“At long last.” “Finally.” “Proves what we have known.” These are words Gov. John Bel Edwards used to describe House Speaker Taylor Barras’ about-face Wednesday morning, the third day of the 2019 legislative session, when Barras agreed to recognizing increased state revenue forecasts for the current fiscal year and next.
Barras
has been the lone holdout among the quartet of Revenue Estimating
Conference members, who are required by law to act with unanimity
when altering the official forecasts. On four prior occasions, the
House Speaker (in one instance, his proxy, Appropriations chairman
Cameron Henry) said no to acknowledging the higher state income
projections, insisting he felt
there was “too much uncertainty”, and “it’s hard to put on
paper how the taxpayer will react.” Conservative words, but coming
from a banker by trade? It’s
been rickety
reasoning,
conspicuously feeble on facts
or figures in defense of the position – beyond an obviously
partisan ploy in this, an election year.
Louisiana Revenue Estimating Committee meeting, 4-10-2019. L-to R: Div. of Admin. economist Manfred Dix; Senate Fiscal Director Sherry Phillips-Hymel; LFO chief economist Greg Albrecht. Inset: Senate Pres. John Alario
Barras’
statement of concession
was as frail as his rationale
for his recalcitrance had been. “I have
been accused of ignoring the economists’ views.
I am hesitant to guestimate
the
numbers, yet it seem this is
as close as we’re going to be able to get.
Therefore, I am
prepared today to adopt somerevenue,
but only if we adopt
the lowest amount.”
Perhaps
much of the reason for Barras’ capitulation
is a result of public discussion during the Senate Finance Committee
meeting on Tuesday.
As
is traditional, members of the committee were given an overview of
the budget proposals as they are being vetted by the House
Appropriations Committee. Also, as has become traditional throughout
this term, there are two primary budget bills filed – but in a
break from long-standing tradition, neither of them is designated
“House Bill 1.”
“House
Appropriations is working with HB 105, the bill jointly authored by
their chairman, Cameron Henry, and House Speaker Taylor Barras,”
Senate Fiscal Director Sherry Phillips-Hymel explained
to the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday.
“There is also HB 103, by Speaker Pro-Temp Walt Leger. Walt’s
bill contains everything from the governor’s budget proposal.
Chairman Henry’s HB 105 has $134-million less than the governor’s
proposal. That’s the difference between the officially recognized
and unrecognized forecasts. The
biggest differences, application-wise, are that Chairman Henry’s
bill cuts $20-million from LDH (the Louisiana Department of Health),
and $13-million from DCFS (the Department of Children and Family
Services.)”
Appropriations chairman Cameron Henry oversees budget testimony on day 2 of the 2019 legislative session
“We
prefer to take that $13-million cut to SNAP,” DCFS Secretary
Marketa Garner Walters told the Appropriations Committee on Tuesday,
referring to the federal program formerly and more familiarly known
as “food stamps.”
“If
we do this, and remove these dollars from your budget authorization
for SNAP, what does that mean in the event of a disaster – say, a
hurricane or a flood, for example?” Speaker Pro-Temp Walt Leger
inquired.
“I
would have to come back to the legislature – to the Joint Budget
Committee – for authorization to implement the disaster SNAP
program,” Secretary Walters answered.
“Isn’t
this the majority of your department’s cost for SNAP?” Leger
pressed. “Don’t you split the administration costs 50/50 with the
federal government?”
“Yes,
but they pay 100% of the benefits that go to our citizens,” Walters
replied. “That’s about $100-million per month.”
“Per
month?” Leger asked.
“Yes,
sir,” the Secretary responded. “And you all should realize that
if we cannot stand up disaster SNAP immediately, then we cannot
provide any shelters, or any emergency disaster housing. It’s all
tied together. We can’t shelter people if we can’t feed them, and
we can’t provide those emergency feedings without being part of the
federal SNAP program. And if we can’t do disaster SNAP without
delays, the federal government will not allow us to be part of the
SNAP program at all.”
Speaker Pro-Temp Walt Leger expresses concerns about proposed cuts to DCFS and SNAP in the House GOP version of the FY 20 budget.
On
the opposite side of the Capitol building, members of the Senate
Finance Committee voiced confusion over the ramifications of the
House Speaker holding up the adoption of an updated forecast.
“I
don’t understand why there are no line items for the statutory
dedications or self-generated fees within this budget!” Sen. Sharon
Hewitt (R-Slidell) exclaimed. “I don’t understand how we’re
saying there are
$18-million in ‘unfunded mandates’ for a budget year that’s not
even begun!”
Sen.
Jim Fannin (R-Jonesboro) who preceded Cameron Henry as House
Appropriations chairman, also wanted to know why statutory
dedications, fees, and self-generated revenue weren’t in the budget
proposal.
“Aren’t
we forecasting stat-deds and fees?” Fannin asked the
Legislative Fiscal Office’s chief economist Greg Albrecht.
“We
are, but we are only doing two years at a time, because of Act 419,”
Albrecht replied.
Act
419 started out as HB 437 of the 2013 legislative session. Authored
by Rep. Lance Harris (R-Alexandria), it requires estimates for
dedicated funding streams be presented to the REC for approvals, but
only for the current year and the next, with “Appropriations from
the funds to be limited to the prior fiscal year’s fund balance.”
The amounts of these funds available are recognized by the REC after
adoption of an updated forecast.
Remember, if the quartet of REC members doesn’t unanimously agree
on each item in order, they can’t move on.
Without
agreement on the current year forecast, they could not move on to the
next year’s forecast, or to the projections for the statutory
dedications, or for the fees and self-generated revenue. They
couldn’t discuss or recognize the prior year’s surplus, or make
the required projections another three years into the future.
“But
fees and self-generated revenues are the taxpayers’ money.
Statutory dedications are the taxpayers’ money, and it has
increased! We’re spending
$2.1-billion more overall of taxpayer money than we did ten years
ago!” Sen. Conrad Appel
(R-Metairie) complained.
“That’s
the budget – the
spending side – not the revenue forecast,” Albrecht replied.
The
amount officially added today
to the revenue forecast for
the budget year that begins July 1 (also
known as the FY 20 forecast and FY 20 budget),
is $119-million. The current
fiscal year, which ends June 30, was bumped up by $110-million. And
the REC also recognized the surplus from FY 2018, which ended last
June 30th.
That’s $308-million, but as a surplus (and therefore “non-recurring
funds”), the uses to which that money can be put are
constitutionally and statutorily restricted.
The
projections for stat deds, and fees and self-generated revenues were
also recognized, and altogether these numbers will alter the amounts
allocated to the various state departments, agencies and programs.
Will
some of it be used to save SNAP, for example?
In
theory, Appropriations chairman Cameron Henry would use the revised
numbers to file an updated budget, and designate it – as is
traditional – HB 1. In practice, however, Henry has tightly held
onto the contents of his intended amendments to the budget bill,
revealing them to none but staff and his GOP sycophants on the
committee, until time for the entire committee to vote on advancing
the budget bill to the House floor.
Only a paltry 8% of Louisiana residents believe that if the state collects more revenue than it needs for current expenditures, then it should give back the entire surplus through tax cuts, according to the second of six reports issued by LSU’s Public Policy Research Lab at the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs, a part of the center’s annual Louisiana Survey. It was one of several findings that reveal a sharp disconnect between the political messaging and legislative agenda advanced by state Republican leaders and elected officials and the opinions held by large majorities of Louisiana residents.
It’s also a timely data point considering the cynical efforts by House Speaker Taylor Barras, state Rep. Cameron Henry, and state Attorney General Jeff Landry to manufacture a stalemate in the Revenue Estimating Committee in order to force Gov. John Bel Edwards and other lawmakers to use two-year-old, incorrect revenue projections for this year’s budget.
The problem for Republicans is that, as a result of measures that ensured Louisiana was no longer dancing around the edge of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the state’s finances are in much better shape than they had been expected to be two years ago. Republicans seem to be gambling that most voters can be convinced they are merely insisting on fiscal conservativism, when, in fact, they are actually advancing fake math as a way of denying the governor and his allies in the legislature the ability to utilize surplus revenue to restore funding for education and other services while also offering targeted tax cuts to those most in need. It’s a policy agenda that, when taken together with the 23% of residents who only want increased spending, enjoys the support of as much as 88% of the state.
As Sue Lincoln explained yesterday in her opening day report of the new legislative session, “…House Speaker Taylor Barras, in his role as one of four members of the Revenue Estimating Committee, has steadfastly refused to vote ‘yes’ to acknowledge increased state revenue for the current fiscal year and next. By law, any revisions to the official forecast must receive unanimous votes.” By refusing the revised revenue estimate, Speaker Barras (R- New Iberia) is not only attempting to deny the governor the opportunity to present an accurate budget, he is also denying the policy outcome desired by the vast majority of state residents, both Republicans and Democrats.
“I know we’re not used to hearing the word ‘surplus’ around here very often, but I have checked with economists and it turns out surpluses are actually better than deficits,” Gov. Edwards joked during his opening remarks. “And unlike in the past, all we have to do is recognize the revenue right in front of us.”
To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the surplus, stupid.
Politicians may lie, but the numbers don’t.
The Louisiana Survey, now in its fifteenth year, aims “to establish benchmarks as well as to capture change in residents’ assessments of state government services.” This year’s survey has a margin of error of + / – 4.6 percentage points, due to an “iterative procedure that matches race, education, household income, gender, and age to known profiles of Louisiana found in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survery 2017 one-year estimates; as a result, LSU added 1.4 points.
Taken on its own, the findings on surplus spending should be enough to force state GOP leaders to change their approach on the budget, but when considered in its totality, this year’s survey can be read as a wholesale repudiation of the talking points that state Republican officials have been peddling for the better part of the past four years.
To be sure, the Louisiana Survey is not a political document; it makes no political judgments, merely providing results without editorial comment. Still, numbers often speak louder than words, and unlike politicians, these numbers don’t lie.
Notably, there is one talking point the GOP has been peddling that appears to have achieved some degree of success. The title of the second report about the Louisiana Survey is “Widespread misperceptions about state’s income, sales, and gasoline tax rates,” and while this was out of the scope of their analysis, the title deserves a six-word preface: “Coordinated Republican disinformation campaign leads to widespread misperceptions about state’s income, sales, and gasoline tax rates.”
“Substantial numbers of state residents incorrectly believe that Louisiana has increased its tax rates on individual and household incomes in recent years – 46 percent say these tax rates are higher than they were four years ago, and 32 percent say they are higher than one year ago,” according to the survey. While 60% of residents were correct when they stated that the sales tax rate is higher than it was four years ago, 40% believed the rate is higher than it was just last year; in fact, it’s lower. (With respect to the gasoline tax, no one seems to know what it is — 38.5 cents per gallon, but funny enough, two-thirds of residents support a gas tax increase of 5 cents; 46% support an increase of 20 cents).
