Sunday, March 16, 2025

Opinion | Pay Attention, Louisiana. Something Big Is Happening in Texas.

This week in the New Orleans area, dozens of campaign volunteers huddled in three different nondescript office buildings to phonebank for their favorite candidate of the 2018 midterms.

There weren’t many 318, 337, 225, 985, or 504 area codes on the call lists handed out, and the volunteers can’t actually vote for the candidate they’re supporting because he isn’t on the ballot in Louisiana.

No, they called voters in Texas, in support of U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.

“Even Moses got excited when he saw the promised land,” Lyle Lovett croons about his home state. “That’s right. You’re not from Texas. But Texas wants you anyway.” 

****

There was a time when the word Louisiana covered nearly half of the country. The Louisiana Purchase included approximately 828,000 square miles. (Before the title changed hands, the country itself was only 867,000 square miles.) 

The land we bought from Napoleon was eventually carved into fifteen different states. Today, Louisiana is a paltry 43,000 square miles, while our next-door neighbors from the former Republic of Texas reign over 261,000 square miles.


Texas, decades ago, competed with Louisiana, even though it was- in terms of land mass- more than five times the size.

From 1900 through 1940, New Orleans was listed as either the 12th or 15th most populated city in America, but there wasn’t a single city in Texas that made it into the top 20. 

By 1960, however, Dallas was bigger than New Orleans, and Houston was the seventh most populated city in the country. Today, New Orleans would have to triple its population just to recapture 15th place, and six of the country’s twenty biggest cities are in the Lone Star State. Depending on who you ask, Houston is either the third or fourth most populated city in the nation.

For a moment, Shreveport bankers could have taken their chances on the wealth believed to be buried in their own backyard; instead, bankers from a mid-sized city on the Trinity River took those odds, and the fortunes they all made together ended up building modern-day Dallas. New Orleans could have been the national headquarters of the mega-trillion dollar energy industry, some have argued, but Houston asserted its intentions in the late 1950s and hasn’t been challenged ever since.  

Today, only two Fortune 500 companies, Entergy and CenturyLink, are based in Louisiana. Dallas, on the other hand, is home to 22 Fortune 500 companies, the fourth-highest concentration in the nation; Houston is close behind, with 21 Fortune 500 companies headquartered there. Both cities, it’s worth noting, are led by Democrats. 

Louisiana’s population has remained stagnant for more than a century, and its land mass is actually shrinking; every 48 minutes, the state loses a football field worth of land.

Populations of Louisiana and Texas, 1900-present. United States Census Bureau
 

****

As an adult, I’ve inhabited these two distinct universes- Texas and Louisiana- for roughly the same amount of time, about a decade per state.

I spent my college years in Houston, occasionally barreling down the highway for a weekend in Austin. Whenever I drove back to my family’s home in Central Louisiana, I got to know some of the far-flung towns and cities of East Texas- Beaumont, Jasper, Livingston, and Woodville. In law school, I lived in Dallas, and during my years there, I watched the city transform itself into an international, cosmopolitan hub.

But I grew up in Alexandria, a place that liked to call itself “the heart of Louisiana.” Alexandria afforded me the unique vantage, from an early age, to learn about the entire state. From Alexandria, you can be almost anywhere in Louisiana within two or three hours.

Before John Bel Edwards won his campaign for governor in 2015, Democratic candidates had lost in fourteen consecutive statewide elections. The Democratic drought in Texas, though, has lasted even longer, more than 24 years.

But Democrats in Texas understand there are reasons to be optimistic. The state is home to more African Americans than anywhere else in the country, and demographers project that Latinos will outnumber whites within the next four years.

Nonetheless, political strategists in Texas are universally stunned by Beto’s breakthrough, though most are still skeptical of his chances of actually winning. Polls show Cruz enjoys a lead of- on average- around 3.3 points, and right now, elections guru Nate Silver pegs O’Rourke’s chances of winning at 30.6%. That doesn’t mean he’s a skeptic though. 

“Beto O’Rourke really has a chance in Texas,” he reported.

Notably, Silver’s model includes what he calls a “fundamentals calculation,” which, surprisingly, advantages O’Rourke. 

“I was pretty sure that once we introduced non-polling factors into the model — what we call the ‘fundamentals’ — they’d shift our forecast toward Cruz, just as they did for Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate in Tennessee,” Silver writes. “That’s not what happened, however. Instead, although Cruz is narrowly ahead in the polls right now, the fundamentals slightly helped O’Rourke. Our model thinks that Texas ‘should’ be a competitive race and believes the close polling there is no fluke.”

Win or lose, Rep. O’Rourke has permanently changed how campaigns should be run in the age of social media, and in so doing, he has reintroduced the fundamentals of retail politics, a style of electioneering that Louisiana had once mastered more fully than anywhere else.

Something big is happening in Texas.

I was there during its last major statewide election, advocating for Wendy Davis’ gubernatorial campaign. There was an unspoken acknowledgment, even among members of her own campaign, that Wendy wouldn’t win; their hope, though, was that it wouldn’t be a landslide.

It was. Davis lost in a landslide.

This is different. I repeat: Something big is happening in Texas.  

About a year ago, I interviewed Jason Kander. He was fresh off his unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in Missouri, and despite his loss, his name was the first mentioned by President Barack Obama in response to the question, “Who is the future of the Democratic Party?” 

Kander may have lost, but he outperformed Hillary Clinton in his home state by nearly 16 points. And he ran as a pro-choice and much more progressive Democrat than the party’s standard-bearer.

“Honesty builds credibility,” Kander told me, even if that requires Democratic candidates in red states to tackle difficult questions about abortion or LGBT rights or gun control.

“Again,” he said several times, “be true to yourself.” 

I have no idea if Beto O’Rourke ever heard Kander’s message, but their playbooks are awfully similar. 

The skyline of Houston, Texas. 2018. 

The skyline of Dallas, Texas. 2018.

“In Louisiana, politics is theater,” Andrew Kolker observed in 1992, a year after Edwin Edwards defeated former klansman David Duke in the most consequential gubernatorial election in modern American history. 

“Louisiana, if you look at it traditionally, has also been more progressive than all the other states surrounding it,” Louis Alvarez explained. Alvarez and Kolker were the filmmakers of the must-see PBS documentary “Louisiana Boys: Raised on Politics.” 

A segment from the 1992 documentary “Louisiana Boys.”

26 years later, their film is still relevant, and their observations remain true, which is one of the reasons Democrats should pay attention to the enthusiasm a candidate for a statewide race in Texas has generated right here in Louisiana.  

Two years after the release of “Louisiana Boys,” Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time in nearly a half of a century, and its leaders scrambled for a new strategy. 

A group of predominately Southern Democratic congressmen conducted brainstorming sessions in the offices of Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana’s Third District and Rep. Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana’s Seventh District, and together, they crafted the framework for a new caucus.

Democrats, they believed, had been defeated by running too far to the left, and the national party was out-of-touch with the political realities of the Deep South. To remain competitive, they concluded Southern Democrats would need to emphasize their conservative bona fides. 

On the walls of their offices, both Tauzin and Hayes showcased paintings by the Louisiana artist George Rodrigue, who is best known for his iconic Blue Dog.


Their new caucus would be called the Blue Dogs, a nod to both Rodrigue’s famous dog- whose real name was Tiffany- and to the Yellow Dog Democrats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.   

There is another version of the Blue Dog creation story. Some attribute the term to former Texas congressman Pete Geren, who had once complained that conservative Democrats were being “choked blue” by their more liberal colleagues. 

Perhaps it’s not too surprising that Texas and Louisiana compete for credit for creating the Blue Dogs. In both states, Blue Dog Democrats dominated intra-party politics for nearly two decades, and during those two decades, both states became reliably red.

A year after co-founding the Blue Dogs, Billy Tauzin and Jimmy Hayes defected to the Republican Party. Pete Geren would go onto serve in the administration of George W. Bush. 

The Democratic Party never abandoned these Southern elected officials, as they liked to claim. They abandoned the Democratic Party, and in doing so, they damaged the prospects of other, actual Democrats in their home states. To win as a Democrat in the American South, you’d need to be obsequiously pro-business, pro-gun, and pro-life. That was the only acceptable formula. 

The irony, of course, is that this occurred during the administration of Bill Clinton, a former governor of a small Southern state who won Louisiana in his 1992 presidential campaign and then again in 1996.  

Today, Blue Dogs are an endangered species, nearing extinction.

Conservatives, not surprisingly, began wondering why they should vote for a conservative Democrat instead of the real deal. To echo Jason Kander, Blue Dogs weren’t being true to themselves or to their political party. Voters noticed, and the Democratic Party in both Texas and Louisiana has struggled for relevance ever since.

Sept. 8, 2018: Beto O’Rourke, Texas Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate at a rally in Houston. 

Beto has already upended the conventional wisdom about what Democrats need to do in order to compete in a ruby-red state in the South, but his astonishing breakthrough isn’t exclusively attributable to his personal charisma. Beto has thrown out the Blue Dog blueprint, and while he has consistently reached out to Republicans and independents, he is also running as an unabashed liberal.

During his first debate with incumbent Ted Cruz, O’Rourke spoke passionately about racial inequities in the justice system and his support of Roe v. Wade. He argued in favor of granting citizenship to the nation’s 12 million Dreamers and in support of Medicare for All; he repudiated President Trump’s proposal for a border wall and spoke about the importance of investigating allegations the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in order to interfere with the integrity of the 2016 election. 

Yes, he also declared his full support of the Second Amendment, but he emphasized the need for enhanced background checks and restrictions on owning “weapons made for the battlefield.” “Thoughts and prayers, Sen. Cruz, just aren’t going to cut it anymore,” he said. 

You’re not supposed to be able to say things like that in a state like Texas, yet Beto is and his message is resonating.   

There is another important reason for O’Rourke’s breakthrough, a point he made at least five times during his debate with Ted Cruz: During the past eighteen months, O’Rourke has visited all 254 counties in Texas. Cruz attempted to dismiss the significance of his opponent’s shoe leather campaign, suggesting that it amounts to nothing more than a series of photo ops for the press, but anyone who follows O’Rourke on social media knows that the candidate drives himself across the state.

The press may be paying attention now, but for the first year, it was just Beto and a couple of young campaign staffers on the road to the state’s far-flung corners and small towns that had long been taken for granted by their junior United States Senator. Ted Cruz may have visited all 99 counties in Iowa when he ran for president two years ago, but he still hasn’t visited every county in his own state. 

People have a more difficult time caricaturizing a politician they’ve met in person or a candidate who has gone out of their way to visit their hometowns. When Ted Cruz suggested that O’Rourke was nothing more than a radical socialist, out of touch with the people of Texas, there were tens of thousands of rural, predominately conservative voters who knew better.

