in the proposed city approved a ballot initiative enabling the establishment of what could become the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana, despite its organizers knowing full and well that they were asking voters to saddle those who lived across the street and within the city limits of Baton Rouge with an enormous financial burden. If the courts allow the city’s creation to proceed, then those who will suffer the most are already among the parish’s most vulnerable.

Let’s not waltz around the obvious: The initiative was animated by a series of thinly-veiled racist and classist tropes that have persisted in Louisiana since well before Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, though the notion of using public education as a raison d’etre is from the residue over school integration, something that Louisiana had stubbornly attempted to resist in the decades that followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Baton Rouge was actually the first city in the country in which leaders of the civil right-shirt movement staged a bus boycott, and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow have continued to perpetuate de-facto segregation and created ample space for two very different versions of law enforcement, as the entire nation was reminded by the harrowing video footage of Alton Sterling’s final moments alive.

Predictably, those who led the fight for St. George insist that the effort has nothing to do with race and everything to do with ensuring “local control,” but the historical truth cannot be altered to account for a contemporary (and convenient) blind spot. Indeed, the taxpayers of Baton Rouge financed the infrastructure upon which the would-be city is built, something that- again- has been conveniently ignored.

But willful ignorance and myopia are not the only reasons we selected the organizers of the campaign to create St. George as the winners of the Most Incompetent Award, because, no doubt, many of those who voted in favor of the new municipality were not motivated by the kind of racial antipathy that had initially informed the proposal. Many were instead led to believe that the new city would be financially self-sustaining and would have almost no negative impact on the region. Moreover, they were also told that the proposal was in compliance with existing law. All of these things are untrue.

Rather than confront the stark reality that their numbers simply did not add up, campaign organizers continually insisted otherwise, even if it meant rejecting the findings of multiple comprehensive analyses and reports. Because so many of the existing retail and commercial developments upon which they had relied to ensure the new city’s financial solvency decided instead to request annexation into Baton Rouge, it’s unclear how exactly St. George would provide for even the most basic services. They may be able to form a breakaway public school district, but they apparently won’t have enough money to fund their own police department.

Additionally, as was clear from the very beginning, the proposal is in direct violation of the approved city-parish plan of government, which expressly prohibits the formation of any new municipalities.

Organizers may have fashioned themselves as patriotic revolutionaries, but there is nothing virtuous or patriotic about capriciously harming your neighbors and misrepresenting the truth about the costs of breaking away.

In 2017, following two failed bids for the United States Senate, Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel from St. Tammany Parish, found himself in the middle of a surprisingly competitive race for state Representative- a seat he should have been able to easily win- when he lost his cool. Maness had decided to openly criticize his fellow Republicans for abandoning Alabama Judge Roy Moore after several women alleged Moore had sexually assaulted them years ago, including two women who claimed the abuse occurred when they were teenagers and Moore was in his thirties.

There was nothing righteous about Manesss’ position. The allegations were credible and lurid, and ultimately, even voters in ruby-red Alabama couldn’t stomach the prospect of being represented by an alleged child molester. But when David Bellinger, a liberal commentator who frequently calls into Jim Engster’s radio show, confronted Maness on air and labeled him an “extremist,” the retired military veteran erupted. “Blow me and get out of here,” he said to Bellinger.

Bellinger, it is worth noting, has made headlines before for crawling under the skin of Republican candidates and elected officials. In the book “Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,” writer Max Blumenthal recounts a memorable exchange that Bellinger, who often uses the nom de plume “Flaming Liberal,” had in 2003 with then-Congressman David Vitter:

For Maness, the exchange with Bellinger marked a low point in his public career, and he would go onto lose the race for state Representative to another Republican, Covington City Councilman Mark Wright.

But this year, Maness did something unusual, particularly in the current era of toxic partisanship: He decided to take a principled stance against the very political party he had once reflexively championed, and in speaking about his decision, he shared details about the pain that he and his family had endured as a direct consequence of the actions taken by Louisiana GOP mega-donor and would-be “kingmaker” Lane Grigsby.