Without any doubt, the widespread confusion about tax rates is not a function of the messages from Republicans in D.C., who have done their damndest to convince red state voters in places like Louisiana that the $1 trillion Trump tax cut that disportionately provides for the very wealthiest Americans is really a tax cut for everyone. The confusion, instead, is the direct result of the fake news and disinformation that Louisiana state Republicans have peddled from the second after Bobby Jindal’s moving van exited the front driveway of the Governor’s Mansion en route to his new home in Baton Rouge’s University Club.
To be fair, it’s a disinformation campaign that also relies on assistance from anti-government propagandists propped up by the Koch Brothers’ network of PACs, phony think tanks, and astroturf “social welfare” organizations as well as wealthy corporatist ideologues like Lane Grigsby and his nonprofit, Truth in Politics (a name that seems like it must’ve been lifted directly from Orwell).
It’s difficult to fault residents for being misinformed about tax rates when they’ve been bombarded with false and misleading political spin disguised as authoritative reporting.
“Louisiana taxes are some of the highest in the nation, but Gov. John Bel Edwards wants more,” blares Truth in Politics. In truth, however, Louisiana’s tax burden ranks among the bottom third in the country, and the state actually receives more money from the federal government than it contributes in taxes.
Louisiana has the lowest property tax rates in the entire country; its state income tax is squarely within the national average, yet every year, the state- with a population of only 4.7 million people- gives away billions in subsidies and incentives to some of the world’s most profitable businesses.
It is true that the state does have the second-highest sales tax rate in the country, but it is also true that this was a direct result of the disastrous fiscal policies undertaken by former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who left the state with a projected $1.6 billion shortfall, a nearly bankrupted higher education system, and a downgraded credit rating; the temporary sales tax hike was entirely due to the brinksmanship by state House Republicans, who refused to even consider proposals that would have spread the burden more equitably, pretending as if they could simply ignore their constitutional requirement to pass a balanced budget. We should demand intellectual and historical honesty.
Yesterday, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham (R- LA05), who is campaigning for governor against John Bel Edwards, blasted out this graphic on his social media:
This is worth briefly unpacking: The reason Louisiana ranks poorly in opportunity, according to the survey’s authors, is due to institutional racism, income inequality, an anemic minimum wage, a dearth of funding for public education, a lack of a robust social safety network, and a failure to ensure equal pay for equal work. These are all issues that have been at the front and center of Gov. Edwards’ agenda, and, in some cases, their solutions are in direct opposition with Rep. Abraham’s vision of a government that increases burdens and requirements on the poor in order to redistribute even more wealth to the already-wealthy.
Worst state to find a job? That comes from an internet marketing website, which didn’t bother to even pretend to have a methodology; in fact, in making this assessment, the website inflated the state’s unemployment rate, which, apparently, was one of its key metrics.
Embarrassingly, someone in the congressman’s office forgot to clip out the final paragraph, which reads, “Some critics have accused the governor of raising $7 billion in taxes since he took office, which is a wild figment of their imaginations. Edwards inherited a $2 billion budget deficit when he took office in 2016, and legislators agreed to raise $1.4 billion in temporary taxes to close the shortfall.”
Epic troll, Jim Beam of The American Press.
This is even better than when the congressman asserted Louisiana had the highest sales tax rate in the nation, only to be corrected in a subtweet by the source he’d referenced.
Trust the Data. Not the Twitteratti.
But aside Abraham’s remarkable talent for the “self-own,” there is a larger problem with the strategy of doubling down on disinformation about taxes: During the past year, there has been a dramatic shift of opinion about whether residents believe the state is on the right track, and today, more people believe the state is headed in the right direction, according to LSU’s first report about the 2019 Louisiana Survey.
If you’re a Republican hoping to unseat the Democratic governor, this isn’t a promising trend line, and if you dig a little deeper, it gets even more daunting. Quoting:
Unsurprisingly, Democrats are especially positive in their view: 55 percent say the state is heading in the right direction and 37 percent say it is heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps less expected, Republicans do not take an especially negative view of the state’s direction under the administration of Democratic governor John Bel Edwards. They split evenly between those who say the state is heading in the right direction (46 percent) and those who say the state is heading in the wrong direction (45 percent).
And according to the third report, which was published this morning, there is broad, bipartisan support for two of the governor’s primary legislative priorities: increasing teacher pay and raising the minimum wage. In fact, the majority of residents would support raising taxes to pay for increasing salaries for teachers and would also support hiking the minimum wage to $15/hour, both of which are more ambitious proposals than the governor’s pitch to state legislators.
In political campaigns, money may talk— and pay people to talk for you on social media— but data is destiny.
On the first day of the last regularly-scheduled legislative session of this term, it was clear that – despite the veneer of good sportsmanship – there’s still a lot of bad blood among the players, leftover from previous games that were decided only after numerous extra innings.
For
one thing, House Speaker Taylor Barras (R-New Iberia) invited
Congressman Ralph Abraham to sit on the House dais – along with the
traditional gathering of statewide elected officials. Abraham is the
only federally-elected official in recent memory to attend and take
such a position – seated prominently nearer the Speaker than was
the lieutenant governor – on opening day.
After
introducing the congressman to today’s joint legislative session,
Senate President John Alario (R-Westwego) asked, tongue-in-cheek,
“He’s here for some on-the-job training?” (Abraham is an
announced candidate seeking to wrest the governorship from John Bel
Edwards this fall. The other announced Republican challenger,
industrialist Eddie Rispone, was also in attendance, seated in the
public gallery.)
Despite
the early pennant-waving, more than a few commented on their hope
this will be the final contest of this series.
Senate President John Alario (L) and House Speaker Taylor Barras (R)
Senate
President Alario directly addressed House Speaker Taylor Barras, as
they stood together at the front of the House, awaiting the
governor’s arrival.
“On
a personal note, in a way I hope this is our last joint session –
but you never know,” Alario said, with a rueful grin. “I want to
thank you for the cooperation that you’ve shown to me and the
members of the Senate through our time together – and through the
many trips to the principal’s office you and I have made together
to get chewed out together.”
But
neither of the duo of team managers, nor their players, were getting
chewed out in this State of the State speech.
“I am happy and honored to join you for the start of what I hope to be our onlylegislative session this year,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said, but only heard back a sprinkling of chuckles. “This is going to be a very different speech than you are used to me delivering the opening day of session because the budget crisis that for years held Louisiana hostage is over. What was once a $2 billion budget deficit is now a surplus that will lay a foundation for us to continue to move the state forward.”
The
governor paused there, for expected applause. When
it
did not materialize, he
employed some none-too-thinly-veiled sarcasm.
“Now,
I know we’re not used to hearing the word ‘surplus’ around here
very often, but I have checked with economists and it turns out
surpluses are actually better than deficits,” he
said, with a big grin, earning single shouts of laughter from several
of the Democrats in the chamber. “And
unlike
in the past, all
we have to do is recognize the revenue right in front of us. Then
we can get to work on making real progress for our state.”
For
those who have missed the latest…let’s call it the “bat-measuring
contest” going on between House Republican leadership and the
administration, House Speaker Taylor Barras, in his role as one of
four members of the Revenue Estimating Committee, has steadfastly
refused to vote “yes” to acknowledge increased state revenue for
the current fiscal year and next.
By
law, any revisions to the official forecast must receive
unanimous votes.
In
November, Barras sent his “man-behind-the-curtain”
– Appropriations chairman Cameron Henry – as proxy to vote no.
Barras himself voted no at REC meetings in December, January, and
February.
The state’s economists are recommending a
$122-million uptick for the current fiscal year, and a $90-million
increase in revenue projections for the budget year that begins July
1.
The
Revenue Estimating Conference meets again this Wednesday morning,
April 10.
Republicans
in the House and Senate have filed bills indicating they still think
the Governor is crowding the plate, and the GOP hardliners are aiming
pitches to brush him back – if not strike him out.
State Sen. Barrow Peacock (R- Bossier City) has a bill to phase the “temporary” (to June 30, 2025) forty-five one hundredths of a penny of sales tax – the hard-fought compromise from last year that finally gave the state a semblance of fiscal stability – out of the state general fund and into the Transportation Trust Fund.
State Sen. Sharon Hewitt (R-Slidell) has SB 171, updating and expanding the legislature’s demands for reports from the administration and its agencies forward – to July 2025.
The
hardline Republicans in the House are trying to dismantle and
discredit the success of the governor’s 2016 Medicaid expansion,
with bills to “reform” the Medicaid hospital payment plans, limit
Medicaid paid behavioral health services to 12 hours, and allow the
Legislative Auditor access to individuals’ tax records for the
purpose of “auditing” Medicaid eligibility.
House GOP Caucus chair Lance Harris speaks with Sen. Pres. John Alario, April 8, 2019
Despite
overt indications that a number of the red team members would like to
see a trade made in clubhouse management during the off-season this
fall, the Governor still took the time to lay out his program for
getting Louisiana into the playoffs, even the World Series.
It
includes raising the salary cap – for teachers and others.
“For
the last year, you have heard me say that giving our teachers a pay
raise is my number one priority. This is well deserved and long
overdue,” he
exhorted.
“I
want to bring our teacher pay up to speed with other southern
regional states startingwith
a $1,000 pay raise this year. This would be the first step in a
multi-year process…because
our teachers deserve more.”
Edwards
got a respectable round of applause for this, and actually seemed to
get more and better audience reaction overall
from his next proposal for improved pay.
“For
three years now, I have asked you to support an increase in the
minimum wage in this state, and pass equal pay legislation. And every
year that goes by without action, we are falling further and further
behind,” Edwards
told lawmakers, shaking his head sadly.
“While
we refuse to act, our neighbors in Arkansas have raised their minimum
wage three times, most recently with an $11 an hour ballot initiative
that passed with 68 percent of the vote. I believe it’s time to
look outside the walls of this building and let the people of
Louisiana decide if raising the minimum wage is the right thing to
do.
“So
I ask you today to support a
constitutional amendment to let the people of our great state use
their voices – and their votes – to determine if we should join
the other 44 states that have enacted a minimum wage.”
That
proposed constitutional amendment is a bill filed in
the Senate by Troy Carter
(D-New
Orleans), but simply referring a House bill on minimum wage to
committee for hearing sparked some furor not
long after the Governor concluded his address and retired from the
House.
State senators mingle with House members prior to joint session on opening day.
HB
422, filed
by Rep. Royce Duplessis (D-New
Orleans)
would
override previously enacted state preemption, prohibiting local
governments from setting their own minimum wage. Since the bill
pertains to local government, it would normally be referred to the
House Municipal, Parochial and Cultural Affairs Committee for its
initial hearing. Certain House Republicans (none
of whom, as one reporter noted on Twitter, had applauded the
governor’s minimum wage remarks)
voiced objections to that, urging its referral to the House Labor and
Industrial Relations Committee instead. (Based on the composition of
the Labor committee and
its previous votes on any minimum wage or equal pay bills,
HB
422
bill is guaranteed a swift death there.) Debate ensued, and a vote on
the referral was quickly called. 64 members – a bare quorum of the
105-member House – voted, and sent the measure to Labor, 37-27.