It remains to be seen whether anyone else will be as successful at using Facebook Live to document their campaign in real-time, though it’s a certainty others will try to replicate Beto’s social media strategy. More than 150,000 people watched O’Rourke hit up a Whataburger drive-through on the night of his first debate in Dallas; early the next morning, tens of thousands tuned in to watch him and the Castro twins, Julian and Joaquin, drive to a campaign rally in Del Rio, a border town of 40,000 people located a couple of hours away from San Antonio. The next day, as he drove to an event in Lubbock, even Mark Zuckerberg tuned in. No politician had ever before used his technology as effectively as a Democratic congressman from El Paso, Texas. 

If politics is theater, then politicians need to know where the audience is. Today and for the foreseeable future, it’s largely online. But to successfully reach people online, candidates can’t present themselves as an actor reading from a script. You need to be “true to yourself.”

The country became familiar with Beto O’Rourke after a video of him speaking about NFL players protesting racial inequities in the justice system went viral, but for those who have paid closer attention to his campaign, his Facebook Live videos from the road are much more significant. As I’ve said before, O’Rourke is currently filming the best political documentary of my lifetime, and he’s broadcasting it in real-time, from his phone. 

One of several bridges connecting Texas and Louisiana outside of Lake Charles.

So, what does this mean for Texas’ neighbors in Louisiana? And what can Louisiana Democrats learn from Beto’s campaign? 

First, Texas may be richer and bigger than Louisiana, but our political landscape is very similar. Texas has Ken Paxton, and Louisiana has Jeff Landry. Louisiana has John N. Kennedy and Clay Higgins, and Texas has Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick. In both states, the right-wing has become dramatically more partisan, while those on the establishment left have worked harder to attract Republicans than in cultivating their own base.

O’Rourke’s campaign should force Southern Democrats to rethink their assumptions and their messaging. In Louisiana, that means embracing our progressive traditions and reaching out to people on all corners of the state, not just the reliably liberal New Orleans. It means learning the state in the same way many of us from Central Louisiana know it and the way Beto now knows Texas.

When hundreds of people showed up in August to hear O’Rourke at a town hall in Navasota, Texas—  a town of only 7,000 in between Houston and Austin— a friend from my hometown said he wasn’t surprised. “People like to forget that small towns in the South are still home to gay people and minorities, that small towns struggle with poverty much more than those in big cities,” he said. “These people have been ignored by most Democratic campaigns, but if Democrats pay more attention to rural voters, they will show up. And Democrats can change the narrative.”

Voter turn-out in Louisiana, 1980-2016. Source: Mike Henderson. 

The Yellow Dog is extinct. The Blue Dog is an endangered species.

Yet Democratic voters never really went away; they were just taken for granted while their party’s candidates worried more about appealing to Republicans. Eventually, they stopped showing up. Louisiana now ranks as one of the worst states in the nation for voter turn-out. Texas is the worst. 

As it turns out, when candidates decide to campaign in places long ignored, the people who live in those places decide to show up again. Just ask Beto O’Rourke.   


A wild and wooly shootout in Atlanta ends with a Saints overtime win

This week is a pretty easy one to write about. Records both good and bad (mostly good) were set, GIF-worthy highlights were plentiful, and in the happiest result of all, New Orleans survived early struggles on both sides of the ball to come roaring back to win a shootout, 43-37 in overtime against the Falcons in Atlanta. I’d break this game into “The good, the bad, and the ugly,” except there wasn’t too much bad– unless, like kids these days, you use “bad” to mean “good”, and “shake one’s booty” to mean “wiggle one’s butt.” In that case, Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara were both very, very bad. Semantics and Simpsons references aside, let’s take a look at the key points from the game, for good and for ill. Pass coverage is still a problem, and the Saints did not fix the secondary by going back to what didn’t work. One of the key changes the Saints made to their pass defense after last year’s 0-2 start was to replace P.J. Williams in the starting lineup with Ken Crawley– which was more of a happy accident after Marshon Lattimore and Williams each missed a game and Crawley filled in admirably. That proved the right move, but after Crawley got torched a fair amount the last couple of weeks (if you’re a regular reader, you’ve already seen the GIFs), the Saints decided to bench him… and their only real other option was Williams. After Williams was roasted repeatedly by rookie receiver Calvin Ridley– who didn’t have a single catch in week 1, for comparison– the coaches put Crawley back into the starting lineup. While Williams was in the lineup, Ridley caught 5 passes for 129 yards and two touchdowns. After Crawley came back in, starting with the Falcons’ final drive of the first half, Ridley caught two passes for 17 yards, and drew one long pass-interference penalty on Crawley. Crawley still had his struggles, but even those struggles were preferable to Williams’ performance, which made him the featured target of the defense every snap he was in the game.
View post on imgur.com
(Also, maybe Dennis Allen should stop calling coverages that leave Williams or Crawley in press man with no help over the top. You can do that with Marshon Lattimore. Nobody else on the team is good enough to do that.) The real problem with the secondary is now twofold: One is that, even with Crawley back in the lineup, the second outside cornerback spot is still shaky. The other is that slot cornerback Patrick Robinson left the game with an ankle injury, and may not be available for a while. The Saints don’t have the depth in the secondary to necessarily handle this, and it’s arguably in part due to mismanagement of the roster there. We’ve covered how they botched the draft picks and development of Natrell Jamerson and Kamrin Moore, but as of today, the Saints have five defensive backs they’ve released since training camp who’ve been signed or claimed by other teams:
  • De’Vante Harris, released fairly early on, eventually signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers;
  • The Other Marcus Williams, who played fairly well in the preseason after being a late addition, also signed by the Bucs;
  • Jamerson, the team’s fifth-round pick, cut at the 53-man deadline and claimed by the Houston Texans;
  • Moore, the team’s sixth-round pick, also cut at the 53-man deadline and claimed by the New York Giants;
  • And Arthur Maulet, waived just before the game against the Falcons, was claimed by the Colts yesterday.
(H/t to John Sigler for noticing this and compiling the list.) I said in my Saints 53-man roster prediction that I didn’t think there would be room for P.J. Williams on the roster with all the new defensive backs brought in. The team kept Williams over most of those players… and that may have been a mistake as well. Those players were good enough to catch on elsewhere, and the team is perilously short on options now for filling out the cornerback rotation. As of now, only four healthy players– Lattimore, Crawley, Williams, and Justin Hardee– line up at cornerback for the Saints, and only one of those players has played the position at the level the team needs (and even he’s given up a couple of big plays this year). The team is bringing in veteran journeyman and former stopgap option Sterling Moore for a workout, which suggests that they think Robinson might be out long enough to sign someone else and that the options on roster to replace him are insufficient. Not a good sign when you add three cornerbacks in the draft or free agency and still need to bring in someone during the season. Maybe one of those five players (well, probably not De’Vante Harris, who got plenty of regular-season chances) could have helped. In better news: Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara are still playing out of this world. Thomas added ten more catches on ten targets, giving him 38 catches on the season, a record through three games, and a preposterous 95.0% catch rate; his 398 receiving yards lead the league. Meanwhile, Kamara racked up an absurd 20 targets on Sunday, turning 15 of them into catches. He leads the league in yards from scrimmage. Marcus Davenport gets his first sack.
View post on imgur.com
A less heralded first, though also auspicious: Cameron Meredith makes his first reception of the season, and it’s a touchdown. Drew Brees, the new all-time record holder for career pass completions. Early in the second quarter, Drew Brees tied Brett Favre’s career record of 6,300 completions, on a 3rd-and-14 pass for 10 yards to set up a Wil Lutz field goal (which fortuitously went in after striking the left upright). He then broke the record with a 17-yard completion on the first play of the team’s next drive. Both completions were, of course, to Michael Thomas. Brees now sits at 6,326 completions, and it doesn’t look like anyone has a realistic shot of catching him, certainly not while he’s still adding to that total. In addition, Drew Brees:
  • has now lead the league in passing yards seven times,
  • has had five of the nine 5,000-yard passing seasons in NFL history (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Dan Marino, and Matthew Stafford have one each),
  • has broken the single-season record for completion percentage three times (including last season’s 72.0%),
  • currently holds the career record for completion percentage (among qualifying QBs),
  • currently sits in third place for career passing yards, but just 315 behind Brett Favre and 417 behind Peyton Manning, meaning he will almost certainly be the career leader before the Saints hit their week 6 bye,
  • currently is third all-time in passing touchdowns, with Favre just 12 ahead of him, and Manning’s record in sight to be broken next year,
  • has completed 80.6% of his passes this season, which would smash his old record,
  • has also thrown for eight touchdowns with no interceptions this sason,
  • and was first in the league this season in passing yards going into Monday night’s game. (Fine, fine, he’s third now.)
Let’s just take a moment to review those numbers and appreciate the greatness of Drew Brees. Then, let’s take a moment to appreciate that a QB approaching forty and who was never known as a runner still has these moves.
View post on imgur.com
View post on imgur.com
View post on imgur.com
Next week: Saints host the Giants, coming off their first win of the season thanks to finally facing an even worse team. This should be a fairly straightforward win for the Saints, if they aren’t coasting on the high of Sunday’s win, and if they can reasonably keep Odell Beckham in check without letting Sterling Shepard have a Calvin Ridley game or letting Saquon Barkley make the linebackers look foolish. This might also be the game where the Saints’ defensive line gets a real chance to shine– Cameron Jordan is tied for the NFL lead in sacks, but the whole crew can get a chance against Eli Manning and his front five, who currently lead the NFL in sack yardage lost and are third in total sacks allowed, with 12 through three games.

Cheerleading, Chiding and Chicanery

Cheerleading is changing, and so are the people who do it.

It’s still early in the 2018 football season, but there’s already been more than a bit of controversy over the New Orleans Saints’ cheerleader, Jesse Hernandez. As one of only three male cheerleaders in the National Football League, he’s been the target of commentary on his performance – nay, his very existence on the pep squad — ranging from “I do not feel ‘threatened’. I feel repulsed & disgusted,” to “It’s a sign of moral decay,” to “What male football fan wants some queer prancing around with the women?”

Jesse Hernandez, Saintsation. Source: YouTube, 2018 

Beyond the inherent sexism and homophobia in the assumption that cheerleaders must be women to entertain the male fans, and the ignorance of history (cheerleaders were almost exclusively male until the 1940s, when women – as they did with many traditionally male tasks – stepped up to fill positions left vacant while the guys were away fighting World War II), Jesse Hernandez IS doing his job, consistently and well.

On the other hand, another guy charged with being a cheerleader for Louisiana is doing a less-than-stellar job.

“State GDP growth is ranked at the bottom of the nation.”

“Louisiana’s legal climate is ranked dead-last in the nation.”

“Louisiana needs Medicaid reform. Louisiana needs pension reform. Louisiana needs continued education reform. Louisiana needs legal reform. Louisiana needs economic reform. Louisiana needs infrastructure reform. Louisiana needs government reform.”

These are all excerpts from recent columns penned by Louisiana Association of Business and Industry president Stephen Waguespack. Titled the “President’s View,” the opinion pieces are sent out via email multiple times each month and are prominently featured on the organization’s website.