Maness decided he’d had enough after Grigsby attempted to bribe a Republican candidate to drop out of a race for the legislature that had appeared to be headed toward a rare three-person runoff and subsequently boasted about the imperial control he had over the state GOP. Two years prior, Grigsby had helped to finance a series of especially nasty attack ads against Maness, and as a result, Maness’ autistic son was abandoned by his only two friends.

Initially, even though he’d announced that he had left the Republican Party and would be “voting for divided government,” Maness couldn’t bring himself to expressly endorsing the Democratic incumbent, John Bel Edwards. But that changed after Eddie Rispone appeared on a morning radio show on Alexandria’s KSYL and told host Jim Leggett that West Point should be ashamed that Gov. Edwards was a graduate.

Maness may not share the same politics as those of us at the Bayou Brief, but his decision to publicly repudiate the endemic corruption and defend the integrity of a leader on the other side of the aisle is commendable and a complete reversal from his cynical defense of Judge Moore only two years prior, which, as David Bellinger accurately pointed out, was “extremist.” It’s unfortunately uncommon for a politician to admit his mistakes and to put principle above party, and it’s especially rare for conservatives in the age of the most mendacious president in American history.

Shortly after Gary Landrieu showed up to qualify as a candidate for governor, he was told by an official with the Louisiana Secretary of State that he wouldn’t be allowed to use the nickname “Go Gary” on the ballot.

Of course, Louisiana has had its fair share of candidates who prefer to be known by a nickname, including former governors Bobby Jindal and Mike Foster, and we’ve had an ample supply of candidates whose nicknames are far less common and much more absurd. Who can forgot Chicken Commander or Live Wire or Cowboy Phil? If they were around today, does anyone doubt that Earl K. Long wouldn’t ask to appear on the ballot as “Uncle Earl” or that his brother Huey wouldn’t be tempted to have “Kingfish” appear next to his name?

The problem with “Go Gary” was that it, very clearly, wasn’t actually his real nickname; it was his campaign slogan. Gary, the first cousin of Mary and Mitch and the nephew of Moon, seems to enjoy capitalizing off of the surname that was made famous in Louisiana by his more accomplished, adult relatives.

This wasn’t his first attempt at elected office. In 2012 and in 2014, he challenged Cedric Richmond for Congress, and in between those two bids, he campaigned for a seat as Councilman-at-large in New Orleans. In 2016, he qualified as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, but by then, it had become obvious that he was more of a professional troll than a serious candidate.

This year, though, he deserves the Shameless Ambition Award not merely because of the ways in which he has acted out his own issues with family jealousy, but because of how he behaved after being told he couldn’t use “Go Gary” as his nickname. Instead of accepting the decision in stride, Gary summoned his elderly mother to the Secretary of State’s office in Baton Rouge to have her repeat the ridiculous lie that “Go Gary” was a nickname that dated back to his childhood. That was shameful of him, and the only convincing part of the whole spectacle was that his disrespect.

The Secretary of State’s office didn’t budge on its decision, and as it turns out, “Go Gary” couldn’t even get his own nickname right. For several days, his campaign Facebook page directed people to the web domain “GoGayGovernor.com.”

She was a still a teenager when she arrived in the city she would one day become the first woman ever to lead, an incoming freshman at the one and only Catholic HBCU in the nation, Xavier University, located in the heart of Gert Town. Back in those days, the litmus test question that established a person’s New Orleans bonafides—“Where’d you go to high school?”— carried with it implications about a person’s “pedigree,” their class, their race, their religion, and even their place in the city’s history.

But LaToya Cantrell went to Palmdale High School, nearly 2,000 miles away from the Big Easy, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles. That meant a few things. Yes, she was an outsider, but she was also more free to define herself- on her own terms- than most of her New Orleans-born classmates. The downside, of course, was it’d be difficult- if not impossible- for her to ever be accepted as authentically New Orleanian.