Dr. Barbara Forrest is an internationally-renowned author, scholar, and science education advocate. Forrest’s expert testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is widely credited with exposing the ways in which the so-called “intelligent design” theory was merely a lightly edited variation of creationism and was therefore prohibited by the Establishment Clause from being taught as science in public school classrooms. She is the co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse and was an outspoken supporter of efforts by state Sen. Karen Carter-Peterson and journalist Zack Kopplin (who was then in high school) to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, which sought to allow public school teachers the ability to present religious creation myths as “alternatives” to the scientific fact of evolution. Dr. Forrest grew up in Hammond, Louisiana. She earned a B.A. from Southeastern Louisiana University, a M.A. in philosophy from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Tulane University.
Theogene Anthony “Gene” Mills III, president and director of the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), which he co-founded in 1998 with Tony Perkins, is a devoted husband and father, an ordained Pentecostal Assemblies of God minister, a legislative lobbyist, and a Christian dominionist who, working with former governor Bobby Jindal, turned Louisiana into a de facto theocracy from 2008 until 2016. Mills has also cultivated relationships with elected officials and other figures at the national level – all with the goal of helping the Christian Right take control of every aspect of American life.
Mills’
religious beliefs are the backbone of his theocratic strategy, which
began a decade before Jindal took office and continues even now that
Jindal’s administration is (fortunately) history. Using
the mechanisms of democratic government, Mills has made our state an
incubator for political strategies designed ultimately to transform
the United States into a dominionist theocracy, making Louisiana a
cautionary tale not only for its own citizens but for the rest of the
country. His targets have been varied, including public school
science education and science itself, which are the central examples
of the strategy explained here. First, however, readers must
understand what dominionism is.
Dominionism
Dominionism is the most extreme form of Christian nationalism. Journalist Frederick Clarkson, Senior Research Analyst for Political Research Associates (PRA) who has covered the Christian Right for decades, defines dominionism as “the theocratic idea that regardless of theological camp, means, or timetable, God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.” More specifically, “Dominionists believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. They believe that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.” According to Rob Boston, Senior Adviser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Editor of Church & State magazine, “Dominionists are the most extreme faction of the Religious Right — they’re people who literally embrace the concept of theocratic government.” Consequently, dominionists are using the mechanisms of democracy to undermine democracy itself.
Mills is a “Seven Mountains Dominionist” (7-M), working to advance the goals of this right-wing evangelical Christian movement, i.e., to secure control over the seven major cultural and political institutions in the United States: religion, family, education, media, entertainment, business, and, most significantly, government. Seven Mountains (7-M) dominionism is advocated by Pentecostals of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Rachel Tabachnick, an independent researcher writing for PRA, writes that the NAR is a “religious and political movement” that is “rooted in Charismatic Christianity, a cross-denominational belief in modern day miracles and the supernatural.” It grew out of “the U.S. neo-Pentecostal movement that gained particular force in the 1980s.” Mills is, as noted earlier, ordained within a Pentecostal denomination.
As Clarkson reveals, 7-Ms are ambitious, targeting every major institution of American life, using the Old Testament as their biblical foundation: “Seven Mountains dominionism calls for believers to take control over seven leading aspects of culture: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. The name is derived from Isaiah 2:2 (New King James Version): ‘Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains’.”
Dominionism
is also distinctly partisan. Just as one
Louisiana lobbyist
has described LFF as “a subset of the Republican Party,” Clarkson
explains the larger movement’s political alignment, saying,
“Dominionism
is an advanced and maturing movement generally, within the Republican
party in particular.”
In
Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has been the most highly placed Republican
elected official helping advance the dominionist agenda. Elsewhere,
Texas
Senator Ted Cruz is among the most prominent dominionists, as is
former Alabama judge Roy Moore. Others in the dominionist camp
include former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former congressman
Newt Gingrich, and former Kansas governor Sam Brownback — all
Republicans, with the latter two – like Jindal – being Catholic.
Clarkson
also notes that dominionists are
cultivating their power “primarily through the electoral system,”
getting candidates elected to local, state, and national offices.
Dominionists work in coalitions with groups “inside the Republican
Party” in their effort “to build the kingdom of God in the here
and now.”
Dominionism Louisiana Style
Mills
dispelled any doubt that he is implementing this strategy in
Louisiana when he explicitly came out as a 7-M dominionist at the
January 2015 prayer rally, organized by then-Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Standing in LSU’s PMAC, Mills
warned attendees
that “these seven spheres of influence are under enemy occupation
right now” – the enemy being everyone who doesn’t share Mills’
dominionist views. Mills then begged God to deliver the targeted
institutions to him
and his allies:
“Father,
we cry out for the seven mountains of influence today. We pray that
you will give us government, arts and entertainment, education, the
church, and the family. That our ambassadors would occupy the high
places. That you would bring us into a place of understanding that
they need to be occupied by the body of Christ because it’s
rightfully His.”
Gene Mills, praying onstage at “The Response,” a January 2015 prayer rally held at LSU, in advance of then-Gov. Bobby Jindal’s June 2015 presidential campaign announcement.
Although,
perhaps inadvertently, Mills omitted business from his prayer, his
views on economics are integral to his religious mission. Just as LFF
promotes religious fundamentalism, it also promotes free-market
fundamentalism, espousing “private enterprise” and “limited
government” – code words for opposition to all tax increases.
Young people who attend LFF’s annual “Leadership Academy,” must pledge to oppose same-sex marriage and abortion, and also pledge to support the “free enterprise system” and “limited government,” along with opposing all new taxes: “Students will be instructed to defend these Conservative principles as the basis for social and economic policy.”
LFF
is an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN). According
to the Center for Media and Democracy (which exposed the agenda of
the American Legislative Exchange Council, a.k.a. ALEC), the SPN is
“a
web of right-wing ‘think tanks’ and tax-exempt organizations”
that “operate
as the policy, communications, and litigation arm” of ALEC. LFF, by
extension, promotes the SPN/ALEC agenda.
In
2008, Mills claimed credit for helping roll back the 2002
Stelly plan income tax increases.
Explaining
to political columnist Jeremy Alford that LFF has a “moral
responsibility” to be politically engaged, Mills is also involved
in disparate areas such as prison reform and legislative
redistricting. Since politics and culture are targets of dominionist
hegemony, the criminal justice system not only qualifies but offers
unlimited opportunities for prison proselytizing. LFF
also proposed its own redistricting plan in 2011,
which, Alford noted, would have diluted the African-American vote and
made Democratic electoral victories more difficult. It would also
have handed more power to Republicans, strengthening what Alford
termed the “new power base,” in 2011 – the roughly “58
percent of respondents” to that year’s LSU Public Policy Research
Lab statewide poll who “identified themselves as ‘evangelical or
born again’.”
Since
a majority of Louisianans have never heard
of dominionism, their lack of awareness
works to Mills’ advantage.
The more areas in which Mills
and his Christian conservative allies are involved, the more
opportunities they have to advance dominionist goals while cloaking
their activities in the mantle of well-intentioned civic engagement.
Dominionism in Science Class and the Lab
Having
overtly promoted creationism since its 1998 founding, LFF got the
green light to target public school science education when Jindal
took office in 2008. Among the first bills Jindal signed was the
Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which attempts to provide
cover for teaching creationism by promoting “critical thinking”
and “academic freedom.” LFF and the Discovery Institute, an
out-of-state intelligent design creationist think tank, partnered to
promote and pass the LSEA, which permits teachers to use
pseudoscientific instructional materials concerning “evolution, the
origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” Despite
insisting in the Hammond Daily
Star that “this
bill is not about teaching creationism or religion,”
Mills later admitted to a science journalist that the LSEA is “an
extension” of LFF’s religious agenda.
Even Doonesbury commented on the LSEA, in this panel from the July 10, 2011 Sunday cartoon.
In
2013, Jindal also admitted the law’s true intent: “The Science
Education Act says if the local school board’s okay with that, and
if the state school board’s okay with that, teachers can supplement
those materials. I’ve got no problem if a local school board says,
‘We want to teach our kids about creationism, that some people have
these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about intelligent design.”
Mills
has been involved in subsequent efforts to interfere with the
teaching of evolution, from opposing
the adoption of new biology textbooks
by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2010 to an
effort to insert creationist code language into the new state science
education standards in 2017 (both times his attempts were
unsuccessful).
LFF’s
efforts are also aimed at science itself. It has targeted stem cell
research and climate science and, most dangerously, has promoted the
falsehood that vaccines cause autism. In 2009, LFF supported S.B.
115, enacted as Act 108, which it calls the “Human-Animal Hybrid
Ban.” This
law threatens Louisiana scientists with ten years in prison at hard
labor for creating embryonic stem cells in regenerative medicine
research using a technique licensed in 2008 in the United Kingdom.
In
LFF’s June 23, 2009, Family
Facts newsletter, a column
entitled “Global Hoaxing” promoted a book denying the
well-established fact that “man-made CO2 [is] responsible for
global warming” and advancing the debunked claim that “it is
caused in part by the increase in the intensity of the Sun’s heat.”
The
March 4, 2008, newsletter promoted a false claim by Tony Perkins’
Family Research Council that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have conceded that
childhood vaccines cause autism. LFF’s former education chairwoman,
now state Rep. Beryl Amedee (R-Gray) has filed anti-vaxxer
related bills for the
upcoming session, requiring all who administer vaccinations to
provide the latest CDC numbers on reported complications as part of
the pre-vaccination disclosure.
Dominionist Electoral Strategy
Since LFF would violate its federal tax-exempt status by directly endorsing candidates and participating in campaigns, it works through the electoral system indirectly by lobbying supportive politicians on its issues. Gene Mills skirts the law by doubling as Louisiana Family Forum (a 501(c)(3) non-profit) President, and Louisiana Family Forum Action’s (a 501(c)(4) advocacy group) chief lobbyist. In addition, LFF puts out an annual scorecard on lawmakers, and it recognizes legislators who vote its way at an annual Legislative Awards Gala that is covered by major news outlets such as the Baton Rouge Advocate.
Gene Mills presents then-Gov. Bobby Jindal with LFF’s 2014 “Gladiator Award
Now,
however, LFF is urging pastors and other LFF affiliates and
supporters to run for office.
Jindal, who energetically advanced Mills’ dominionist agenda,
hosted more than seventy pastors at the governor’s mansion to plan
the 2015 prayer rally, a primary purpose of which was to urge pastors
to become political candidates.