LABI publicizes itself as “Louisiana’s official state chapter for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

The official U.S. Chamber website defines a “chamber of commerce” as “an organization of businesses working together to improve the economic, civic, and cultural well-being of the area. The main function of a Chamber of Commerce is to promote interest in local business possibilities, and promote industrial and business development.”

Yet if you were looking at opening up or moving a business to Louisiana and were reading Waguespack’s columns, wouldn’t you reconsider?

His messages weren’t always so negative.

Stephen Michael Waguespack, or “Wags” as he’s known by friends, associates, and the capitol press corps, is still only 44. But he’s already worked in the public sphere, in some capacity, for more than two decades. It’s in his DNA. 

His grandfather, Hickley Waguespack, Sr., was a long-time powerful sheriff of Ascension Parish, serving for nearly 24 years. Last year, when the APSO opened Waguespack Park in Donaldsonville, Chief Deputy Bobby Webre praised the late sheriff. “A great man and a great sheriff through the Civil Rights Movement,” Webre said. “He was ahead of his time.”  

Sheriff Hickley Waguespack, Sr. 

His grandson was always a Louisianian, though he spent a portion of early years in Missouri, where his father worked as the Chief Operating Officer of Rehab Care Group in St. Louis. After Stephen graduated from LSU in 1997, with a degree in Mass Communications, he took a job as a legislative aide to U.S. Rep. Joe Barton from Texas’ Sixth District in the Dallas metroplex area. Two years later, Barton promoted him to legislative director, and Wags spent another couple of years on Capitol Hill before heading to law school at Catholic University. 

After 33 years in office, Barton, who became a leading voice in the Tea Party movement, announced earlier this year he would not seek reelection, after a collection of embarrassing lewd photos and videos of the congressman emerged online. 

While in law school, Wags moonlighted as a lobbyist for clients of the D.C.-based Alpine Group, a job he’d keep until 2007 when another position with a promising young conservative politician from Louisiana became available: Policy Director for Bobby Jindal’s gubernatorial campaign.

Once Jindal was elected, Waguespack served as his Deputy Chief of Staff for nearly two years. Then, the 35-year-old was named Jindal’s Executive Counsel, a position he would keep for another two years before being promoted again, as the Governor’s Chief of Staff. 

All told, he spent nearly five years at Gov. Jindal’s side until yet another opportunity presented itself. 

There was a lot of tongue-wagging when Wags was appointed to head up the business group in September 2013, upon the retirement of LABI’s prior president Dan Juneau. Much of that controversy stemmed from his work in the Jindal administration; among many of LABI’s members, there were worries that the trade organization could not possibly be expected to be independent of the governor and that Waguespack’s selection could undermine LABI’s credibility. 

He quickly worked to quell those concerns with his genuine “nice-guy” personality, proactively reaching out to meet with skeptical LABI members, and by steadily shaking the pom-poms by lauding promised economic development projects around Louisiana and the state’s anticipated economic growth.

LABI President Stephen Waguespack, known as “Wags” by friends, associates, and the capitol press corps. Credit: Marie Constantin.

“In Louisiana, we are on the verge of a manufacturing renaissance that has the potential to revamp our economy in a way that will benefit our people for generations,” Waguespack wrote in 2014. “Over $60 billion in new manufacturing projects have been announced in our state and more are expected to come on line in the years ahead. The Louisiana manufacturing sector contributes an estimated $55.1 billion to the economy and accounts for 7.4 percent of our workforce.“

“A sense of urgency is needed to fill the 69,000 STEM-related jobs Louisiana will gain between now and 2018,” Waguespack said in another 2014 column.

In January 2015, marking LABI’s 40th anniversary, Wags wrote, “We are on the right track. We have seen over $100 billion in announced projects throughout the state and Louisiana is soon expected to surpass two million non-farm jobs for the first time in history. Our economy is also diversifying before our very eyes, with growing technology, trade, health care and manufacturing sectors joining our more traditional economic drivers. Our employment trends continue to outperform the nation and our employers are growing their businesses at a promising rate.”

Go team!

Four months later, LABI’s president started changing his tune. As the cumulative result of the Jindal administration’s “if you offer them state dollars, they will come” economic development policies, the unraveling of the Stelly Plan, and smoke-and-mirrors budgeting practices, the state was saddled with a projected $1.6 billion budget deficit; the legislature voted to scale back many business tax credits, rebates, and giveaways.

And despite his prior involvement in developing and implementing what we now know were disastrous fiscal policies, Waguespack was peeved about the results.

“On May 7, the Louisiana House of Representatives voted repeatedly to raise taxes on employers and individuals by $664 million in 11 different bills,” he wrote. “Likely the largest single-day tax increase effort in the history of the Louisiana Legislature, this collection of tax hikes was broad in its scope and impact on the private sector. In fact, the average amount of taxes raised per minute of floor debate was $2.8 million.”

Still, his tone continued to be generally positive, with a June 2015 column thanking the association’s members “for what you do to make this state great.” And in the midst of the debates during Louisiana’s statewide election season that fall, Waguespack reminded all the players in the political game, “Have we forgotten the ultimate goal we are trying to achieve? Aren’t we striving to build the Louisiana we have always wanted, where an innovative and growing economy provides a good quality of life and a robust variety of employment opportunities for our people?”

And he urged people to exercise their right to vote. They did, sending the governor’s race to a runoff between Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter and Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards.

Edwards, as chair of the Legislative Democratic Caucus, had been a consistent and vocal critic of Bobby Jindal’s policies, many of which had been crafted by Waguespack. And Edwards, as a member of the House Education Committee, had been outspoken in his opposition to the Jindal and LABI-backed “education reforms” enacted in 2012.

During the leadup to the runoff, when the campaign’s epic “Prostitutes Over Patriots” ad hit the airwaves, Waguespack went after Edwards.

Edwards’ award-winning ad, which many consider to be a turning point in the 2015 election, is now known as “Prostitutes Over Patriots.” It’s actually titled “The Choice.”
  

Calling the Democrat “the Pied Piper,” Wags’ column was very well-written, appealing to the business community’s self identification of “conservative” as good, versus their antipathy for anything branded “liberal.”

LABI’s president wrote, “Three Republicans have taken turns attacking one another in the hopes of convincing an overwhelmingly conservative state like Louisiana that they were the best man for the job. All the while, the lone Democrat in the race watched his competitors eat one another alive as his campaign consultants portrayed their candidate as a moderate. His campaign was never challenged and played uninterrupted the music that plays to his most admirable attributes: his distinguished military education and his close-knit family. His campaign’s song does not reflect the reality of his political agenda nor the policies his potential administration will pursue…. Many of the hard fought reforms won over the last 20 years, through both Democrat and Republican administrations, will likely either whither (sic) on the vine or be quickly torn out by the roots…. His campaign’s music masks the truth about the policies and priorities he would pursue as governor.”

And Waguespack warned his organization’s members, “If the Pied Piper’s song prevails, don’t be surprised when conservatives are left standing without a chair.”

Edwards, of course, won that election. And, to play further on that column’s musical theme, it would seem the LABI president has been singing the blues ever since.

“Fiscal conservatism in Louisiana is on the ropes.”

“And the hits just keep on coming.”

“Louisiana has entered an era where our leaders regularly tell us the only real way to make progress is to spend more and place the blame and burdens on someone else.”

Gone from Waguespack’s columns are any attempts to cheerlead for Louisiana, as a place to bring or grow your business. Gone are any mentions of new economic development projects promising more jobs. Instead, his message has been consistently critical of the state, its leadership, legislature, and policies.

There have been important economic development “wins” during the past three years. Waguespack, who once cheered on practically every new business created during Jindal’s final term in office, has largely ignored those that have occurred since.

LABI professes to champion economic growth and the desire to attract more business opportunities here in Louisiana, but in recent years, they seem far more interested in pursuing another agenda. 

It’s politics over propagating entrepreneurship.

I offered him the opportunity to address this critique. Here is his statement:

Since its founding in 1973, LABI has proudly been the guardian of free enterprise in Louisiana. To capably do so, we have had to take tough stands on many different policies throughout the years. We develop, promote and support these policy positions based upon the feedback of our diverse statewide membership and we have never been beholden to any one politician or political party. We have never gone out of our way to oppose the proposals from any particular politician, nor do we shy away from articulating an alternative view when necessary. Louisiana is a great state filled with tremendous potential for growth. Our members are proud to call it home and proud to advocate strongly throughout the years for the reform policies that can elevate it to even greater heights. We stand ready to work with anyone and everyone to make that happen.

Stephen Waguespack

President and CEO

Louisiana Association of Business and Industry

Note that he uses the editorial “we” throughout, yet has a hint of the royal “we” as well. “We” can be inclusive, but among politicians, it often transitions to a language device that indicates their presumption of divine right to rule. It’s a subtle difference, but one that bears watching – especially since Waguespack’s name has been steadily mentioned among the possible challengers in next year’s governor’s race.

And certainly one of the recent “President’s View” columns, proposing a “Contract With Louisiana,” could be viewed as Waguespack’s first overt step in that direction.

Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 2008. Ginrgrich had called Jindal a “rising star.” The two men ran against one another for president in 2016. 

His July 27, 2018 opinion piece highly praises the 1994 Republican document known as the “Contract With America.” The book-length statement, the brainchild of Newt Gingrich, is generally conceded to be a masterpiece of political propaganda which led to Republican control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

It’s also generally acknowledged that the policies enumerated in the “Contract With America” (which former Pres. Bill Clinton frequently called the “Contract ON America”) exacerbated classism in the United States, pitting the country’s middle class against those earning minimum wage and those in need of public assistance. That left the nation’s upper income echelon – including corporations – free to operate and speculate with impunity. By promoting the desire to qualify as the favored “middle class” with “home ownership” and multiple credit cards touted as the ticket to that status, the provisions of the mid-90s “Contract” led inexorably to the 2008 mortgage and banking crises, stock market crash, and “Great Recession”.

Waguespack’s proposed “Contract With Louisiana” conveniently ignores all that, while applying intentional misdirection to many of the problems that plague our state.

For example, he says, “Louisiana needs Medicaid reform,” having noted elsewhere that “more than 40 percent of Louisianans utilize Medicaid for health care.” Of course he doesn’t mention that his organization and its affiliates have consistently lobbied against any legislative action requiring employers to provide health care coverage for their workers, while they’ve argued strenuously against establishing a state minimum wage that could enable people to purchase health insurance on their own.

He calls for “pension reform,” saying, “These costs are crippling our school and university budgets, and these plans are not meeting the needs of workers.” This ignores the fact that the nation’s largest population group by age, the Baby Boomer generation, is now retiring and collecting their benefits. That drawdown of the pension systems’ assets has been expected for decades. The expectation was that state pay would increase, and the new hires to replace retirees would pay sufficient dollars into the systems to keep the funding flowing. Pension plans did not anticipate the devaluation of their assets due to the 2008 global financial crisis. Nor did they anticipate the Jindal administration’s push toward privatization and elimination of state jobs, which further depleted the pool of funding the pension systems have available.