Before Cantrell’s election in 2018, the last person to be elected mayor of New Orleans who wasn’t actually a native of the city was Vic Schiro in 1961. Schiro was born in Chicago, but, unlike Cantrell, he moved to New Orleans with his family when he was still a small child; he could have answered the question about where he went to high school. Before Schiro, there was deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison, one of the most consequential mayors of the last century. Morrison was born in tiny New Roads, Louisiana, the seat of Pointe Coupee Parish. But through his mother, Mayor Morrison was a descendant of three iconic New Orleans families, the deLesseps, the Storys, and the Tremés. The city’s former red-light district, Storyville, was named after one of his cousins, and his third great-grandfather was Claude Tremé, whose surname also appears prominently on the city map. The point is: For most of its history, despite the fact that it has always been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants, New Orleans has nonetheless been known to be wary of “outsiders.”

LaToya Cantrell didn’t inherit a famous name, and although father-in-law, Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell, is also an elected official, she didn’t marry into a well-known political family either. Judge Cantrell won his first election in 2013, a year after LaToya Cantrell had won her first, defeating Dana Kaplan for the District B seat on the New Orleans City Council despite being outspent nearly six-to-one. Indeed, her first election would serve as a blueprint for how she approached the race for mayor, relying on an aggressive and relentless field operation that allowed her to build personal relationships with hundreds- if not thousands- of residents all throughout the city.

As a Councilwoman and, before that, as a neighborhood leader, Cantrell made a name for herself as an outspoken advocate for affordable housing and equitable redevelopment. She didn’t get everything right all of the time; her ambivalence about the removal of four white supremacist and Lost Cause monuments, for example, wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. And although she ultimately voted in favor of their removal, the concerns she had expressed about procedural trivialities were unconvincing.

During her year-and-a-half as New Orleans Mayor, however, Cantrell has consistently proven herself to be a born leader, particularly when the stakes are high and the spotlight is on. She has repeatedly stood up against the Trump administration’s egregious and inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants, and when it looked possible that Eddie Rispone- a man who had denounced New Orleans for being a “sanctuary city” (it’s not) and promised to dispatch Gestapo-like raids in order to arrest and deport those found to be residing in the city without the requisite documentation- could be elected governor, Cantrell turned Action New Orleans, the organization that was born from her campaign operation, into high gear, earning the attention and the admiration of several national Democratic leaders, including Sec. Clinton.

To be sure, there have been slip-ups and mistakes, most notably her decision to quietly approve lowering the speed threshold on traffic cameras located in school zones, which quickly generated more than $1 million in anticipated revenue from tickets sent to unsuspecting drivers. (In April, the Times-Picayune’s James Gill excoriated Cantrell for “hornswoggling” New Orleans voters over the traffic camera issue). As a result of the public backlash against the way in which the new policy had been rolled out, the city decided to refund drivers who were ticketed before the changes were announced. Others have criticized the Cantrell administration for its lackadaisical approach toward enacting or enforcing a coherent set of regulations that could stem the unfettered proliferation of short-term rentals, which have already priced many people out of the city’s increasingly expensive housing market.

But when faced with the biggest and most important test that she has encountered thus far- the looming threat of a potential hurricane aiming its sights on the Louisiana coast, LaToya Cantrell was at her absolute best, looking less like a rookie mayor and more like a seasoned veteran who knew how to speak with authority and calm the nerves of a city that the national media had shamelessly attempted to stir into a panicked frenzy. Without question, her steady, even-keeled approach, along with the city’s near-perfect deployment of its emergency preparedness protocols, prevented the kind of nightmare scenario similar to the one that unfolded in Houston in 2005, when more than 100 people died in the process of evacuating in advance of Hurricane Rita. Rita pummeled the Lake Charles area, but Houston was spared completely.

Cantrell deserves immense credit for refusing to contribute to the sensational and entirely baseless doom-and-gloom that was being sold by the national media; at one point, her team even called out the Washington Post directly for its irresponsible coverage.

And since this is about her authenticity, it’s also worth mentioning that her enthusiasm for the Saints isn’t something you can fake.

In a state dominated by the far-right and represented in Washington by seven white Republicans, all of whom have tethered themselves to a president that, with only one exception (Clay Higgins), they had privately opposed as a candidate, and only one African American Democrat, LaToya Cantrell offers a refreshing reminder that, in Louisiana, our very best leaders have always known how to inspire people by simply being honest with themselves.