That year, then-LFF Vice
President and Bethany Church Outreach Pastor Rick Edmonds did just
that, winning his current seat in the House of Representatives. He
prominently displays both his LFF and pastoral credentials on his
(publicly-funded) legislative website.
Last year, Edmonds ran for the unexpired term of Secretary of State –
unsuccessfully.
And,
as previously mentioned, Beryl Amedee, a home-school proponent and
anti-vaccination advocate who served as LFF’s Education chairwoman
from 2007-2014, was elected in 2015 as state representative for
portions of Assumption, Lafourche, St. Mary and Terrebonne parishes.
Referring
to the upcoming 2019 election for statewide and legislative offices,
Mills
told Alford in 2018
that “I
have a number of friends who are considering running for office, a
number of pastors from across the state who are even considering
stepping down to step over.”
Mills
has built a formidable network of potential pastoral politicians.
Calling
himself a “missionary to the field of government,” he works
through a “network of 300 to 500 churches,” whose pastors he
summons to Baton Rouge for “briefings” near the start of every
legislative session. This year’s “Legislative Pastoral Briefing”
is being held Wednesday morning, April 10, at the Capitol Welcome
Center.
Tony
Perkins, LFF founder, former state legislator, and now head of the
Family Research Council (branded an “LGBT hate
group”
by the Southern Poverty Law Center) applauded this annual gathering
just before the 2018 session: “I
was thrilled to see an auditorium full of pastors this morning in
Baton Rouge for Louisiana Family Forum’s annual statewide pastors
briefing. Gene Mills has done a tremendous job in shaping public
policy in Louisiana. When we started 20 years ago, it was difficult
to sustain the presence of pastors in the political and policy realm
beyond the issue of abortion. Today, they not only have a sustained
presence, they have a shaping presence.”
Gene Mills and NWLA-area pastors lay hands on and pray with Sen. Ryan Gatti, Rep. Raymond Crews, Rep. Larry Bagley, Sen. John Milkovich in Jan. 2019
Between
legislative sessions, Mills assiduously maintains LFF’s pastoral
and legislative support network. In his January
11, 2019, End
of Weeknewsletter,
Mills recounts a “busy road trip” during which he visited north
and central Louisiana churches, meeting with
“pastors, lawmakers, and business leaders” and handing out LFF
awards to senators Ryan Gatti, John Milkovich, and Gerald Long, and
representatives Larry Bagley, Raymond Crews, and Alan Seabaugh. He
then “circled
back to Lafayette” to meet with a conservative civic group “for a
time of strategy and assessment of Louisiana’s current political
situation.”
The Dominionist “Kingdom” of Louisiana
Gambit editor Clancy Dubos has called LFF “a perennial powerhouse at the Capitol.” Indeed, Mills has reached a level of influence that’s placing him alongside public officials on state task forces and councils. For example, he served on the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force and now is a member of the Empowering Families to Live Well Louisiana Council, which is tasked with developing a statewide anti-poverty strategy. These activities further serve Mills’ dominionist agenda, which he candidly explained in his 2012 article, “Kingdom Implications,” for Smith Media Group, a Christian public relations company that “partners with churches and non-profits to advance the kingdom of God.”
In the article, Mills calls LFF a “ministry” whose essential mission is assisting pastors and “the body of Christ” in discovering “their jurisdictional authority in the arena of government.” When legislative sessions begin, Mills and his pastors fan out over the Capitol “to open the session in prayer, intercede, or simply have lunch or a conversation with a lawmaker.” However, his boasting in 2012 of LFF’s “over 75” legislative and policy victories belies this innocent description of what Mills calls a “servant leadership model of ministry,” which, when “administered among the powerful,” causes “the supernatural to happen.” Plainly put, Mills and his pastors are working to influence legislation and policy. This pastoral networking, Mills wrote, has given him “an influential voice” that enables him “to execute objectives in an arena which respects power but often confuses the churches’ authority.”
In 2016, then-state Rep. Mike Johnson (now U.S. Rep.) and Gene Mills talk with press after failure-to-pass of Johnson’s “Pastor Protection Act”
Louisianans who value true religious freedom and sound public policy must take Mills’ dominionism seriously. It is not a threat that is coming down the road but a strategy that he and his allies have executed in Louisiana for two decades. Moreover, with the current White House administration, dominionists such as Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are now running the country, while Louisiana dominionists are helping to shape national policy. Bossier City attorney and former Louisiana legislator Mike Johnson, one of Mills’ closest allies and a recipient of LFF’s annual “Gladiator Award” (as were Perkins and Rep. Steve Scalise), is now a U.S. congressman, influencing executive policy decisions as the chairman of the U.S. House Republican Study Committee, a position that was also once held by Rep. Scalise. Although Republicans are now the House minority rather than majority, Louisiana’s 1st District Congressman Steve Scalise remains the GOP Whip. And Perkins boasts about his direct access to the White House: “I’ve been to the White House I don’t know how many more times in the first six months this year than I was during the entire Bush administration.”
Meanwhile,
back in Louisiana, Mills believes that “God
could reach the world from right here in Louisiana with resources at
our disposal, if we can figure out that that’s precisely what He
put us here to do.”
He
is working non-stop to make Louisiana the center of God’s kingdom
in the United States.
As he zigzags across Louisiana, often from the cockpit of his Cirrus SR20 airplane, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham presents himself as a kind of Reluctant Warrior. Although he hadn’t even taken the Oath of Office for his third term in Congress before he began campaigning for governor, Abraham wants people to know that he isn’t a “career politician.”
Five years ago, in an effort to convince voters that he was a good guy who wasn’t interested in the money, Abraham pledged to donate his entire salary to charities supporting children with cancer and quadruple amputee veterans. It was a nice sentiment, but so far, there is no evidence it was anything more than that, a sentiment. His office claims his pledge was valid only for his first term, though it remained on his campaign website when he ran for reelection; he has yet to disclose how much he ever actually donated.
In Louisiana, we are more than well-acquainted with this particular breed of politician: The puritanical crusader who feigns humility by acting as if he had been recruited for political office through some sort of act of divine providence.
Abraham, a physician who now asks to be called “Doc,” hopes to define himself as folksy and earnest yet capable of administering tough medicine. He ridicules people on Medicaid for “voting for a living instead of working for a living.” He believes that only those who maintain employment should qualify for food stamps. Earlier this week, he launched his first web ad. It is titled “Help Is On The Way,” and it officially went online on April Fools Day.
As a part of a rite of passage for almost every Republican politician in Louisiana, Ralph Abraham has also spent a considerable amount of time courting the interests of Big Oil. Last weekend, at an event hosted by the right-wing Pelican Institute, Abraham vowed to reverse the current administration’s efforts to hold oil and gas companies responsible for damages they illegally inflicted on the state’s environment. This would be his priority from “day one.”
While that may be music to the ears of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), which has suggested- for years and without a shred of evidence- that the mere threat of litigation irreparably paralyzes a multi-trillion dollar industry, it is probably a cold comfort to those who are literally losing their entire hometowns as a consequence of the industry’s negligence.
It is also more than a little ironic, because of the three men currently running for governor, Ralph Abraham is the only one who has ever personally sued an oil and gas company.
The original mineral lease, comprising 123 acres.
Ten years ago, after Gulf South Pipeline Company planted a 42″ pipeline in the middle of Abraham’s farmland in Richland Parish, the good doctor, along with his son-in-law, took the company to court.
“Due to the construction of the pipeline and the failure of Gulf South to restore the property properly and the incumbent interference with fertility, irrigation and drainage, (Dustin) Morris (Abraham’s son-in-law and the manager of his farm) suffered crop losses in the areas which were affected by the servitude and the yields (sic) were substantially reduced causing a financial loss to Morris and his lessors,” the petition reads. “Due to the share rent (sic) with Abraham Farms, LLC and John Hoychick, Jr., they join as party plaintiffs, but only for their share of crop losses.”
The suit sought less than $75,000 in damages, and less than nine months after it was filed, the whole thing was resolved and voluntarily dismissed. Morris, among other things, had initially sought compensation for mental anguish.
Abraham Farms is not an insignificant operation. According to the congressman’s most recent financial disclosure statements, his ownership interest is worth as much as $5 million. And while his son-in-law manages the farm, Abraham is still the boss. “My son-in-law actively farms my property,” he told the Delta Farm Press. “I’ll make decisions with him on what is done. I’m basically in the trenches with the farmers figuring things out. Should we grow corn or soybeans this year? What’s cotton going to do? I’m asking the same questions farmers are asking daily. I want to be a good voice and advocate for my farmers whether they’re working row crops or timber or whatever they do.”
$75,000 may not seem like an enormous windfall, but it’s worth noting that it’s more than twice the median income of Abraham’s district. Still, it pales in comparison to the amount of money Abraham Farms has earned from its most generous contributor, the United States government.
To preempt, or not to preempt? Is it better to have some state-level group of appointees decide who gets how much in tax breaks, or have local elected officials determine if there’s a fair return for giving up their revenue? State-level decision-making, or local determination and democracy? That’s an overarching question posed by bills now prefiled for the legislative session starting next Monday, April 8.
Some
of the proposals seek to reinstate full state-level control over
exempting industries from paying local property taxes, while others
look to open up the sacrosanct homestead exemption to changes – via
local option elections. Still another bill would authorize local
option elections to legalize marijuana.
And,
in the case of HB 281, authored by Rep. Blake “Top Shot” Miguez
(R-New Iberia), the bill seeks to expand previously enacted state
preemption. The measure even uses the “p” word!
Blake Miguez, cover photo as CEO of Sea-Tran Marine, LLC. Inset: Zoom in to show he’s wearing his Louisiana House of Representatives lapel pin, while posing with the pistols.
Subtitled
– or, more properly, described
– as “WEAPONS/FIREARMS: Provides relative to preemption
of state law for firearms,” HB 281 would remove the ability of
local governments to have any ordinances prohibiting possession of a
firearm in a commercial establishment or public building.
Current
law, enacted in 1985, is titled “Preemption of state law,”
although it should be more accurately called “Preemption
by state law” or “Preemption
of local control.”
It states, in the classic wording of state preemption, “No
governing authority of a political subdivision shall enact any
ordinance or regulation more restrictive than state law
concerning…” in this case, “firearms or ammunition”. The
Miguez bill would remove the law’s language that permits locals to
designate certain buildings – like city hall, or city court – as
firearm free zones.
It
will be particularly interesting if the Miguez bill is heard by the
House Criminal Justice Committee the same day as HB 382, by Rep.
Kenny Cox (D-Natchitoches). That measure would prohibit firearm
possession in any park, playground or recreational facility open to
the public. Though it has the opposite purpose of the Miguez bill –
restricting versus expanding locations where firearms are allowed –
the Cox measure is also a form of state preemption of local
governance. It might be okay – even appropriate – to carry a
firearm while boating in recreation areas of the Atchafalaya Basin,
whereas carrying a weapon to a 4th
of July barbeque in an urban park could be a trigger for fatal
fireworks. What is appropriate for parks in Calcasieu Parish isn’t
necessarily right for those who frequent the parks in Claiborne
Parish.