And who was one of the architects of those Jindal-era policies?

In fact, Waguespack’s “Contract” proposal calls for more shedding of state government jobs, and expanding efforts toward privatization, saying, “The size of state government must shrink” and “This plan must include public/private partnerships.”

Who profits from these proposed changes? Why, the unelected “they” – the corporations. It’s decidedly not “We, the people.”

Which team do you cheer for?

Praetorian Law

Pictured above: The “Great White Wall” at the headquarters of the Red River Waterway Commission in Natchitoches, Louisiana (circa 2012). 

Praetorian Law:

Roman law: a system of equity developed by the praetors after their acquisition about 149 b.c. of criminal jurisdiction providing for their right to allow an action not provided for by law, their right to disallow an action that would strictly lie by the jus civile, and their right to allow an equitable defense where no defense was provided by law

Until recently, when you walked into the offices of the Red River Waterway Commission (RRWC) in Natchitoches, the first thing you encountered was their Great White Wall, framed portraits of the body’s exclusively white members.

During the past two months, Republican Party political operatives and conservative pundits have attempted to manufacture a scandal over the appointment of the RRWC’s newest commissioner, Col. Ret. Michael Deville, an African-American veteran from Pineville in Rapides Parish, instead of Carolyn Prator, the wife of Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator.

It’s become a near-obssession among the governor’s opponents, and it is, arguably, the pettiest and most ridiculous state political news story of the year, which is really saying something.

On Wednesday, state Attorney General Jeff Landry staged a press conference in Caddo to announce an advisory opinion written by one of his deputies, Carey Jones. The opinion, which argues the appointment failed to properly follow the statutory scheme, fails to consider or acknowledge a few key facts, rendering it effectively useless.  

For more than a week, The Bayou Brief spoke on background with numerous officials from both Caddo and Rapides Parishes, consulted with legal experts familiar with the Red River Waterway Commission, and obtained numerous public records related to the dispute. 

Newly-appointed Commissioner Michael Deville

Rather than proving any sort of illegality or conspiracy, the facts demonstrate a principled decision to ensure more equitable representation on the commission. This isn’t an opinion only held by members of the Edwards administration or officials and civic leaders from my hometown of Alexandria. Several officials and civic leaders in Caddo Parish are in agreement: Those who are demanding Ms. Prator’s appointment are knowingly operating in bad faith, they say. 

The criticism is being leveled by the usual suspects: Far-right conservatives like Jeff Landry and attention-seekers like Sen. John N. Kennedy, a couple of fringe bloggers and hyper-partisan columnists, and the bloviators on AM radio. Notably, though, the list also includes one Democrat, state Sen. Greg Tarver of Shreveport.

To critics of Edwards, state Sen. Tarver’s decision to publicly insert himself into the story lends credibility to the theory that something improper occurred. But Tarver has his own Democratic critics, and privately, they contend he is often more politically aligned with the Republican Sheriff of Caddo Parish, Steve Prator, than he is with most of the delegation.

“(Former state Sen.) Lydia (Jackson) outpolled Greg (Tarver) in urban precincts,” a Shreveport-area political operative explained to me, on the condition of anonymity. “Prator’s endorsement and robocalls to rural portions of the district made up the deficit and gave Tarver a close victory.”

So, it’s not surprising he would lobby for his friend’s wife. “He owes his return to the state Senate to Prator,” the operative said.

During last year’s regular session, state Sen. Tarver was the only African-American in the entire legislature to oppose Senate Bill 139, the most comprehensive and important piece of criminal justice reform legislation of the year. Sheriff Prator was also opposed. The bill passed anyway and is now law. He may also still be upset that he wasn’t able to steer a hospital management deal earlier this year (set to be officially announced on Monday), they say, and the reasons may be more personal than political.

Still, according to multiple people closely involved in the decision-making process, state Sen. Tarver’s politics didn’t factor into the appointment at all, and neither, for that matter, did Sheriff Prator’s.

Nearly a year ago, Gov. Edwards had pledged to members of the Central Louisiana legislative delegation that he would ensure Rapides Parish- not Caddo- received the next at-large appointment. Tarver claimed he had been promised the appointment for Prator, but according to a source familiar with the phone conversation between the state senator and the governor, Tarver is simply not telling the truth.

Tarver’s subsequent insistence that he had secured a commitment from Gov. Edwards to appoint Sheriff Prator’s wife was met with disappointment, though, not hostility or the desire for retribution.



Feb. 15, 2018: The bridge across the Red River at the Boardwalk Mall in Bossier City.

What is the Red River Waterway Commission, and why does any of this matter?

The Red River Waterway District (RRWD) includes the river’s seven parishes in North and Central Louisiana: Avoyelles, Rapides, Natchitoches, Red River, Grant, Bossier, and Caddo. The enabling statute explains its purpose:

The district is created for the object and purpose of establishing, operating and maintaining, individually or in cooperation with the federal government, the state and its various agencies, subdivisions and public bodies, a navigable waterway system to be known as the Red River Waterway, hereinafter simply called the “waterway,” extending from the vicinity of the confluence of Red River with Old River and the Atchafalaya River northwestward in the Red River Valley to the state boundary.  To that end and for the purpose of this Chapter, the district shall be governed by a body or commission which shall be known as the Red River Waterway Commission, hereinafter simply called the “commission.”

It may appear on paper to be a relatively perfunctory, dull, bureaucratic operation, but over the past fifty years, the Red River Waterway Commission has been responsible for at least two billion dollars. Commissioners can become kingmakers for large-scale projects; their decisions can alter the landscape of a community for generations.  

“The RRWD is responsible for active participation in economic and recreational development for areas along the Red River,” the commission explains on its website. “It is accomplished through assistance to the ports in developing opportunities for growth and supporting facilities; working with local governmental entities to develop venues and projects along the Red River and providing and maintaining navigable channels for both commercial and recreational purposes.”

That’s not insignificant.

But in recent years, leaders in the seven-parish region have been frustrated with the commission’s calcification and its failure to coordinate with local and parish governments.

The district is funded through a dedicated millage, but some contend the commission frequently misunderstood its mission. In the past, they say, the RRWC has been too reluctant to spend money on necessary or value-added development projects. It’s sometimes been a terrible partner, they claim, out-of-touch with the communities it serves.

It was a good ol’ boys club, a taxpayer-subsidized fiefdom that had been controlled almost exclusively by white conservative men, critics contend.

The recent media coverage has entirely focused on the plight of pitiable Caddo Parish conservatives, who have recently enjoyed disproportionate influence over the RRWC and who had hoped to make that control permanent by confiscating a seat on the commission from Rapides Parish.

While the loss of an appointment has enraged a handful of Shreveport conservatives, in Central Louisiana, the story is about how brazenly a small group of Caddo Parish political insiders have attempted to play the victim. More absurdly, they argue, these insiders seem to be suggesting that the wife of a sheriff is somehow entitled to a bonus seat at the table, even if it means removing an African-American appointee from Rapides Parish.

Major assets in the Red River Waterway District

Since the legislature established the commission in 1965 as a political subdivision of the state, according to public records, approximately ten African-Americans have ever been appointed to its rotating eleven-member board (plus a twelfth ex-officio member). Three of those members joined during the past six years.

The disparity was so brazen that, in 2017, state Rep. Cedric Glover (D- Shreveport) filed House Bill 602, which was specifically designed to ensure that “gubernatorial appointments are reflective of the entirety of the demographic makeup of the seven parishes that comprise the district.” Rep. Glover, who previously served as the first-ever African American mayor of Shreveport for two terms, ultimately decided to postpone the bill.

Steve and Carolyn Prator. Credit: Paul L. Schuetze, The Shreveport Times
 

His colleagues understood the message, though. In a state in which African-Americans comprise a third of its population, it was absolutely unacceptable that a powerful commission was so dramatically unbalanced. The two members who currently now represent Caddo Parish are both African-American, and without question, part of the story here is the way in white conservatives have played to racial resentments.

“(T)he appointment of Carolyn Prator to the waterway commission would have been consistent with the governor’s policy of inclusion. The commission has always been a ‘boy’s club,’ and Prator certainly would have changed that reality,” writes John Settle, a Shreveport attorney who has been suspended three times from practicing law and who now moonlights as a columnist for The Shreveport Times. “Additionally, she would be a white Caddo member. Burrell and Lattier are black.”

Settle isn’t exactly subtle. 

There was another issue: The commission had also become geographically unbalanced, albeit briefly. Shreveport in Caddo Parish and Alexandria in Rapides Parish are the only two “metropolitan areas” in the district, and throughout the past fourteen years, both had been represented by their own at-large member as well as their own district member. As a result of the death of a commissioner earlier this year, for a period of only four months, Shreveport had three seats, not two. (Importantly, Bossier Parish also has its own appointee, which means the region, which generates approximately 63% of the RRWD’s revenue, still maintains an advantage in representation).

The banner image of the Red River Waterway Commission’s website.

Jeff Landry claims the governor made an illegal appointment. Did he?

No. 

Ironically, in attempting to prove that the appointment was illegal, the state attorney general’s advisory opinion cites, as persuasive authority, the 1992 case Murrill v. Edwards, which forcefully makes the complete opposite ruling.

That case, involving a different Murrill than the current “state Solicitor General” serving in Landry’s office and a different Gov. Edwards, considered a very similar set of circumstances. Importantly, it also required the court to interpret a statute that includes the same language as the enabling statute for the Red River Waterway Commission.

“Nothing in statute authorizes the Governor to ignore the nominations of the local entities and proceed in disregard of the nominating requirement,” Landry claimed in a press release. “Unless the nominating entities present one or more nominees for appointment and the Governor appoints a member to fill the vacancy from among those nominees – the appointment cannot be regarded as a lawful appointment, and a candidate so appointed cannot be said to lawfully hold the office.”

What does it mean when a statute says “the governor shall appoint…”?  

The court answered the question directly: “We do not interpret the language “[t]he governor shall appoint” to mean that the governor is mandated to appoint, but rather we conclude it means that as between the three branches of government, except as provided by the constitution or by law, the appointment powers belong exclusively to the governor subject to Senate confirmation” (emphasis added). 

The court went even further. “However, any requirement that attempts to limit the discretion of the governor to reject the nominees submitted would amount to an impingement on the appointment powers,” it concluded (emphasis added). 

In a footnote, the court also referenced a previous decision in a case styled State ex rel Saint v. Dowling. “This holding implicitly recognizes the governor’s power to reject an appointee by failing to submit the appointee’s name for confirmation during the next regular session of the legislature. The Dowling court explicitly stated this principal (sic) as follows: ‘the appointive power is vested exclusively in the Governor by the Constitution, and therefore it is left to him to take the initial step in having recess appointees confirmed by the Senate.'”