This year, Eddie Rispone accomplished something extraordinarily rare in American politics: He somehow managed to lose support from the commercial that introduced him as a candidate for governor. It’s difficult to overstate how disastrous his debut was. Over the next five months, he would end up spending $13.5 million of his own money attempting to repair the damage. It’s important to note that, prior to declaring his candidacy, Rispone had been almost completely unknown.

Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, he still seems to believe that the problem with the commercial was the pitch of his voice and not the pitch he was selling, cluelessly claiming to the Advocate that the team he had hired didn’t realize he normally didn’t sound as nasally (notwithstanding the fact that, presumably, he still approved and paid for the ad to blanket the airwaves).

No, the most glaring problem with the ad had nothing to do with his Ross Perot impression; the problem was its basic premise: It wasn’t about Eddie Rispone, the self-made millionaire with a vision for how to lead Louisiana (perhaps because he didn’t really have much of a vision other than changing a few things that would financially benefit his business). The commercial was about Eddie Rispone: Trump Supporter, and right out of the gate, Eddie Rispone: Trump Supporter made himself immediately unlikable to nearly half of the state’s electorate and antagonized the entire city of New Orleans.

Trump may remain slightly above water in Louisiana, with 53% of voters approving of his job performance, but according to Morning Consult, since taking office, Donald Trump’s net approval in the state has decreased by 21 points. By putting Trump, who wasn’t even on the ballot, front and center, literally towering over Rispone and his wife, Rispone had effectively introduced himself not as a leader but as a follower.

But the decision to frame his introductory commercial around his obsequious support of the president isn’t the only reason the ad was such a spectacular failure. Rispone outlined three things he would do if elected governor: Work with the president on protecting Constitutional rights (i.e. the Second Amendment, not the First or the Fourteenth Amendments); ban sanctuary cities (and to ensure everyone understood he was talking about New Orleans, he included aerial footage of the French Quarter), and end taxpayer benefits for illegal immigrants (a nonsensical and vague pledge he would make repeatedly and that apparently referred to an estimate that 0.05% of Medicaid spending went toward physicians and hospitals for treating undocumented patients).

Put another way, Rispone’s message was Trump, guns, and illegal immigration, all issues that may have poll-tested well with conservative voters but have almost nothing to do with the job responsibilities of the governor.

But the line that was most memorable- and that ended up defining Rispone for the rest of the election was his reference to the Trump bumper sticker he put on his pick-up truck. He may have been telling the truth, but because of the way the commercial was staged, it came across as frivolous and scripted. Soon thereafter, GumboPAC responded with an ad that would end up defining him for the rest of the election season and would be replicated later by John Bel Edwards’ campaign: A still-frame image from Rispone’s debut commercial of the Republican candidate sitting on the flatbed of his truck, with his Trump bumper sticker visible on the back windshield, along with a caption that succinctly expressed what most people were thinking: Phony Rispone.

During the discussion that occurred in the state Capitol this year over how to best address the state’s high price of auto insurance, most lawmakers (and even a few members of the media) seemed more than happy to accept at face value the specious arguments made by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). As we mentioned earlier, the right-wing business lobbying organization was nearly successful in ramming through a series of changes to existing law that purported to be designed to lower car insurance premiums but actually amounted to a costly giveaway to the insurance industry, all intended to rig the civil justice system against drivers and in favor of insurance companies.

It’s always a good idea to be skeptical whenever politicians begin preaching about “tort reform,” because most of the time, the real aim is to make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to hold the powerful accountable.

There is no question that car insurance is too expensive in Louisiana. Depending on who you ask, we pay either the second or fourth highest prices in the nation on insurance premiums. However, there is significant disagreement about what is driving up those costs. The insurance industry blames trial lawyers, suggesting that people like Gordon McKernan and Morris Bart- whose billboards and commercials are ubiquitous across the state- are the symptom of a legal climate that makes it vastly more expensive to do business. They latch onto isolated and often inaccurate stories about frivolous lawsuits and staged car wrecks to illustrate their point, and in so doing, they’ve been able to convince a great number of otherwise reasonable people that the insurance companies are the real victims, not the people who seek remedy through the justice system.