The entire
concept of different areas of the state having different standards is
what led to local option elections for “gaming” in the late
1990s. It’s also – presumably – the prompt for HB 462, by Rep.
Cedric Glover (D-Shreveport). Glover’s bill would permit
local governing authorities to call an election for the purpose of
allowing the sale, possession, distribution, and use of marijuana.
Glover’s measure – one of a dozen or so bills regarding marijuana
that have been filed this session – is a constitutional amendment.
It, too, is set to be heard by the House Criminal Justice Committee,
and would have to get approval by two-thirds of the House members,
two-thirds of the state Senate. Then it would have to be approved by
a majority of state voters this fall before local governing bodies
could ask – at some future election date in 2020 or after –
whether or not their town, city, or parish specific voters want
legalization.
Remote
as the possibility of that bill passing seems, it appears even more
unlikely that a duo of suggested constitutional amendments – HB 12
by Rep. Steve Carter (R-Baton Rouge) and/or HB 439 by Rep. Barry Ivey
(R-Central) – will find much favor with either lawmakers or voters.
Those measures propose sacrificing (parts, at least) of one of
Louisiana’s most sacred cows.
The
homestead exemption was amended into Louisiana’s constitution (the
state’s 1921 constitution, our eighth such document) in 1934.
Louisiana was (unsurprisingly) following the lead of Texas, which had
adopted its own homestead exemption plan two years earlier. In the
financial turmoil of the Great Depression, it was expected the
property tax break for primary residences would help protect
homeowners and small farms (up to 160 acres) from losing their homes
due to tax delinquency and/or forfeiture. Subsequently, during the
national economic boom following World War II, the exemption was kept
in place as a perceived inducement and incentive for home ownership.
Now
the property tax break exempts an owner-occupied home from state and
parish property taxes due on the first $75,000 of value, and the
homestead exemption is highly-favored by Louisiana citizens, and
generally viewed as an “entitlement” for the middle class. Yet
throughout most of its existence, the personal property tax break has
been critiqued by good government groups and tax structure studies.
For example, in 1962, a study by the Public Affairs Research Council
(PAR) stated, “the homestead exemption program should be
substantially revised.”
Within
the past decade, discussions on tax reform have returned repeatedly
to Louisiana’s lack of a (much-needed) tax structure leg to stand
on. Former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s 2013 proposal to eliminate state
income tax – imitating Texas – never made it out of the starting
gate, presumably because Jindal’s plan substituted reliance on only
higher sales tax to make up for the loss in income tax revenues. The
proposal was utterly unrealistic and unworkable because, unlike
Texas, Louisiana has no dependably robust property tax base. That’s
partly because of ITEP, but mostly due to the political
untouchability of the homestead exemption. Additionally, while the
language of the current state constitution (enacted in 1974) permits
the enactment and assessment of statewide property taxes, only
parish-level and municipal-level property taxation is actually
implemented. And no matter how deep the budget hole, nor how high the
fiscal cliff, in more than two decades of reporting on the Louisiana
Legislature, I have yet to see a bill filed that could initiate
collecting a state property tax.
Yet
both Rep. Carter and Rep. Ivey believe homeowners would be willing to
either reduce or shift the amount of their property tax exemption,
and voluntarily take on a “fairer share” of the local tax burden.
Carter’s bill would have the exemption kick in after the first
$10,000 in value, but still top out at $75,000 in value, thus
reducing the overall amount exempted from $75,000 to $65,000. Ivey’s
bill would let each parish government and voters choose the amount or
percentage reduction they are willing to adopt.
Both
of the capital-area Republicans’ proposals insist that the total
amount of property taxes collected would not go up. Both measures
would require reductions to the property tax bills of businesses,
industries, rental properties – even vacant lots – to offset the
“fairer share” single-family homeowners would be paying. It’s
unclear whether new business or residential developments subsequently
coming onto the tax rolls would be under that overall amount cap,
requiring further recalculation of taxes due, but that may all be
clarified during committee and/or floor hearings on the bills.
Ivey’s
bill is part of his renewed attempt to enact comprehensive tax
reform. And there’s little doubt that both Barry Ivey’s and Steve
Carter’s bills are partisan philosophical reactions to the ITEP
controversy, i.e., “If local decision making is such a good thing
for commercial property tax exemptions, then shouldn’t it be just
as good for homeowners’ and their homestead exemption?” Good?
Yes. Likely to pass, with its complex calculations and asking
homeowners, who’ve benefitted from the property tax exemption for
the past 84 years, to pay more so businesses can pay less? no.
But,
as Rep. Steve Carter put it in a recent interview with The Advocate’s
Mark Ballard, “I
know it’s a sacred cow. But unless you put it out there, you’ll
never know what you can do.”
“The model of government created by Huey Long – which relies on excessive political power and the heavy hand of state government far too much – must be holistically transitioned to a system that embraces the principle of local control and taxation closest to the people.”– Louisiana Association of Business and Industry president Stephen Waguespack
The
Homestead Exemption and the Industrial Tax Exemption (ITEP), both
created in the 1930s, can loosely be attributed to the state’s
“Huey Long era.” Both post-dated Long’s governorship, although
both qualify as examples of state preemption of local democracy. And,
ostensibly, both should be on Waguespack’s philosophical chopping
block, based on what the LABI president said in the above quote–
“local control, and taxation closest to the people.”
Once Gov. John Bel Edwards’ executively-ordered reforms to the ITEP program were implemented, and locally-elected governmental agencies – parish councils and police juries, school boards, sheriffs – began reducing and even rejecting some of the tax breaks, LABI and Waguespack composed different lyrics to the song they’d been singing.
Speaking
to the Baton Rouge Press Club on February 4, Waguespack condemned the
ongoing criticism that’s been branding ITEP as “corporate
welfare.”
“If
the tax code is so warm and fuzzy and friendly to the business
community in Louisiana, why aren’t our skylines growing like
Houston and Atlanta and Nashville and these other cities in the
South?” Waguespack asked, rhetorically.
“We have to stop this dangerous rhetoric that’s destroying our
business climate.”
LABI released a brochure the same day, branded as a “report” on ITEP and manufacturing in Louisiana.
“ITEP
remains far more limited than in previous years with less recognition
of the importance of manufacturing investment,” the pamphlet
states, before it goes on to compare parts of Louisiana’s tax base
with Texas. It also urges (as Waguespack had in his speech earlier in
the day) a single local point for ITEP approval in the future, with
that local authority having the ability to recommend the state Board
of Commerce and Industry give higher exemptions for longer periods of
time.
That’s
right. LABI wants its member industries exempted from greater than
the current 80-percent of property taxes, and for longer than the
current maximum eight years. The math they use to argue for this is
so fuzzy it could benefit from a good, close shave.
The Why It Matters: ITEP brochure says “Manufacturing brings prosperity to Louisiana,” then goes on to claim that “Parishes with high levels of ITEP benefit from higher tax collections.” The pamphlet then presents charts showing that those are higher per capita tax collections than the statewide averages.
Per
capita
means per
person,
and, LABI says, the statewide average for property tax per person is
$935 per year. In Cameron Parish, with the greatest volume of ITEP,
the average property tax paid per person per year is $4850. The
disparity for sales tax is even greater: with a statewide average of
$551 paid per person, and Cameron Parish collecting $3481 per person.
Corporations get the tax exemptions, while the people who live there
each become responsible for more than five and six times the state
average for certain types of taxes.
Defining “Local Control”
It’s expected LABI will be supporting SB 214 and HB 529, co-authored by Sen. Bodi White (R-Baton Rouge) and Rep. Franklin Foil (R-Baton Rouge). Identical measures, they return sole authority for ITEP approvals to the (appointed) state Board of Commerce and Industry, while keeping a nod to the concept of local input about the local property taxes being waived.
The bills add a trio of parish appointees to the C & I Board’s voting membership; one from the parish governing body, one from the school board, and one from the sheriff’s department. Each parish will have its trio of C & I members, who will vote on the tax exemptions being requested for their parish. It means any public debate over return on investment for the tax exemptions will be conducted at the Commerce and Industry Board hearings in Baton Rouge – not in local public meetings of local school boards and parish councils or police juries. Local citizens objecting to corporate exemptions will have to file those objections with what will be a 27-member statewide board of political appointees.
So
now we know…when representatives of LABI say “local control,”
they
don’t mean “control by
locals”. They mean “control of
locals.”
State Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera. Photo by Robin May.
“Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.” – Donald J. Trump
On Nov. 8th, 2018, less than a month before the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) debuted their state-of-the-art system for Medicaid enrollment, a total overhaul that transformed the inefficient method in place since Edwin Edwards’ final term as governor, the state legislative auditor, Daryl Purpera, published “Medicaid Eligibility: Wage Verification Process of the Expansion Population.” According to more than a dozen healthcare policy experts and legal scholars familiar with Purpera’s report, the document, which purports to be an audit, could be described at best as earnest analysis based on misinformed speculation and, at worst, a cynical exercise in political propaganda and historical revisionism.
As the 2019 gubernatorial campaign begins to heat up, Purpera’s report is now back in the spotlight, because, among other things, he claims LDH doled out as much as $85.5 million in Medicaid expansion funding to managed care organizations for patients who should have never been eligible for coverage. Actually, to be precise, Purpera wrote:
Because this sample was random, we were able to project these results to the entire population of 19,226 single-person household Medicaid expansion recipients. Based on this projection, it appears that LDH may have paid between $61.6 million and $85.5 million in PMPMs (Per-Member, Per-Month) for Medicaid recipients who did not qualify at some point during their Medicaid coverage.
Or, as U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham claimed in a press release on March 5th (emphasis added): “In November, a report by Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office revealed that 82 of 100 Medicaid recipients in a random sample did not financially qualify for the program. The Legislative Auditor’s Office estimated that the state wasted as much as $85 million on ineligible Medicaid recipients.”
It is grossly misleading to characterize Purpera’s sample as “random” Medicaid recipients; he explicitly selected only from “a population of 19,780 Medicaid recipients who had average wages that appeared to exceed the amount to qualify for Medicaid.” Purpera assumed these recipients made more than allowable, not based on tax filings, but based on Louisiana Workforce Commission data, which is, itself, based on “unreliable” self-reported information from employers and a semiannual national survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Source: Louisiana Budget Project
At a recent forum hosted by the Pelican Institute, a right-wing “think tank” in New Orleans, Rep. Abraham put it somewhat differently but no less dishonestly: “We have $100 million going to people who shouldn’t be on the rolls.” The money goes to providers, not patients.