This is also important in the current controversy, because although it does not involve any recess appointments, it is demonstrably true that the nominating organizations in Caddo Parish all failed to submit Carolyn Prator’s name prior to the deadline and failed to follow the procedures required by statute.  

But one doesn’t even need to argue over whether the governor should have been more flexible on the deadline and notification requirements, as Landry does, because the Caddo Parish Commission had already provided the governor with the name of another nominee.

The facts are straightforward.

Mickey Prestridge, a district-level commissioner from Caddo Parish originally nominated by the parish, appointed by Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and reappointed under Gov. Jindal, passed away on Feb. 5, 2018.

A few months prior to Prestridge’s death, in September of last year, the Caddo Parish Commission passed a resolution asking the governor to appoint Shreveport attorney Ronald Lattier to the RRWC.

Lattier was confirmed by the state Senate during the 2018 legislative session and initially had been considered one of four at-large appointees, which is definitively a discretionary decision made by the governor. 

“The act of appointing is a discretionary decision not a mandatory, ministerial duty,” the court in Murrill held. 

When another spot on the commission became available, Lattier assumed the district-level appointment of the Caddo Parish Commission, which had nominated him, and Gov. Edwards then appointed Lt. Ret. Michael Deville, a Rapides Parish nominee, to the at-large position, restoring the balance of the RRWC’s composition that had been in effect for more than a decade. 

The resolution of the Caddo Parish Commission nominating Ronald Lattier.

Notably, the resolution states that Lattier is “the name of a nominee (authorized) to serve as Caddo parish’s (sic) representative on the Red River Waterway Commission.” 

This should have been uncontroversial; the majority of elected officials in Caddo Parish understood and respected their colleagues in Rapides Parish and recognized the unfairness of exploiting a man’s death in order to demand an additional seat on the RRWC. It would demonstrate bad faith and epitomize dirty politics.

But in the aftermath of Prestridge’s passing, a group of Shreveport officials connected to the sheriff began plotting on how to undermine both Rapides Parish and the governor and install Carolyn Prator instead. They attempted to get all three of Caddo’s nominating organizations to submit Prator’s name as their one and only nominee, but they couldn’t get their act together. They missed the deadline. 

Absurdly, they’re now suggesting the governor was required by law to appoint her, and they enlisted the support of the governor’s primary political opponents. 

There are a few critical facts that seem lost in the press coverage: First, they’re arguing for an illegal usurpation of the governor’s constitutional authority. As the courts have made clear, the governor is under no obligation to appoint a person to any board or committee merely because that person was the only one nominated. Second, at-large seats are only held for a term concurrent with the governor’s tenure, whereas district-level seats are held for a term of six years. 

Supporters of Prator don’t seem to realize that even in the event they’re successful in removing Lattier from his reassigned district-level seat, the law only requires there be “one member from each of the seven parishes of the district.” The governor gets to choose his four at-large members from all seven of those parishes.

If he were interested in “political retribution,” as critics contend, Gov. Edwards could ask his two current appointees from Caddo Parish, Roy Burrell and Ronald Lattier, to resign and request their renominations, all while refusing to fill the seat demanded by Prator and her allies. This would jeopardize Caddo’s ability to maintain at least one of the two positions it currently holds. As his office additionally points out, if he were interested in “political retribution,” he could also easily remove Prator from the position to which he appointed her on the Caddo Levee District. 

However, Gov. Edwards has proven he is only interested in ensuring fairness on the RRWC.

The only people who seem to be motivated purely by politics are those who arguing they can force the governor- any governor– to  give someone a job just because they said so. 
 

Anti-Gay Lawyer Who Tried to Marry His “Porn-Filled” Laptop Sues Lafayette Parish Library, Claiming Drag Queen Reading Endorses Religion

Update: Sevier mistakenly named Tony Roswarski, in his capacity as mayor of the good people of Lafayette, Indiana, instead of Mayor-President Joel Robideaux of Lafayette, Louisiana, in his lawsuit. 

Mark Christopher Sevier (a.k.a. Chris Sevier, a.k.a. Mark Sevier, a.k.a. Chris Severe), an attorney from Nashville who once claimed to be sexually attracted to his own computer- a “machinist” is how he described his sexual orientation- in an attempt to intervene in a series of same-sex marriage cases, filed suit against Teresa Elberson, the director of the Lafayette Parish Library, Gov. John Bel Edwards, and Attorney General Jeff Landry in an effort to prohibit the library from hosting a scheduled reading event featuring drag queens, according to a report from KADN, a Lafayette affiliate of Fox

The Advertiser also reported on Sevier’s lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of two religious organizations, Warriors for Christ and Special Forces of Liberty.  

But so far, the local media hasn’t picked up on exactly who they’re dealing with. 

The upcoming Drag Queen Story Time event has been the subject of intense controversy, almost entirely due to the bizarre decision by Mayor-President Joel Robideaux to issue an inflammatory statement on Facebook denouncing the library.  On Tuesday night, the Lafayette City-Parish Council hosted a marathon meeting to consider a non-binding resolution against the library. (Neither the council nor the mayor-president have any authority over the parish library). Ultimately, only three members signed onto the resolution; the other six abstained, and the resolution failed.   

Chris Sevier is a notorious legal troll who made national headlines five years ago after attempting to intervene in a same-sex marriage case in Florida, under the pretense of representing “other minority sexual orientation groups,” specifically people attracted to their computers. He has filed similar cases in Tennessee, Utah, and Texas. 

In his motion for intervention in Florida, Sevier declared to the court

Recently, I purchased an Apple computer. The computer was sold to me without filters to block out pornography. I was not provided with any warning by Apple that pornography was highly addictive and could alter my reward cycle by the manufacturer. Over time, I began preferring sex with my computer over sex with real women. Naturally, I ‘fell in love’ with my computer and preferred having sex with it over all other persons or things, as a result of classic conditioning upon orgasm.

A year prior, he had sued Apple for his porn addiction. Last year, he attempted to convince the government to mandate porn-filters on every electronic device connected to the internet.

Among other things, as The Daily Beast reported in an extensive 2017 profile, Sevier has also previously been charged with stalking a 17-year-old girl and country star Josh Rich and was convicted of assaulting his father-in-law in an incident that sent his 7-month-old son to the emergency room. After briefly relocating to Texas, he was sentenced to 58 days in jail for misdemeanor assault after attempting to abduct his son, who he is now prohibited from contacting. 

His license to practice law in Tennessee was suspended; the state’s bar association cited “mental illness.”

It is unclear whether Sevier can actually practice law in Louisiana, but this isn’t the first time he has made news in the state. In 2013, he sued President Obama, among others, after A&E canceled the television show “Duck Dynasty.” 

In his lawsuit against the Lafayette Parish Library, Sevier argues that the decision to host Drag Queen Story Time amounts to a state-sponsored endorsement of religion and violates the Supreme Court’s three-part Lemon Test, first articulated in the 1968 case Lemon v. Kurtzman

He is hoping that the court will believe that drag queens are all “secular humanists” and that secular humanism is a religion. The government cannot pass a law that advances or inhibits any particular religion or results in excessive government entanglement with religion.    

Sevier had been making the same argument in a same-sex marriage case in Texas. Ironically, the first prong of the Lemon Test is that “the statute must have a secular legislative purpose” (emphasis added).

No court has ever declared secular humanism to be a religion, though the religious right has occasionally argued that Footnote 11 in the 1961 case Torcaso v. Watkins, which concerned tax-exemptions for various groups, to be authoritative. 

Either way, there is no such thing as the Church of Drag Queens. 

Regardless, Sevier’s case in Lafayette- much like the other cases he has filed-   is meritless, but it does underscore one thing: In issuing his statement against the library reading event, Joel Robideaux effectively announced that Lafayette was open for bigots. It shouldn’t be surprising that they’ve shown up. 