It should be obvious, but considering the way in which the debate has been framed in Louisiana, it bears emphasis: If you’re in a dispute with an insurance company, you’re inherently at a disadvantage. They hold nearly all of the cards. It also should be noted: Despite their pollyannish outrage over lawyers who advertise their services, the insurance industry spends more every year on advertising than almost anyone else in the state of Louisiana, easily five times the amount the legal industry spends.

This year, the Bayou Brief teamed up with Douglas Heller, a nationally-renowned expert on auto insurance and how public policy affects the industry’s profits and the premiums they charge drivers. Heller spent nearly three months studying Louisiana’s auto insurance market and the laws and regulations that govern it, and his findings, which he presented on two separate occasions to the legislature, suggest there are several ways the state could act to lower the costs of car insurance premiums. Unlike the proposal pushed by LABI, the solutions outlined by Heller have all been empirically proven to work.

Despite their claims to the contrary, the truth is that the insurance industry continually hits their profit targets in Louisiana, year after year. They’re not hurting, far from it, in fact. Indeed, the proposal that LABI outlined, which was carried by state Rep. Kirk Talbot’s HB 372, would’ve resulted in only one thing for certain: Millions more in taxpayer spending every year.

Heller’s “innovative idea” is actually quite simple: Enforce existing regulations that are designed to protect consumers and enact laws that prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against drivers on the basis of their credit score and gender and prevent companies from penalizing widows, widowers, and those reentering the marketplace, like returning military veterans.

If the legislature is seriously concerned about lowering premiums and not lining the pockets and rigging the system in favor of the insurance industry, then the conversation should begin with insurance- and not tort- reform.

Alexandria native Lane Grigsby made his fortune and a name for himself 125 miles away from his childhood home on Thornton Court, arriving in Baton Rouge for good after his new bride and their new baby made it impossible for him to remain at West Point. Aside from a profile in the Town Talk several years ago, Grigsby had been largely forgotten in Alexandria. His construction company, Cajun Industries, didn’t do much work in Central Louisiana, and even though he emerged as a prominent Republican megadonor more than two decades ago, he largely stayed out of the area’s politics as well.

This year, however, Lane Grigsby became known across the state, and in the city of his birth, he finally made a name for himself, not as Boo’s son or as the hometown boy who struck it rich, but as a smug, conniving, and brazenly unethical partisan radical who attempted to bribe, lie, and buy his way to the top of state government, not as a kingfish but as a kingmaker.

Four years ago, recognizing before many others in the Louisiana GOP that David Vitter’s gubernatorial campaign was doomed, Grigsby asked for and received a refund of the $100,000 donation he’d made to Vitter’s PAC, and along with his close friend and fellow construction magnate Eddie Rispone, he poured a fortune into electing a slate of like-minded candidates to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). No one had ever before spent as much on BESE elections, and with the state’s attention squarely focused on the top of the ticket, nearly all of the candidates supported by Grigsby and Rispone won their races. They had effectively ensured that they would both possess disproportionate influence over state education policy- or, at the very least, the ability to force a stalemate over changing education policy. Both Grigsby and Rispone were outspoken supporters of school privatization initiatives and funneling taxpayer dollars to vocational training tailor-made to fit the workforce needs of their construction companies.

A couple of years later, the two men decided to embark on another electoral project: They began actively attempting to recruit a candidate willing to run against incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards. This, as it turned out, was easier said than done. No one of their shortlist was interested in the gig. Steve Scalise, their top choice, was adamant about staying put in Congress, where he currently serves as House Minority Whip. And the interview they had with U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham had left them unimpressed; afterward, Grigsby couldn’t even remember Abraham’s name, referring to him as Abramson. That’s around the time that a sleep-deprived Rispone decided that God Himself wanted him to run for governor;

Eddie Rispone would spend millions of his own fortune directly on the campaign, and his friend Lane Grigsby would spend his millions through a shadowy constellation of PACs and nonprofits he’d created to support Rispone through negative advertising against Edwards.