But even if you accept Purpera’s fuzzy math, the document he produced no longer reflects the on-the-ground reality of how the Louisiana Department of Health monitors and determines eligibility for Medicaid, rendering Purpera’s analysis almost entirely irrelevant. In fact, the new system has been lauded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as one of the four best in the entire country, a credit to Sec. Rebekah Gee of LDH and Gov. Edwards.
Rep. Abraham is not the only Republican politician to seize on Purpera’s speculation in order to advance an argument that Louisiana is awash in welfare fraud as a consequence of profligate government spending and the concomitant “culture of dependency.”
In a letter to The Advocate in January, U.S. Sen. John N. Kennedy cites Purpera’s findings as the primary reason he decided to file the Income Verification Act, which would require states to use federal tax information prior to granting any entitlement benefit program; his scheme is unworkable for a whole range of reasons, but that isn’t the point. Sen. Kennedy found an opportunity to grandstand about Democrats and welfare, red meat for his political base.
State Attorney General Jeff Landry has spent more time in office shadowboxing Medicaid recipient fraud than battling consumer fraud or white collar crime. Last week, Landry issued a press release boasting about five arrests that had recently been made against people accused of welfare fraud, four of whom are alleged to have underreported their income in order to qualify for health insurance. Suffice it to say, none of these four individuals are alleged to have actually earned a significant amount of money.
One man was arrested for claiming his child, who lived with its mother, as a dependent. Landry arrested a 60-year-old woman who accurately reported her income as $40,000 a year, but who had previously represented to LDH that she earned less than $10,000 a year. Notwithstanding the fact that in four of the five cases, the principal crime alleged is pretending to be slightly less poor in order to get health insurance- which is, in fact, a crime- it is worth questioning the morals of anyone in the justice system who would seek to ruin someone else’s life for an offense that could be easily remedied without any fanfare or publicity. (The fifth person was arrested for provider fraud).
“A Medicaid card to a drug pusher is like a credit card,” Landry claimed, without any scintilla of evidence, shortly after he took office. “It costs them nothing, then on the street it’s 100 percent profit.”
Landry claims the recent arrests were made “after investigations by the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation, the Louisiana Department of Health, and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office” (emphasis added).
Of course, the legislative auditor does not have the authority to criminally investigate individual recipients. Landry wasn’t really praising Purpera for his detective work; he was praising him for speculating about the scale of potential Medicaid recipient fraud.
A solution in search of a problem
Gov. John Bel Edwards’ decision to accept federal Medicaid expansion funds has proven to be an undeniable success and, as such, an enormous embarrassment to conservative partisans who had once campaigned on rigid opposition to President Obama and anything associated with him.
The simple truth is that Louisiana has never been beleaguered by widespread “welfare fraud,” and the vast and overwhelming majority of crimes associated with Medicaid fraud are committed by the provider, not by the recipient.
For nearly four consecutive years, in one of the poorest and sickest states in America, former Gov. Bobby Jindal and the majority of the state legislature had stubbornly refused to accept billions of dollars in federal funding to expand health insurance through Medicaid. Publicly, they claimed to be concerned about the possibility of over-obligating the state’s finances, but privately, many would acknowledge their concern was political, not financial. Louisiana has long received more federal money than it generates in federal taxes, and because Gov. Jindal had spent the final six of his eight years in office slashing taxes and cutting spending on education and healthcare, the state needed the money more than ever.
Today, there are 502,647 people in Louisiana who now have health insurance as a direct consequence of Gov. Edwards’ decision to accept federal funding for Medicaid expansion. According to LDH, the program has saved countless lives, created thousands of jobs, and not drained a penny from the state general fund.
So, while there isn’t any legitimate or compelling reason to believe Medicaid expansion was ever beset by widespread recipient fraud, there is a desperate political need to create a counter-narrative from Republican elected officials who had built their careers by explaining to voters all of the horribles that would occur if Louisiana dared to accept “Obama’s healthcare money.”
Read the report here.
Purpera’s Projections
The problem for Rep. Abraham, Sen. Kennedy, and state Attorney General Landry: Daryl Purpera was guessing.
Only a year before, Purpera had issued a similar report that was even more absurd, speculating that it was hypothetically possible the state wasted $500 million a year on covering ineligible Medicaid recipients. State Sen. Sharon Hewitt spliced together a video of Purpera testifying at a senate committee hearing, cut out all of his disclaimers and equivocations, and promoted the clip to her audience on social media.
Tricia Brooks of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute politely yet adroitly ripped Purpera’s most recent analysis to shreds in an article she titled “Louisiana Medicaid Audit Report Misses the Mark.” Jeanie Donovan, policy director for the Louisiana Budget Project, was even more understated in her review of Purpera’s analysis; she titled her report “Five Points of Clarification on Louisiana Medicaid Audit.” (Donovan is now policy director of the Louisiana Department of Health).
“The Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s recent review of Medicaid eligibility determinations caught the attention of journalists, the Legislature and political pundits,” Donovan wrote. “But the audit findings were more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and a careful reading of the audit report reveals findings that aren’t as salacious as conservative critics would have you think.”
If you’re not feeling as beneficent, you may be inclined to use a more direct term to describe Purpera’s report: Fake news.
Regardless of how you describe it, one thing is clear: Despite having the imprimatur of the legislative auditor’s office, the document Purpera produced is notan audit. (In a feat of bureaucratic magic, Purpera claims on the title page that the work was a product of the office’s “Medicaid Audit Unit,” an obscure government agency that apparently has only one employee, Daryl Purpera).
Purpera is an accountant and a career bureaucrat, not a healthcare expert, as is abundantly obvious to experts who have read his reports. He’s worked for the state government for the past 34 years, and for the past 14 years, he has also moonlighted as a Baptist preacher in a small church in suburban Baton Rouge. According to his biography on the church’s website, he earned a Bachelors from LSU and, at some point, an unspecified degree from Andersonville Theological Seminary, an unaccredited institution that relies on audio files to educate students over the internet.
I mention this not to diminish at all Purpera’s life-long public service, but the fact of the matter is he made a string of factually incorrect or incomplete assumptions. Analyzing Medicaid expansion, an enormously complex and largely federally-funded program, requires subject-matter expertise.
Without that expertise, you run the risk of handing a zealous politician a hand grenade and granting them permission to blow up someone else’s health insurance.
Lost in all of this has been the fact that Purpera’s report didn’t actually reveal a single instance of illegality by anyone administering the program or suggest that the state ever deviated from the guidelines set by the federal- not the state- government.
The report does create a false impression, however, that the money alleged to have been wasted came from the state. Medicaid expansion in Louisiana is almost entirely paid by the federal government, 93.5% to be precise. A provider fee covers the bulk of the “state match;” not a penny comes out of the state general fund.
As Donovan points out, even if you accept Purpera’s projections as valid, the very most the state would have ever paid to cover health insurance for ineligible recipients would be between $4 to $5.5 million. “That’s between .16 percent and .22 percent of the total projected state funding for Medicaid in this fiscal year,” Donovan writes (emphasis hers).
Credit: Louisiana Budget Project
There are other, more fundamental errors with Purpera’s analysis. He misstates federal law and, as a result, inaccurately concludes by implication that LDH could have done more.
Moreover, as Tricia Brooks of Georgetown explains, the state legislative auditor did not “test the accuracy of the eligibility determinations…,”failed to factor in ‘the reasonable compatibility standard’ that states may adopt if the beneficiary’s estimate of their income and the wage data source differ…,” and “did not examine the actual source of wage data.”
The final point deserves emphasis, because the state relies on eligibility determinations made by the Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) “for people who come into coverage through this pathway (the federal marketplace) rather than forcing them to go through a second application process.”
The Stench of Politics
Purpera presented his report as if it were an audit, but he had been fully aware that the LDH was preparing to launch a new system and a different schedule for checking income eligibility (moving from an annual check, which is what CMS uses, to a quarterly check), a detail he conveniently downplays. “While LDH states that it will be able to do this (perform quarterly checks) in the new system, we have not audited the design of the system and cannot verify system capabilities at this time,” he writes. In other words, he wasn’t conducting an actionable audit; if anything, he was conducting a policy autopsy.
There is one other telling sign that Purpera’s document had more to do with playing politics than in guaranteeing good government. For some reason, his flawed analysis ended up catching the attention of U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, and U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio. They asked CMS to respond, and on March 8th, CMS Administrator Seema Verma sent them a letter, calling the findings “deeply troubling.” Louisiana, Verma wrote, would now be included in a “future review of how ‘high risk states’ determine eligibility for government-financed Medicaid benefits,” according to the Associated Press.
Administrator Verma’s Senior Counselor is a man named Calder Lynch, and prior to joining the Trump administration and a brief stint in Nebraska, Calder Lynch was the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health during the Jindal Administration. Lynch, a Louisiana native, worked at LDH for six and a half years, joining shortly after graduating from LSU in 2008.
His first job was as the Special Assistant and Policy Advisor to Sec. Bruce Greenstein. Greenstein, it is worth noting, also joined the Trump administration, serving for a year as the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It seems more than a little ironic that Calder Lynch’s new boss claims to be “deeply troubled” by the delays in system modernization caused by his old boss and more than a little convenient that, less than a month before the state launched a new system, a report materialized that attempted to shift all blame away from the people who created the problem to those who were correcting it.
No one should accept wasteful or fraudulent spending, but in order to solve a problem, we should be guided by the facts, especially when a person’s healthcare is at stake.
In the weeks preceding Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), the eleven-member board that is constitutionally charged with adopting and enacting policies governing public schools, decided they needed to intervene in order to save a handful of failing schools in Orleans Parish. To address mismanagement and corruption that resulted in a persistently underperforming district, BESE recommended the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD), a brand-new legislatively-created political subdivision of the state.
It is a coincidence of timing that the Recovery School District was created only weeks before the recovery from the Federal Flood, but in Louisiana, public education has been continuously jeopardized by racism, poverty, and divisive political gamesmanship ever since Huey P. Long paid for free textbooks for all of the state’s school children by taxing oil and gas companies. (As a result of Long’s textbook program, school attendance bounced up by 20%, and the oil and gas companies still made a fortune).
At least initially, policymakers, BESE board members, and members of then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s administration had pitched the RSD as a to repair a small number of broken schools by wresting away control from local administrators and temporarily operate the schools as charters. Once triaged, oversight would be returned to the local or parish school board.
In many ways, the RSD was designed to operate like a consent decree, wherein the federal government oversees a corrupt local police department until the locals can be trusted again.
But what began as an effort to address a handful of problem schools quickly evolved into a takeover of the vast majority of Orleans Parish Schools as post-Katrina chaos ensued. In her nationally acclaimed book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein points to the RSD as a prime example of “disaster capitalism.” The initial recovery effort has grown into something entirely unprecedented, even on a national scale.
Even the handful of traditional public schools that Orleans Parish held on to eventually were chartered. Nearly fifteen years later, there is not a single “traditional” public school in Orleans Parish. The last five closed their doors after the 2013-2014 school year.