Props to Jezebel for the featured image

The Saints escape with a win… but not one that inspires much confidence

I’ll get one thing out of the way: This Cleveland Browns teams is significantly better than the one we’ve seen the last two seasons. They have a real NFL quarterback (two, indeed), a reliable wide receiver in Jarvis Landry, and substantially improved defensive talent, led by last year’s #1 overall pick Myles Garrett, a tremendous force of a pass rusher. But all that said… the Saints were nine-point favorites on Sunday, and had to step up in the fourth quarter and put together a serious scoring run just to scrape by with a win– and even that required a lot of luck. The final 21-18 victory came in no small part because then- (and now ex-)Browns kicker Zane Gonzalez missed two field goals and two extra points, all in the second half. The Saints could only muster three points over the first three quarters, but the first two missed kicks left the score 12-3; after New Orleans scored 15 unanswered points, the second missed extra point left the game tied at 18, and a final field goal attempt failed to send the game into overtime, leaving the Saints with a 21-18 win. I’m not sure what there is to say about this game. I was quite serious when I said Cleveland’s defense is significantly improved. Their own young players– six of their own draft picks from the last three years, including three first-rounders– have started to come into their own; they’ve acquired a couple of talented pieces that fell out of favor with their old teams, such as Jamie Collins and Damarious Randall; and even have what’s practically considered an ancient holdover around Cleveland as a defensive leader, linebacker and 2014 draft pick Christian Kirksey. All that said, the Drew Brees and Sean Payton Saints should not go three quarters in the Superdome and only score three points. Some of the problems were the same as those that the team faced against the Bucs– namely, that only Michael Thomas and Alvin Kamara were able to advance the ball regularly. Cleveland’s defensive line was far more stout than Tampa’s, though; even Kamara was held to only 46 yards on 13 carries, and the team sacked Brees three times, including two by Larry Ogunjobi, second-year defensive lineman and emerging star (if nothing else, getting two sacks against an elite pocket mover and one of the best interior offensive lines in the NFL is evidence of that). Thomas continued his preposterous start as a can’t-miss target hog, adding 12 receptions to last week’s 16 to lead the league by far at 28 (and on 30 targets!). Still, though, the team is missing that usual next level on offense. Between two more turnovers and converting only 3 of 12 third downs, the Saints aren’t the efficient machine that strikes fear into the hearts of even the best defenses in the Superdome that we’re used to. And even though Brees completed 80 percent of his passes (28/35), the lack of sustained drives– not to mention a few of those seven misses being key plays– has slowed the offense from being great to being merely good. Football Outsiders’ DVOA currently has them seventh on the year, but that’s a significant drop from last year’s second-place ranking, and more in line with the 2014-16 teams that all went 7-9. The team can’t find reliable targets outside of Thomas and Kamara. Ben Watson and Ted Gin are doing OK in secondary roles, not great, but nobody else has stepped up. Second-year player Austin Carr has been active on game day ahead of free-agent signing Cameron Meredith, because apparently he’s learned the slot receiver position better and Brees has better rapport from him, but he didn’t have so much as a target this week, let alone a catch. If Meredith is healthy, he’s a real weapon– his 2016 season was remarkably productive given his age and the bad offense and bad quarterback play he was stuck with– and the Saints need one more of those. (And if he’s not healthy, just admit it instead of saying he hasn’t learned the offense or what have you.) It’s time to see if he can provide the spark this offense needs. The defense has similarly fallen off (thanks largely to last week’s performance); it’s currently ranked 21st after finishing 8th last year. That one is better than the 2014-16 teams, which all finished 31st or 32nd, but not better enough to make a difference. The Saints did play substantially better than in weeks past; few splash plays, but the team largely bottled up the run game and the scrambling of quarterback Tyrod Taylor. When the team did need plays, they came up with three sacks (two by Cameron Jordan; one by Sheldon Rankins) and a Marcus Williams interception with less than six minutes left in the fourth quarter that gave the Saints a short field and the chance to take the lead for the first time. Unfortunately, even though Gregg Williams was now on the opposite sideline, we also saw a play that looked mighty familiar to anyone who watched the Saints when he was defensive coordinator: a late-game situation where a defender was inexplicably left alone, with no help over the top, for a receiver to blow by him. In this case, it was Ken Crawley, on a 4th-and-5 with 1:24 left in the game and the Saints up 18-12, left alone to get burned by rookie Antonio Callaway for the tying touchdown:   I don’t know what should have happened on that play. It looks like the Saints ran a three-deep zone with Crawley on the defensive left, Marcus Williams on the right, and A.J. Klein down the middle, and five players in short zone– a reasonable coverage when considering the situation. Of course, that raises some questions, like Why is your linebacker the deep middle guy, and not the free safety with tremendous range, on the most important play of the game? That said, it’s also worth noting that Crawley had a substantial cushion on Callaway and still managed to get beaten pretty easily. Whether Crawley underestimated Callaway’s speed, overestimated his own, or kept thinking Callaway was going to break off his route instead of taking it deep, it’s worrying. At times I suspect the Saints’ personnel additions on defense have gotten the coaching staff to get too cute. While I don’t have the numbers handy with me, my impression of last year’s defense is that the Saints primarily left Marshon Lattimore in press man to shut down the team’s top receiver, with Marcus Williams playing a single-high free safety, and didn’t vary too much from that because it was consistently effective. With the addition of some players like Kurt Coleman and Patrick Robinson, the coaching staff has seen the potential for more versatility in coverage looks… but maybe more versatility isn’t a good thing if your team isn’t as good in some schemes as it is in others. On the one hand, the coaching staff probably shouldn’t run coverages in important situations that put A.J. Klein as the deep middle man. On the other, Ken Crawley simply failed to do his job. There’s blame to go around in both scheme and execution, and the team’s got to fix it on both ends. Parts of the Saints’ first two performances are bad luck and will get better. Fumble recoveries are largely random and should even out over time. On Sunday, New Orleans fumbled twice and Cleveland fumbled three times; the Browns recovered all five. Combined with last week’s results, that means the Saints have four fumbles and their opponents have four fumbles, and their opponents have recovered (or retained possession on) all of them. Williams’ interception was the team’s first forced turnover of the year, and they’ll almost certainly improve in that regard. On the bright side, the team is 1-1, snapping a four-year streak of starting 0-2. On the downside, the Saints have played what were supposed to be two of the easier games on their schedule, and have come out of each not nearly looking like the team we thought they were. With a visit to hated rival Atlanta this Sunday, winning isn’t going to get any easier, even if the Falcons have had their own struggles. We’re going to have to count on the coaching staff having figured out what works and doesn’t work and going back to what works. They did it last year after the 0-2 start, and with the talent they added in the offseason, there’s no reason the team ought to be worse anywhere. Mark Ingram’s absence definitely hurts the offense’s versatility, as the team can’t run two all-around threats out of the backfield or give Kamara a rest without tipping their hand. But they still ought to be better than this. And the defense only lost one starter– Kenny Vaccaro– and added a handful of quality players. It’s time for everyone to live up to that expected level of performance.

Adrian Perkins Claims Senate Judiciary Committee Relied on Fraudulent Letter Supporting Kavanaugh

Yesterday, The Bayou Brief reported that Adrian Perkins, a 32-year-old Democratic candidate for mayor of Shreveport, was one of only eight former or current members of Harvard Law’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA) listed as a signatory of a letter submitted to both the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee praising embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. 

Perkins, who has refused to answer or acknowledge our repeated requests for comment, reacted to the report on social media and in an e-mail sent to The Shreveport Times, alleging that his name and others were used without their permission. He “declined to say whether he supported Kavanaugh,” the paper reports.

If his allegations of fraud are true, the letter, which was entered into the public record on Aug. 29 and mentioned by Sen. Mike Crapo during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Sept. 6, should raise significant questions about the integrity and credibility of the Senate’s rushed effort to approve the nomination.   

“This is a letter that exhibits Judge Kavanaugh’s commitment to fostering diversity in the legal profession,” Crapo said. 

The Harvard Crimson reported on the letter’s prominent role in the proceedings, and the Harvard BLSA issued a separate statement distancing itself from the endorsement.

“I started — on my own — going to the Yale Black Law Students Association every year starting in 2012. I think I’m the only judge who has done something like that or certainly one of the few,” Kavanaugh told the committee later that day, responding to a question from Sen. Cory Booker. “And I just cold called them, cold emailed them and said I’d like to come speak about minority law clerk hiring because I’m told there’s a problem.” 

Perkins asserts that he has never met Kavanaugh and did not attend the Harvard BLSA event with the judge that is referenced in the letter. 

“Several of the other past presidents who are listed in that letter have also confirmed their names were listed without their consent,” he stated to The Shreveport Times.

However, of the eight individuals listed on the letter, Perkins is the only one who ever served as a student government president of Harvard Law, and thus far, he is the only person to publicly allege the letter was fraudulent. (He is not the only person with a connection to Louisiana; another signatory, Abraham Williamson, once worked as an intern for former Sen. Mary Landrieu).  

According to The Boston Globe, one of Perkins’ classmates helped to organize the effort in support of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination.

On his campaign’s Facebook page, Perkins shared a screen capture of an email exchange on Sept. 6 with Merve Ciplak, a student reporter with The Harvard Law Record and a copy of a letter he claims to have emailed to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein on Sept. 10.

The email exchange between Perkins and Ciplak.

The email Perkins alleges to have sent to Sens. Grassley and Feinstein.

In his reply to Ciplak, who said she was “currently looking into… a question of support of some of the signers,” Perkins claims he was too busy to respond to a request for an interview and that he “did not authorize the use of my name on that document.” A portion of the exchange provided by Perkins appears to be partially redacted.

“In response, I emailed the Senate Judiciary and requested that my name be removed from the letter,” Perkins wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page, attaching the document above as evidence. 

“Please note that the dates on the emails predate the article written by (The Bayou Brief),” Perkins contended.

Although Perkins produced a time-stamped email to The Harvard Law Record, he has yet to provide any documentation that his email to Sens. Grassley and Feinstein was actually sent.

Neither the Senate Judiciary Committee or the White House have redacted Perkins’ name, as he requested, and thus far, the email does not appear anywhere in the public record.

“It was a big surprise to me to hear about this because all of my attention has been on Shreveport and the future of Shreveport so to be wrapped up in kind of this national thing has been kind of a surprise,” Perkins told KTBS earlier today

Adrian Perkins, Shreveport Mayoral Candidate, Signs Letter Supporting Kavanaugh Nomination

On Aug. 29th, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Diane Feistein received a letter from eight recent or current members of Harvard Law’s Black Law Student Association (BLSA), including Shreveport mayoral candidate Adrian Perkins, in support of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The Bayou Brief contacted Perkins, both directly and through his campaign, and, as of the time of publication, has yet to receive a response.

The letter praises Kavanaugh, a staunchly pro-life conservative who is now confronting credible allegations of sexual assault, for meeting with African-American students in March and providing them “his insights and advice” on how to secure a judicial clerkship. “The students who have signed below write to express appreciation for the Judge’s enthusiasm on this issue and hope that his efforts will be taken into consideration,” the letter reads

The Harvard BLSA subsequently issued an official statement to the media, distancing itself from the letter submitted by Perkins and his classmates. “The vast majority of these individuals who signed the letter, moreover, have already graduated from Harvard Law School and are no longer active members of Harvard BLSA,” the organization explains.

After graduating from Harvard Law earlier this year, Perkins, 32, returned to his hometown of Shreveport in order to run for mayor as a Democrat.

Only a year ago, he told the publication Harvard Law Today that he intended on pursuing a career in technology and was considering taking a job with the corporate firm Sidley Austin in Los Angeles, where he worked as a summer associate. “If I go to a corporate law firm, I could carve out a specific space for (practicing tech law),” he said.


Perkins is one of six “viable” candidates and, according to internal polling commissioned by a group of area business leaders, is currently locked in a tight battle for second place. The poll, which has not yet been released to the public, suggests that incumbent Mayor Ollie Tyler is almost certain to finish first in the general election but is severely vulnerable in the runoff.

Perkins’ campaign has largely been propelled by the strength of his resume: He attended West Point, where he served as the school’s first-ever African-American class president. That was followed by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a Bronze Star, and then Harvard Law, where he was elected student government president. 

In light of Stanford professor Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations, disclosed on Sunday morning in The Washington Post, that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school, Perkins’ decision to support Kavanaugh’s nomination, which until now had not been reported, is certain to raise significant concerns among the moderate Republicans and the young progressives that he hopes to attract. 

His encounter with Kavanaugh was brief and insignificant, but the letter he signed was prominently referenced by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee as evidence of the nominee’s commitment to diversity.

To his critics, who had already expressed concern about turning over the leadership of City Hall to a young man who hasn’t lived there full-time since he graduated from high school fifteen years ago and who, according to publicly available records, has never cast a vote in Shreveport, it reinforces the perception that Perkins may be willing to place his own ambition above the principles he espouses as a Democratic candidate.

For others, though, it may be perceived as a sign of his political independence and willingness to forge meaningful alliances with conservatives. After all, at the time he signed the letter, the allegations about Kavanaugh had not yet been disclosed to the public, and it is more likely than not that either Kavanaugh or the White House solicited letters of support from as many organizations as possible. It does not seem plausible that eight Harvard BLSA members submitted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee without at least some prompting or request.

Publisher’s Note: I have previously published an opinion piece by another candidate for Shreveport mayor, Steven Jackson, and I have covered his efforts to remove a Confederate monument at the Caddo Parish Courthouse. After Jackson (who I have known for nearly a decade) was targeted and threatened by racist hate mail, I made a personal contribution to his campaign. The Bayou Brief became aware of Perkins’ letter through a tip provided by a reader in New Orleans. Jackson has never received any compensation for his opinion column, and neither he nor his campaign have ever contributed to The Bayou Brief. Prior to publication, I also reached out to Jackson to inform him of my ethical obligation to preemptively disclose my campaign donation.  He had no involvement in or prior knowledge of this report.