Grigsby’s primary beneficiary was a 501(c)(4) he founded called, ironically, Truth in Politics. Truth in Politics had intermittently published a website that was designed to resemble a news organization, but their real debut was a commercial that aired stateside that featured Juanita Bates-Washington, a former aide to gubernatorial assistant Johnny Anderson. In the commercial, Washington, who goes by several different aliases and had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax liens and a string of disgruntled former colleagues, inaccurately implied that she was fired from her job by the governor after credibly accusing Anderson of sexual harassment. Notably, Washington’s attorney, Jill Craft, who negotiated a settlement on her behalf, subsequently issued a public endorsement of John Bel Edwards, and after making a splash with the commercial, a public records lawsuit, and a press conference during the jungle primary, Truth in Politics lost interest in Washington in the runoff campaign. Their next ad, which inaccurately claimed that one of Edwards’ college classmates had been given a lucrative, multi-million dollar state contract, was ordered to be taken off the air.

But Grigsby’s award-winning quote- “I’m a kingmaker. I talk from the throne.”- actually had nothing to do with the governor’s race, at least directly. When it looked as if there could be a rare three-way runoff election for a state Senate seat in Baton Rouge, which included two Republican candidates and one Democrat, Grigsby attempted to convince one of the two Republican candidates to drop out in exchange for a promise of future financial support. When Grigsby’s offer made headlines, it was met with bipartisan outrage. And in a moment of candor, Grigsby lashed out, proving himself to be even more of megalomaniac than he appeared and reinforcing the belief among many that Eddie Rispone, if elected governor, would merely be a proxy for his buddy, the self-anointed kingmaker.

(Dis)Honorable Mention for Most Embarrassing Statement: “I am a person of myself.” – Eddie Rispone.

It took nearly two weeks before General Landry, as he calls himself, realized that the campaign commercial he had been airing statewide contained one glaring error: The word Louisiana was misspelled.

It’s a fitting metaphor for how he had led the state Department of Justice during the past four years. Landry has certainly provided us with plenty of material: His creation of a phony police force to arrest people in the French Quarter for smoking pot, the official-looking badges he handed out to his friends and campaign donors, his apparent contravention of state policy on travel reimbursements, his clearly politicized and ultimately fruitless investigation into LaToya Cantrell’s city credit card, and his use of federal HUD fair housing funds to purchase thousands of pens and plastic go-cups with his name on them, among other things.

But the reason Landry deserves this year’s Biggest Liar Award is because of another glaring inaccuracy that appears in his campaign commercial. To be sure, it’s something said about him, not something said by him directly, though that’s a distinction without much of a difference given that it was still his commercial.

Last year, Jeff Landry joined Ken Paxton, the disgraced Texas attorney general who is still awaiting trial after being indicted in 2015 with two securities fraud felonies, in a suit over the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, had previously ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional under the Tax and Spending Clause, even though most legal scholars had believed the more compelling constitutional rationale was located in the Commerce Clause. Eventually, a Republican-led Congress effectively eliminated the penalties imposed against people who do not comply with the law’s individual mandate, which provided Landry, Paxton, and other far-right Republican attorneys general to challenge the law again. The central premise of their argument is that because the penalty has been reduced to nothing, the individual mandate should no longer be considered constitutional under the Tax and Spending Clause.

Hoping for a favorable ruling, Landry and Paxton filed the suit in the Northern District of Texas (it’s a tactic known as forum-shopping), and as predicted, the judge agreed, sending the case to the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. Recently, a divided, three judge panel in the Fifth Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling but sent the case back to Texas for a clarification on whether or not the individual mandate is severable (or removable) from the Affordable Care Act or if the entire law should be held unconstitutional.

It’s important to emphasize: Landry’s objective isn’t just to have an unenforced penalty be declared unconstitutional. He hopes to convince the court to throw out the entire Affordable Care Act, and importantly, that’d also mean ending legal protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Landry didn’t bother to worry himself or the legislature about how to ensure Louisiana kept the widely popular provisions that guarantee insurance companies cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. That means if Jeff Landry is ultimately successful, his efforts could be devastating for hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana.

So, what did Landry’s commercial claim? Why did he think he deserved to be reelected?

According to a teenager named Bella, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, and her mother, apparently, Jeff Landry somehow guaranteed protections for people with pre-existing conditions, the precise opposite of what his lawsuit intends to do.