Some hold up the Orleans Parish’s post-Katrina status quo as an overwhelming success story of “school choice,” while public education advocates today push to reign in and manage the excesses of wholesale “charterization.”
Among other measures, Louisiana RS § 17:3972, the enabling legislation that created the RSD, states, “It is the intention of the legislature in enacting this Chapter to authorize experimentationby city and parish school boards by authorizing the creation of innovative kinds of public schools for pupils” (emphasis added). Critics in Orleans Parish correctly argue that the legislature never intended for a school district to be fully encompassed by such experimentation as it is now.
When “school choice” is really just an algorithm
A consequence of a school district largely made up of charters was the introduction of the OneApp school placement system put in place in 2011. OneApp is a centralized common application system where parents can rank their school choices. OneApp’s algorithm then considers a number of inputs such as available seats, siblings enrolled, and, in some cases, the proximity of the schools from the applicant’s home. Students enrolled in closing schools are to have a priority for admission to schools at the top of their lists, usually “A” or “B” rated schools.
However, on-the-ground, the reality is far different: Many students are falling through the algorithm’s gaps and are forced from closing schools to unproven and underperforming schools. Caroline Roemer, with the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, acknowledges that there currently “are just not enough seats in quality Orleans Parish charters.”
Charter critics, such as Armtrice Cowart of Erase the Board Coalition, point out that the students slipping through the cracks are most often minority and impoverished students, while students in wealthy zip codes have a much easier time gaining admission to the best charters. “OneApp assures that failing schools survive because OneApp has to put students somewhere—even if the school is failing,” Cowart says. “That is not true school choice.”
Even with the inclusion of charters such as Haynes Academy—a historically selective and overwhelmingly white/wealthy school—into OneApp, critics are skeptical of the access poor, primarily African American kids will have to these newly grandfathered-in schools. The weight that the OneApp algorithm places on geography and sibling attendance may keep schools like Haynes de-facto exclusionary.
Critics do not only direct their attention to OneApp and structural injustices they believe it isn’t doing anything to remedy, they also point to a convoluted, unelected bureaucracy that is fragmented into dozens of charter boards in Orleans Parish.
Maria Harmon of Step Up Louisiana, which describes itself as “a grassroots organization that fights for education and economic justice,” draws attention to the demographic makeup of many charter boards. “These boards are not largely made up of parents and those who know what is happening in their schools, at a ground level. There is a strong disconnect.” Harmon was pleased that the Orleans Parish School Board recently required that charter boards at least have one parent from the community, but she believes there is much work done in the way of transformational parental engagement in order to force out-of-touch boards to be more responsive to the unique needs of the students for whom they are responsible. While Harmon believes that charter boards seem to be “technically following public meeting laws,” she sees that boards don’t typically have their meetings at a central location where it is easy for parents, no matter the school their kids attend, to show up. After all, what incentive does a board of privatized education, short of democratic mandate, have to spend “unnecessarily” in an area such as a centralized boardroom?
Step Up has also worked in the Einstein Charter Network to engage parents to ensure that kids from all over the city could ride yellow school busses, instead of public transportation for which Einstein Network children were receiving bus tokens. Step Up filed public records requests into Einstein, which, in part, was responsible for the eventual management change and bussing practices of the network. Even with all the work done to get yellow school buses for transportation, Harmon says “issues don’t end once schools provide traditional transportation.”
Step Up continues to have issues with yellow-bus, transportation contractors cutting corners, ostensibly because they are operating at low costs, which continue to make it more dangerous for children to get to school. Just recently, a charter transportation provider was in the news for falsifying insurance certifications. The “race to the bottom” which this kind of false competition creates, paired with a lack of democratic oversight, can combine to create problems that are too dire to wait for market corrections to address— especially in the education of Louisiana’s future.
A bureaucratic mess
Charter critics have welcomed the Orleans Parish School Board’s renewed and long-delayed oversight of the schools that were taken over by the RSD after Katrina, nearly fourteen years ago. While the landscape has drastically shifted over that period, the board is now faced with questions of what sorts of oversight are appropriate to exercise over its charter networks. Educational mismanagement in Orleans, which provided a backdrop to the move toward complete privatization, may now become visible again—but this time in charter networks and their contractors.
On a state level, BESE is itself a charter authorizer and has a solid track record of approving charters. This has played out to give charter applications a second chance to receive a charter, even after being rejected by local school boards.
Belinda Davis, an LSU political science professor, believes that “having multiple charter authorizing bodies, as Louisiana does, dilutes the quality of charter schools” and cites research conducted by Robert Crew and Mary Anderson. Davis further asserts the charter school movement ideally is an innovative program that targets at-risk kids, but that there are few mechanisms being used to share things that are working with traditional schools.
Caroline Roemer agrees. “I’d like to see more sharing across districts and types of schools to find what ‘the secret sauce’ is,” Roemer says.
However, there are evident hurdles to realizing cooperation. From the perspective of some charter skeptics, there isn’t any compelling reason for charters to share what is working for them with districts and other schools because a charter’s financial security and value in the marketplace is partially dependent on the differentiation of their educational products from traditional schools and other charters. If a charter doesn’t do things differently than other schools, why send your kid there? On the other side of the coin, many charter advocates feel school board members turn their nose up at charters and are not willing to acknowledge successful charters because charters are not under their jurisdiction in the same way that traditional schools are.
East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, which is currently set to consider applications for several new charter schools, is in a tough position. Tania Nyman, a Baton Rouge charter skeptic, says, “The board will likely approve all of the applications because if an application is not approved the charter will go before BESE and will in all likelihood be chartered.” School boards, such as EBR, that oversee charters also face uncertainty every year when students have the opportunity to enroll in charters. Employment in traditional schools is not “at-will,” so in the event of an exodus or influx of students to or from charter schools, districts can end up over or under staffed. Some argue this is a downside of traditional, public school employment, but the charter model may be more problematic.
Charters do not typically have the same kind of job security nor do they retain staff for as long as traditional schools. Many simply can’t tolerate precarious employment practices and worst-case scenarios of having inexperienced teachers in environments where kids are in need of the most help.
Location, location, location
Perhaps the most potent critique of charters is the close link some charters have with real estate interests.
Currently in Louisiana, charter schools are allowed to enter capital lease agreements with for-profit real estate affiliates. Whereas traditional schools are owned by the school board and are a long-term financial asset to the public, real estate affiliates of charter networks profit directly from the allocation of per pupil funds. If the school fails, the affiliate still walks away with the asset. South Baton Rouge Charter Academy, operated by Florida-based Charter Schools USA leases in this way from Red Apple Development LLC, its real estate affiliate.
Charter Schools USA has been a prolific contributor to Louisiana politicians on both sides of the aisle, though they have donated more frequently to Republicans than Democrats. Red Apple Development has contributed to only one campaign. In 2015 and then again in 2017, Red Apple cut $2,500 checks to Louisiana state Rep. Edmund Jordan. Jordan, an African American Democrat and a lawyer by trade, represents a struggling part of both East Baton Rouge and West Baton Rouge parishes.
All of this is not to say that there aren’t some charters doing excellent work in Baton Rouge and around Louisiana. According to the latest Department of Education statistics, Madison Preparatory Academy, a “B” school, has a graduation rate of 94% and places 69% of its students in college. Mentorship STEAM Academy, a “C” school, offers a technologically advanced curriculum that one might find in one of Baton Rouge’s best parochial schools.
Spending the minimum
“Charters and traditional schools receive roughly the same funds through BESE’s (Minimum Foundation Program) MFP formula,” says Neva Butkus of the Louisiana Budget Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that “monitors and reports on public policy and how it affects Louisiana’s low- to moderate-income families.” With financing essentially identical, one would be right to expect little difference between the performance of the two models if other variables are controlled for.
One of these variables is Louisiana’s childhood poverty rate of 28%, high enough to rank Louisiana last in the US, which affects both charters and traditional schools. In a report from earlier this month, Butkus points to a couple of other factors: Louisiana also “has the largest gap between the incomes of families sending their children to public versus non public schools.”
Critically, the state’s investments in public education have remained flatlined for far too long. While Louisiana’s per-pupil spending ranks among the national average, this is somewhat deceptive because of the enormous gap between states at the very top of the list. New York, for example, spends $18,719 per student, while Louisiana, which spends half as much, $9,462 per student.
Credit: Louisiana Budget Project
“For many years… the (MFP) increased annually by 2.75 percent to keep up with the rising cost of living,” Butkus explains. “But massive tax cuts, combined with the 2008 economic downturn, prompted state officials to eliminate this annual increase – ultimately leaving Louisiana with near-stagnant state funding for K-12 schools for over a decade.”
Credit: Louisiana Budget Project
It is easy to be pessimistic about the prospects of either educational model if the links between poverty and educational achievement are properly appreciated. But for many on the margins, the days of traditional school hegemony were better because there was no question that the parish school board was the one to hold accountable—even if the process often yielded pictures of corruption.
Today, many are experiencing difficulties in correcting injustices of a system beleaguered by a convoluted bureaucracy, less parental access, and a startling lack of public oversight. To those parents and students, the solution is simple: Louisiana needs a recovery from the recovery.
Last September, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry attempted to ingratiate himself with far-right conservatives in Shreveport and Bossier City by denouncing Gov. John Bel Edwards for appointing an African American veteran from Rapides Parish to a relatively obscure political subdivision, the Red River Waterway Commission (RRWC). As its name suggests, the RRWC is responsible for “establishing, operating, and maintaining” the Red River, and although it may not be a well-known commission, the RRWC has overseen more than $2 billion of projects during the past half-century.
Landry told anyone who would listen that Gov. Edwards had violated the state constitution by not handing over the seat to the wife of Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator, one of the state’s most powerful Republican officials.
Landry issued an advisory opinion from his office. He peddled his bizarre interpretation of the law on a local talk radio show and to conservative bloggers. He staged a press conference in Shreveport. Both the Shreveport Times and The Town Talk published front-page reports about the manufactured controversy.
On Tuesday, Judge Lala Sylvester of the Tenth Judicial District Court in Natchitoches issued a smartly-considered 17-page opinion, rejecting Landry’s arguments in meticulous detail.
Judge Lala Sylvester
At its core, Landry’s argument was that Ms. Prator was entitled to an appointment because she had been recommended to the governor for a district-level seat after it became vacant due to the death of Commissioner Mickey Prestridge. The governor, instead, decided to shift one of his district-level appointees from Shreveport to an at-large position, which freed up a spot that had been traditionally held by a resident of Central Louisiana. In September, I described the controversy as “the pettiest and most ridiculous state political news story of the year, which is really saying something.”
Landry styled his case as The State of Louisiana, through Jeff Landry, in his official capacity as attorney general of the state, and Carolyn Prator versus The Red River Waterway Commission, Michael Deville, and Ronald F. Lattier. The abbreviated title is simply State of Louisiana et. al. v. Red River Waterway Comm’n et. al., which was an absurdity not lost on Judge Sylvester.