You Think You Have Rights? Louisiana’s “Lockbox” Says Otherwise

On Sept. 4, 2018, with bulldozers revving their engines in accompaniment, Cherri Foytlin was tackled and placed in a choke hold by a non-uniformed man who then knelt atop her, grinding her into the sticky mud of the Atchafalaya Basin.

Two uniformed deputies then moved in to provide handcuffs and escort the environmental activist off to the St. Martin Parish jail. She was charged with “criminal damage to critical infrastructure” – in this case, blocking work on the Bayou Bridge pipeline by protesting.

Over the previous month, some dozen individuals, including a reporter covering the protests, had been tackled, tased, arrested, and charged under the same law – Act 692, which went into effect Aug. 1, 2018.

The route of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Source: Gulf Restoration Network

The day before Foytlin’s arrest, fifty people had – at that same spot — been able to halt work on the muddy strip in St. Martin Parish. All were there at the invitation of the property owner, who has refused to agree to the sale or use of the property for the pipeline. He is being sued by the pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), to force him to surrender the right-of-way.

From the time we’re very young, we’re taught about the superiority of our democracy. We’re proud of our Bill of Rights and of our First Amendment’s guaranteed freedom of speech.

Here in Louisiana, our state Constitution opens with a paean to democracy: “All government, of right, originates with the people, is founded on their will alone, and is instituted to protect the rights of the individual and for the good of the whole.”

Due process, the Right to Individual Dignity, and the Right to Property (more on that later) immediately follow that statement. After that comes the Right to Privacy, Freedom from Intrusion, and finally – in section 7, Freedom of Expression, which states: “No law shall curtail or restrain freedom of speech of of the press.”

Yet as events and actions surrounding the Bayou Bridge opposition illustrate, our individual and community rights are far from “inalienable” – in actual practice.

The U.S. Constitution, enacted 231 years ago this week, was designed “to facilitate commerce.” And while the (overused) mantra of innovation and improvement has become “thinking outside the box,” the last things corporate interests want citizens doing – especially when it comes to protecting the environment – is anything “outside the box.”

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a national nonprofit organization that “provides legal services, organizing support, and education to community groups, elected officials, and the general public,” defines the framework. They call it “the Box of Allowable Activism,” and it’s designed to protect corporate interests while also limiting individual rights.

The box has four walls, including the legal view of nature as property. There’s the regulatory fallacy, corporate privilege, and state preemption.

Courtesy: CELDF  

The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is a 163-mile-long conduit for crude oil, being constructed from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to St. James, Louisiana. The $670-million project crosses eleven parishes and eight watersheds, which include more than 600 discrete bodies of water and the ecologically sensitive Atchafalaya Swamp.

It is a cooperative endeavor of Phillips 66, Energy Transfer Partners, and Sunoco (an ETP subsidiary). It links with ETP’s Dakota Access Pipeline through a hub in Nederland, Texas. The pipeline between Nederland and Lake Charles is already complete.

I first met Cherri Foytlin in mid-October 2017.

She was standing in the field across from the Governor’s Mansion, holding a sign that said, “Governor Edwards, we want an Environmental Impact Statement for Bayou Bridge Pipeline.” Accompanied by members of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, 350.org, and others, Foytlin led the group in chants and sign-waving, urging the governor to request an environmental study from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was considering the pipeline permit at the time.

Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources had already approved the project.

Noting ETP’s record of pipeline spills and a Phillips 66 pipeline fire in Paradis, LA, which had killed one worker and injured five others earlier that year, Foytlin suggested that while waiting on the Corps’ environmental study, the state could be encouraging the companies to actually follow the rules.

Phillips 66 pipeline fire in Paradis, LA. Photo by Matthew Hinton, Source: Twitter

“We have actually really good laws on the books. It’s just this state doesn’t tend to hold companies accountable to do what they’re supposed to do,” Foytlin said. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask that this industry – but in particular this company – cleans up its mess in the first place before they’re allowed to do another project. I mean, I would make my kids clean up before they get more toys out, right?”

But the environmental study wasn’t requested or done, and in Dec. 2017, the Corps approved the Bayou Bridge permit. The next month, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Gulf Restoration Network, and Atchafalaya Basinkeepers, with assistance from Earthjustice and the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, filed suit in federal court, seeking an injunction to halt the pipeline construction across the Atchafalaya Basin until an environmental impact study could be done. It was granted, but subsequently appealed by the Corps and Bayou Bridge.

In June, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the lower court’s decision, suggesting that because the Corps had discussed mitigation measures during the permitting process and acknowledged potential environmental impacts, including “permanent loss of wetlands, loss of wildlife habitat, and impacts to water quality,” that was sufficient enough. It may have not been an environmental impact study, but it was an environmental impact statement. Therefore, the formalities have been observed, and it’s okay to build.

With this single decision, the 5th Circuit exposes the lie at the center of the regulatory fallacy.

We’re led to believe that laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act- and the agencies that enforce them – such as the EPA, DEQ, Corps of Engineers, DNR – are there to protect public health and the environment. But the very nature of the regulatory schemes and permitting processes assumes there will be harm.

As one current TV commercial for a water filtration system sarcastically points out, there’s lead in the water, “but it’s well within the allowable standards.” The regulatory system may limit the allowable harm, but it’s still permissible. There is no place in the system for no harm at all.

Why? Because our laws treat nature as property. We buy and sell land and what is on it and underneath it, including the mineral rights that descend – theoretically – all the way down to the earth’s core. If you own it, you have the right to use it and destroy it, if you so choose.

This concept of “property rights” is the basis for another way the Bayou Bridge opponents are endeavoring to halt the project through the state courts. Yet it’s an effort that’s complicated by those another wall in the box of allowable activism: corporate privilege.

Opponents have also been challenging the pipeline in multiple jurisdictions of state court, using a variety of avenues of legal attack.

In St. James Parish, the planned terminus of Bayou Bridge, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, L’Eau Est La Vie, Atchafalaya Basinkeepers, and other objectors argued the state Department of Natural Resources did not exercise “due diligence” in granting the pipeline’s permit because it failed to develop an emergency plan for evacuations in the event of a catastrophe.

The court concurred, ordering the permit back to DNR for reconsideration and and issuing a halt to the work on that segment of the pipeline. ETP appealed, and got the work stoppage lifted while the case itself continued through the court system. (The state’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal hears that case on Sept. 19 in Gretna).

It may seem like basic commonsense to demand emergency contingency plans, but to those in the industry, it’s bad optics and bad for business to call the public’s attention to the inherent risks involved.

As we reported in March, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s state attorney general, is currently leading an effort to prevent the petrochemical industry from complying with the requirement they coordinate disaster response plans with local law enforcement.

Landry, doing the bidding for the industry, argued this was “even more burdensome, duplicative, and needless regulation.”

That’s part of the wall of corporate privilege.

In January of this year, opponents of the Bayou Bridge filed suit in the 19th JDC in Baton Rouge, challenging the pipeline company’s use of eminent domain (or expropriation) to acquire the right-of-way for the pipeline project.

“They are using the power of the state in claiming eminent domain,” Louisiana Bucket Brigade leader Ann Rolfes said. “They are a for-profit private company that is assuming a state function.”

“People who own land along the pipeline route are told, ‘You don’t want us to take your land? We’ll take it through the court system. We’ll take it away from you’,” stated Foytlin, who, as owner of a camp along the pipeline route, is a party to the action. “Most land in the area went for $10 an easement. How many billions and trillions of dollars are going to run underneath that land?”

Cherri Foytlin

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2005 Kelo v. New London decision, which permitted use of eminent domain for economic development purposes, outraged Louisiana legislators advanced a state constitutional amendment – approved by voters in 2006 – prohibiting state and local governments from taking private property unless it is for a “general public right to a definite use of the property” or the removal of a threat to public health or safety. The amendment defines specific public uses.

Privately operated pipelines are not one of the defined public uses.

That case is still pending, and in July, with their self-set October deadline for pipeline completion fast approaching, ETP filed suit in state court in St. Martin Parish. They’re seeking to force several hundred property owners to surrender their land in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Some of the approximately 700 co-owners of the 38-acre tract have agreed to the pipeline crossing. Others have steadfastly refused, instead giving anti-pipeline activists permission to occupy the property.

On Monday, Sept. 10, as dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky, a pipeline in Center Township, Pennsylvania – 20 miles northeast of Pittsburgh – exploded, knocking down powerlines and towers, closing I-376 and schools across the Central Valley District. More than thirty homes were evacuated; the fire raged for more than two hours.

That pipeline is owned and operated by Energy Transfer Partners.

Gas explosion causes huge fire in Center Township, PA. Credit: CBS News

Just as Pennsylvania authorities were getting that fire under control, a hearing convened on the expropriation matter in Louisiana’s district court in St. Martin Parish. Resistant property owners had countersued ETP, seeing an injunction to halt the bulldozing and trenching in progress across their property.

Somewhat surprisingly, lawyers for the pipeline company agreed to halt work across that tract, until the full trial on the expropriation is conducted in November. That same day, in an email to media, the company said the project would be completed in October. This week, the company has told the media the timeline for completion is now “before the end of this year.”

Pipeline opponents view this as evidence their pushback against the project is working. But a spokeswoman for the company says their finish date is being pushed back as a result of weather conditions.

Beyond all the courtroom wranglings over Bayou Bridge, opponents have long anticipated their efforts to halt the pipeline would also necessitate direct action. They were able to thwart ETP’s plans to use the company TigerSwan for security along the Louisiana pipeline route by presenting examples of that firm’s notorious work for ETP at Standing Rock. The Louisiana Board of Private Security Examiners determined TigerSwan was “unfit” to provide services in this state. Subsequent efforts to set up a “front” company for doing the Louisiana work were similarly uncovered and denied licensing.

Instead, ETP hired three firms — Hilliard Heintze out of Chicago, Athos Group from Irving, Texas, and Hub Enterprises of Lafayette – to do their security work and to surveil and investigate the opponents. Some are off-duty law enforcement officers; others are what are simply unarmed security personnel, often denigratingly referred to as “rent-a-cops.”

Energy Transfer Partners also used its “corporate privilege” to help drive a new law through the Louisiana legislature this past spring. They retained the services of some heavy-hitting lobbyists and coalesced the clout of petrochemical industry groups to push passage of HB 727, now known as Act 692.

While other states – including Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Ohio, and Colorado – have considered a similar measure to this ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) model bill, Louisiana was the only one to fully enact it. The bill designates pipelines as “critical infrastructure,” equivalent to public ports and transportation such as railroads, and public utilities like electric power generating stations and water treatment facilities. The “construction” of pipelines is now included in that definition.

And it makes “unauthorized entry,” also known as trespassing and formerly classified as a misdemeanor, onto the property of one of these facilities a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. If more than one person is involved in the planning or commission of such an offense, it becomes a “conspiracy,” punishable by up to 12 years and a $250,000 fine.