Landry, presenting himself as acting on behalf of the state, was attempting to sue Gov. John Bel Edwards, yet he neglected to even name the governor as a defendant. To that end, Judge Sylvester provided Landry with an additional 45 days to amend his petition in order to include the governor, though it seems abundantly clear this would be an exercise in futility.
In her opinion, she methodically unpacked and swiftly dispensed of Landry’s entire legal theory, dismissing with prejudice all of his claims under the Intrusion into Office Act as well as “the particular declaratory and injunctive relief sought by Plaintiffs.” She found those claims “unavailable as a matter of law.” By dismissing those claims with prejudice, Judge Sylvester effectively kicked Landry out of the courtroom.
“Although the injunctive and declaratory relief sought wisely falls short of compelling the Commission to place Ms. Prator on the Commission or recognize her as the Caddo Parish member, Plaintiffs, despite their hair-splitting arguments to the contrary, are nonetheless using injunctive proceedings to somewhat confine the Commission unless and until Ms. Prator is appointed to the office of Caddo Parish member, something only the governor can do,” Judge Sylvester wrote.
The judge ruled that “Ms. Prator has no claim to the Office of Commission Member because she does not possess the requisite muniment of title.” Put simply, it is not enough to merely possess a sense of entitlement; you must also prove you actually possess the title. And the only person with the constitutional authority to bestow that title is the governor. “The Commission is a legislative body for whom the governor is exclusively responsibleas well as accountable for its membership,” she explained (emphasis hers).
Carolyn Prator, therefore, does not even the right to seek a remedy from the court. As I reported in September, Landry’s arguments amounted to nothing more than political grandstanding and were never grounded in legitimate constitutional or legal analysis.
His decision to file suit against the Red River Waterway Commission may seem insignificant, but it is a reminder that the state attorney general is not only spending taxpayer money on preventing efforts to end discrimination against the LGBTQ community or on repealing the law prohibiting health insurance companies from covering Americans with preexisting conditions or on stripping away environmental protections in order to pad the pockets of Big Oil, he is also spending public dollars on self-promotional junk, like 30,000 plastic go-cups, and efforts to force the governor to appoint his friends to positions to which they merely feel entitled.
“Louisiana remains one of only five states in the nation without its own minimum wage, relying on the federal minimum instead,” Gov. John Bel Edwards declares, as when addressing the Baton Rouge Press Club at the beginning of the year. “$7.25 per hour is not a meaningful wage in 2019.”
Those
five states – Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and
Louisiana – are, unsurprisingly, often listed at or near the bottom
on national quality of life rankings. Also unsurprisingly, all five
of those states have embraced state preemption, adopting laws
prohibiting local governments from acting on their own to establish
locally-appropriate minimum wage rules.
Setting
a state minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage (which was
last upped in 2009) was part of Edwards’ 2015 campaign platform;
part of his 2016, 2017 and 2018 legislative agendas; and setting a
“modest” raise is already promised to be part of Gov. John Bel
Edwards’ legislative goals for this year’s session. As of this
writing, that bill has yet to be officially filed, although Sen. Troy
Carter (D-New Orleans), author of prior year minimum wage bills, has
promised to keep bringing the measure back until it succeeds.
It
has to be done statewide,
if it’s to be done at all, because of a law Louisiana’s
legislature enacted in 1997.
It’s state preemption of local democracy at its most egregious.
Act
317 of the 1997 Louisiana Legislature says: “No
local governmental subdivision shall establish a minimum wage rate
which a private employer would be required to pay employees.”
(Actually, it says a lot more than that, but we’ll get to that in a
bit.)
Garey Forster
The
bill’s primary author was Rep. Garey Forster of New Orleans, owner
of a direct mail company and an NFIB (National Federation of
Independent Business) member. As a legislator, he was also an active
member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and this
was one of ALEC’s model pieces of legislation.
Immediately
following the 1997 session and passage of this bill, then-Gov. Mike
Foster appointed Forster as state Labor Secretary. (And here’s
today’s trivia: Forster’s assistant Labor Secretary was Raj
Jindal, Bobby Jindal’s mom. Bobby himself had already been
appointed to Foster’s cabinet, as state Secretary of Health).
Notable
among the co-authors of this bill sanctioning state preemption of
local minimum wage options were then-state representatives Steve
Scalise, David Vitter and Tony Perkins (current head of the Family
Research Council, not the actor who starred in “Psycho”). Among
those who voted for its passage are still-familiar names, including
John Alario, Jim Donelon, Danny Martiny, Mike Strain, Francis
Thompson, and Mike Walsworth.
Act
317 starts off nobly, stating, “The Legislature of Louisiana finds
that economic stability and growth are among the most important
factors affecting the general welfare of the people of this state and
are, therefore, among its own most important responsibilities.”
Seems
like a good reason to set and/or establish a minimum wage, doesn’t
it? But what follows is – shall we say? – problematic.
The
law states: “Local variation in legally required minimum wage rates
would threaten many businesses with a loss of employees to areas
which require a higher minimum wage rate and many other businesses
with the loss of patrons to areas which allow for a lower wage rate.
The net effect of this situation would be detrimental to the business
environment of the state and to the citizens, businesses, and
governments of the various local jurisdictions as well as the local
labor market. Therefore,
no local governmental subdivision shall establish a minimum wage rate
which a private employer would be required to pay employees.”
Let’s
pause and unpack this.
Basically,
it says that if Baton Rouge (for example) set a requirement to pay a
higher minimum wage, the folks slinging burgers at McDonald’s in
Shreveport would be moving to Baton Rouge to take advantage of the
better pay. That would threaten the burger business in Shreveport.
And folks from Baton Rouge would start driving to Shreveport for
their burgers because, since the Shreveport McDonald’s would then
be paying their employees less, they could sell their Happy Meals
cheaper. That loss of customers would then be bad for the fast food
operators in Baton Rouge. It says – essentially – that
competition for better pay and competition over lower prices for
goods and services is bad
for
business, for consumers and for government.
This
is part of thelaw
passed 22 years ago.
Let’s
compare this to what we’ve been hearing the past couple of years
from those that currently oppose increasing the minimum wage (or
those that oppose this Governor, because he’s a Democrat.)
“LABI, NFIB and other business groups say that government-mandated pay levels take discretion and decision-making away from business owners and may end up actually reducing the number of jobs,” Tim Morris of nola.com reported in November, following Gov. Edwards’ tweet noting that voters in Missouri and Arkansas had just endorsed raising their states’ minimum wage.
“Discretion” and “decision-making” – aren’t those what state preemption takes away from local governing bodies and the people, themselves?
“The minimum wage argument is a distraction from more meaningful solutions that will truly lift our people out of poverty. The answer is not to squeeze dollars out of employers for entry-level jobs, but to increase training and educational opportunities for Louisiana’s workforce,” LABI’s former director of small business, Renee Amar, has stated. She is now the vice president of public policy for the Pelican Institute.
If you’re working full-time for minimum wage, and still can’t afford to feed your family, is hunger a “distraction”?
Republican
lawmakers are partial to the business coalition arguments, and Sen.
Conrad Appel (R-Metairie), a member of the Senate Commerce committee,
has been rather outspoken on the subject. In 2017, when the minimum
wage bill came up, he argued, ““If
you raise the minimum wage, you might be jeopardizing those very jobs
that earn that $7.25.
Instead
of focusing on increasing the minimum wage and possibly driving jobs
away we should be focused on fixing our economy.”
In
recent Facebook posts, Appel has said, “We
all are very aware that we a state full of poor people, a state where
our incomes are low and our options for upward mobility equally low…
The negative economic policies…are to a great extent the
fundamental basis of out-migration of Louisianans.“
In
other words, people are leaving Louisiana because
incomes are low, and options to move up the economic ladder are
limited. And while our state’s economic policies (controlled by
Republicans for the past 11 years) have not worked, rather than raise
pay, we need to “fix the economy”. Details on how to actually do
so remain as vague as the statement itself.
This is part and parcel of industry spin and conservative rhetoric that insists minimum wage never was supposed to be a “living wage”. It was “always” designed to be just a starting amount for people entering into the workforce. And many who embrace the “entry-level-pay-only” propaganda also insist minimum wage should not be determined by the government, but instead determined by the marketplace.
How does that mesh with Louisiana’s 1997 state preemption law, trying to force uniformity in the marketplace, through prohibiting local governments from enacting differing pay standards, because marketplace competition is “detrimental to the business environment of the state”?
Lest
you think that wording in the 1997 is outdated, and minds have
changed in the past 22 years, consider this: In 2012, Louisiana
lawmakers added
to this law, with Act 667 (SB 521), authored by Sen. Ronnie Johns
(R-Lake Charles). Keeping the same anti-competition justification,
state lawmakers further prohibited local government – parishes or
municipalities – from establishing a mandatory, minimum number of
vacation or sick leave days for businesses to provide their
employees.
That,
too, would “threaten” businesses.
None
of this is how our nearest state neighbor to the north sees it. And
while we’re sure Sen. Appel wasn’t intimating that everyone
migrating out of Louisiana is moving to Arkansas, that state’s
lawmakers have let voters decide – twice in the past five years –
whether or not to increase minimum wage. Arkansas voters approved an
$8.50 minimum wage in 2014, and this past fall voted to up the state
minimum wage to $9.25 this year, $10.00 next year, and $11.00 in
2021.
To
be utterly realistic, since House Speaker Taylor Barras and his
ventriloquist – House Appropriations chairman Cameron Henry –
have refused to acknowledge increased state revenue projections, it’s
highly unlikely that they’d permit the Governor to achieve even a
“modest” win by allowing a minimum wage bill to advance, period.
Further, considering the stranglehold these extreme Republicans have
on the leadership of Louisiana’s House, it’s implausible to
expect this crop of elected lawmakers to permit voters to weigh in on
raising the minimum wage. For one thing, that would mean framing the
issue as a constitutional amendment, and that would require a
two-thirds majority consensus of each chamber. With the Legislature’s
current political climate, that’s a nigh impossibility.
Less
difficult to achieve would be the simple majority vote of each
chamber needed to repeal the state preemption of local option on
minimum wage – in its entirety.
In
this election year, Democrats could tell voters their vote to repeal
is part of bringing democracy back home, closer to the people.
Pro-business Republicans could say their vote to repeal is a
reflection of their deeply-held personal belief in letting the
marketplace determine its own levels. Or they could spin it as a move
away from the “Huey Long model of government” — where local
governing bodies have to repeatedly come, hat in hand, to ask the
state government for their share of both revenues and authority to
govern.
There’s
some disagreement within the business community over whether they
really want more local government autonomy, and less state
preemption. Next up, we’ll look into the consternation over
property tax policies – ITEP and now, the homestead exemption.