Even though sections were added to the law declaring it was in no way to apply to “lawful and peaceful assembly or demonstration” or “recreational activities conducted in the open around a pipeline, such as boating” (nor to “prevent the owner of a property form exercising right of ownership, including use”), thirteen people have been arrested and charged with felonies under this law since it went into effect on Aug. 1.

Bayou Bridge protest, Sept. 3, 2018

Kayakers and canoeists have been herded ashore, onto the pipeline route, by security in airboats, then handcuffed and carted off to jail.

A reporter covering the action for The Appeal was arrested and charged.

“Tree-sitters,” there at the invitation of property owners refusing to sell out to ETP, had their safety ropes cut. As chainsaws revved up below them, they were forced to scramble down from their perches, and then, they were tased, handcuffed, and hauled away to the lockup.

Other objectors, also invited by property owners disputing the pipeline’s right to tear through the land, stood in front of the bulldozers, simply holding a sign saying, “ETP, you are not above the law.”

That’s what Cherri Foytlin was doing when she was tackled and arrested.

Each person arrested had to post a $10,000 bond in order to be released.

As Karen Savage reported in her story for The Appeal, it is difficult to determine under what actual authority these arrests are being conducted. Those doing security for the Bayou Bridge project often wear black ball caps simply stamped with the word “police.” Some are St. Martin Parish deputies, while others have been determined to be state probation and parole officers, moonlighting as Bayou Bridge security.

As a result of media reports on the arrests, the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections has terminated its agreements to provide off-duty officers for Bayou Bridge security details.

But it still appears to be an egregious example of corporate privilege relying on state enforcement, in preemption of individual rights to free speech, assembly, and property rights.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is assisting with defense of those arrested under Act 692, as they fight to retain their freedom from imprisonment and their continued rights to speak out against a project they think is wrong.

ETP claims, conversely, that the environmental protesters are “endangering the very ecosystem they purport to love.”

While the swarm of lawsuits involving the Bayou Bridge Pipeline might seem to be forcing a delay and potentially a halt to the project, the Fortune 500 company undoubtedly considers the environmental groups, property owners, and their various lawsuits to be no more than mosquitoes.

They’ve said they’ll be done with the pipeline by the end of this year. With gross income of $3.69 billion last year alone, they can afford to keep the cases going in court, while continuing work on the pipeline (which was 85% complete as of August) – legal or not. That would effectively render all of the cases moot.

What’s the alternative?

CELDF, which teaches the “Box of Allowable Activism” theory as a cornerstone in its Democracy School, maintains citizen initiative – working to create law to empower “We the People” in lieu of “We the Corporations”  – is the answer.

But Louisiana’s constitution has no mechanism for statewide citizen initiative, and local initiative is tightly restricted to those communities that had adopted their Home Rule Charter prior to 1974.

Even with that, our legislators – held in thrall by corporate interests dangling the eternal carrot-and-stick of “jobs” – have consistently used their power to enact state preemption in order to forbid local citizen and governmental initiative on pressing issues.

After the City of New Orleans sued gun manufacturers in 1998 for the costs associated with gun violence, state lawmakers- led by Steve Scalise- passed a law making such action retroactively illegal. And in 2015, they did the same to halt a levee board lawsuit seeking to recover coastal land loss damages from the oil and gas industry.

And while Louisiana citizens currently rank as the nation’s second most-impoverished people, a state law passed in 1997 absolutely prohibits any local governmental subdivision from instituting a minimum wage. In 2012, the legislature added a ban on requiring any employee vacation or sick days, whether paid or unpaid.

All this would tend to lead us into what CELDF calls “the black hole of doubt.” After all, how can mere citizens and their communities possibly scale the walls posed by state preemption and corporate privilege?

But corporate interests, exemplified by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), may end up kicking the activism lockbox door wide open. They have been agitating toward calling a state constitutional convention in order to rewrite Louisiana’s governing document.

In the current political climate, the resurgence of community activism through groups ranging from Together Louisiana to L’Eau Est La Vie could propel such a constitutional convention in an entirely different direction than what’s intended by the corporate gang.

That would be especially ironic for LABI, which was formed to quell the clout of unions – which are, in actuality, a community of individuals with like interests and concerns.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” anthropologist Margaret Mead famously stated. “Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Ted Cruz easily receives endorsement from other robots

Although we are almost exclusively concerned with Louisiana news, politics, history, and culture, I have always had one foot still planted in Texas. My immediate family lives in Dallas (the city’s founder, John Neely Bryan, is actually my fifth great grand uncle); I spent my undergraduate years at Rice University in Houston and attended law school at SMU in Dallas. In fact, I’ve lived just as many years of my adult life in Texas as I have in Louisiana.

But what is occurring right now in Texas- the insurgent campaign of Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke against Ted Cruz- is, arguably, the most consequential election for Louisianians this cycle, assuming, of course, that all of our incumbents in Congress are re-elected as anticipated (though FiveThirtyEight currently projects that Rep. Clay Higgins is likely to face fellow Republican Josh Guillory in a runoff for Louisiana’s Third Congressional District, contradicting the findings of a poll from earlier this week showing Higgins with a much more commanding lead). 

And there’s nothing new with Louisiana having a vested interest in our neighbor’s politics. Next week, Beto’s campaign will hold three days of phone banking in New Orleans, and four years ago, The Houston Chronicle endorsed Mary Landrieu’s re-election to the U.S. Senate.

As I’ve said before, countless times, of course Louisiana cares about Texas politics; half of our economy is headquartered there.

This year, the entire country is watching the race between Beto O’Rourke, the dynamic young Congressman from El Paso who shares a name- Robert Frances- and more than a passing resemblance to another U.S. Senator, a man largely known by his initials, RFK.   

Source: The Economist

In the early hours of Thursday, while searching for news about the Texas Senate race on Twitter, I noticed a troubling pattern, and I mentioned it: 

As of this writing, my tweet has received 3.6 million impressions and more than 500,000 engagements from people all across the country and the world, making it- easily- the most viral tweet I’ve ever published. (For the first and likely the only time in my life, one of my tweets received more engagement than any of Donald Trump’s tweets that day). 

The implication is clear: It defies logic and commonsense that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Texas voters decided to share the same exact tweet in the middle of the night

Many, understandably, came to the same conclusion: 2AM CST is 10AM in Moscow, and considering the outsized role that Russian social media interference played in the 2016 election, it’s worth wondering whether this was a legitimate effort by the Cruz campaign or if they had been compromised. 

Only a few hours after I shared this information, the far-right website Twitchy, which was founded by conservative provocateur Michelle Malkin, attempted to preemptively debunk any speculation in its tracks,, labeling me as a conspiracy theorist.


This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself in Twitchy’s cross-eyed crosshairs. Four years ago, in another statewide Texas campaign, the site accused me of being nothing more than an exploited campaign prop for gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, following remarks I wrote and delivered at a press conference about her opponent Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy on disability rights. It was an ugly and patronizing attack, bordering on dehumanizing. (For those not familiar, I was born with cerebral palsy, and am imminently qualified to speak on the subject). 

The team at Twitchy apparently does not possess any institutional memory, because their article yesterday neglected to mention that they’d actually written about me before. But that’s okay. They had another point to make: Nothing to see here. 

So, what, in their opinion, explains the proliferation of identical messages from seemingly random accounts at the same time in the early morning hours? 

Well, according to Twitchy, each and every one of those users were simply clicking the same button at the same time on an account set up by the Cruz campaign. Contrary to what others have speculated, this was not a Thunderclap, nor were these tweets pre-scheduled for publication at a certain time.  

Here’s the tweet: 

And here’s what happens when you click on the “Tweet #IStand” button: 

Mystery solved right? No, not at all. 

Josh Perry, a thirty year old from New York, was hired by the Cruz campaign to manage their social media, and he attempted to explain what happened: 

“There’s really nothing supicious about using the same messaging in the tweets. It’s Twitter’s own conversational cards feature,” he told me. “It’s what they’re designed to do. Each of those tweets, if you’ll click to expand them, has a button to tweet a hashtag with suggested text.” 

Sure, there may be nothing suspicious in the messaging of those tweets, and Perry was able to prove, in real-time, that he had the ability to edit that specific tweet. 

https://twitter.com/MrJoshPerry/status/1040363077751824384

Perry, aka “the campaign,” asserts that these tweets were all the result of hundreds of Texans, at two in the morning, all deciding to simultaneously hit the same share button at the same time, which, to repeat, defies logic and commonsense.  

“As for the timing. If an account with a large number of followers tweets or retweets a tweet with a conversational card in it, it’s really not uncommon to see multiple tweets in quick succession come as a result of it,” he attempted to explain. “Happens throughout all hours of the day.”  

Oh yes, the “series of tubes” argument. 


Unfortunately for the Perry and the Cruz campaign, it didn’t take much to discover that, in fact, this was not an organic response. 

Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Bot Sentinel, a software system designed to “correctly identify propaganda bot/troll accounts with an accuracy of 98%,” conducted an independent forensic analysis of the tweets at issue. 

“At first I thought it was a bunch of people just clicking the button like you suggested, until I realized many of the accounts are being tracked (by Bot Sentinel),” he explained to a skeptic. 

“Unlike other machine learning tools designed to detect bots, we are not sacrificing accuracy for speed,” Bouzy explains. “We analyze hundreds of Tweets per each Twitter account to determine if an account exhibit irregular tweet activity or engaging in harassment.” 

And Bouzy was not the only data expert to verify that a significant number of the accounts that had blasted out Team Cruz’s message were, in fact, not real people. 

The long-running joke about Ted Cruz is that he is not a real person, hence the satirical website TedCruzforHumanPresident.com. During the past few months, as he has attempted to catch up with his opponent’s momentum, Cruz has only reinforced that perception: Comparing Beto O’Rourke to “a triple meat Whataburger liberal,” which is a riddle no one has yet to solve; after Kevin Bacon shared a viral video of O’Rourke talking about NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem, he claimed on Twitter that now all Texans could play the Kevin Bacon game, which isn’t how the game works but whatever. 

He aired an entire commercial of Beto O’Rourke traveling across the state and dropping a few f-bombs along the way. The ad ends with the line, “Beto shows the f*** up,” which is an undeniable compliment. 

My family has several Republican conservative friends in the Dallas area, loyal conservatives, and they are usually reflexively opposed to any Democratic candidate. But they all loved that ad. “I like a man who curses like I do. That’s how we talk in Texas.” Cruz, apparently, was targeting elderly Sunday school teachers.

The point is: Cruz’s social ineptitude is his greatest weakness, yet he has spent much of his campaign unwittingly reminding voters of O’Rourke’s authenticity, as if it’s a vulnerability.  

My friend and colleague Nath Pizzolatto sums it up well:

To those who have followed his career, it’s unsurprising that bots are now a part of his key constituency: They speak the same language, after all.