Ask just about anybody at the State Capitol, and they’ll tell you Taylor Barras is one of the nicest guys in the Legislature.
It’s too crass for politicians to acknowledge it openly, even in the age of frankness ushered in by Donald Trump, but legislators know it is one of the fundamentals of political physics: If you give somebody a benefit, you’ll never get it back.
Let us hold down the celebrations, please, but more than half of the 2019 session of the Louisiana Legislature is now past.
We live in an age of skepticism, but there is more and more danger from people who believe misinformation on social media, particularly when it comes to vaccinations.
If the sheer geographical realities don’t persuade politicians, maybe a poll shall: There is widespread support for funding a passenger rail service connecting New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
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“I’m a small-government guy.” The way that Ralph Abraham, physician and pilot from north Louisiana, drawled out that statement, it sounded like 28 syllables.
The word “retirement” might mean something pleasant for most people, but for the growing ranks of the elderly poor, it’s a sentence to hard labor without end.
At the annual meeting of the Public Affairs Research Council Thursday, a Republican challenger to Gov. John Bel Edwards was primed during a forum right after the luncheon to say that Louisiana has been bad for business in the last four years.
If nothing else, John Bel Edwards is a man of the system.
Mark your calendars, denizens of the State Capitol, and not in a good way.
Maybe it seems a historical issue now, but if one lived through the dramatic hearings and legislative battles of 2012 over public education, the changes wrought by Gov. Bobby Jindal and his aides, including one Stafford Palmieri, continue to be an…
There is, apparently, no official motto of city-parish government, nor of the Metro Council. But in the newly refurbished council chambers on the third floor of the neo-Stalinist building on St. Louis Street, a motto might be inscribed over the do…
Years ago, Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard told a story of how a classmate of his ended up as president of the Senate in North Carolina. Bernhard, a supporter of LSU and higher education, was frustrated by Louisiana’s unwillingness to pay the…
Louisiana has the lowest unemployment rate in a decade.
When a passel of business leaders and officials gather Thursday in Baton Rouge for an economic development “summit,” will it be a pep rally for re-election of Gov. John Bel Edwards? That’s what the Louisiana Republican Party rather ineptly argues,…
When Amazon was showered with offers by the cities and states of the Union for a new job-creating second headquarters, it was clear all along that comparative backwaters — e.g., Louisiana — would never be competitive.
It's difficult to think of two more different visionaries in the Republican Party than Haley Barbour and Kristen Soltis Anderson.
While it is a dramatic symbol of New Orleans, the Dome is officially the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, and it is owned by the state, not the city.
"In 2001,” recalls Davis Rhorer of the Downtown Development Authority, “we had zero hotel rooms in downtown.” It was shortly after that year that national consultants reported that Baton Rouge’s investment in meeting rooms, theater and arena — at …
John Bel Edwards’ opponents should probably hope that January is the cruelest month and things will get better in the election by October.
With the greetings, if not fawnings, of Louisiana’s Republican elite, Donald J. Trump arrived at Louis Armstrong International Airport trailing clouds of glory.
On Monday, it was morning in Louisiana again.
There is generally a crowd for the mayor’s State of the City speech to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge, and Sharon Weston Broome’s talk was well-received by the group.
It’s a shame that Louisiana is one of the states with relatively few women in its Legislature, although that is changing over time, and we’ve had one woman reach the governorship, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That statement helped President Ronald Reagan to be elected in 1980.
At this time in 2014, Governor-elect David Vitter was measuring the drapes on the walls of the big office on the fourth floor of the State Capitol.
In a building where political landmines abound, many state legislators are cautious about where they stand, and none in the State Capitol was more so than Sharon Weston Broome. In the House and Senate, she was the despair of lobbyists, who often d…
Fair or not, a politician who builds things gets applause for it.
For decades, candidates from north Louisiana dominated in races for the Governor’s Mansion, but since Edwin W. Edwards broke the string, and with the single exception of Buddy Roemer in a splintered field in 1987, a candidate north of the Intersta…
When I registered to vote for the first time, as a Republican, the nice lady at the courthouse tried to talk me out of it. For the best of motives: That was more than 40 years ago, when elections were typically decided by Democrats, who were almos…
Maybe, as a Democrat, Gov. John Bel Edwards is for once expressing the deepest feelings of hardcore partisans in the Louisiana Republican Party: "For Sen. Kennedy, this was never about the people of Louisiana. This was about focusing the spotlight…
When East Baton Rouge Parish Metro Councilman Matt Watson talked up a pay raise for the city's police officers, it was a good idea whose time had not come. Other members of the Metro Council were not unsupportive of police officers, although there…
It takes a village to pass a tax, and Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome is at great pains to portray the backing of a coalition of supporters on behalf of her big increase for roads and bridges on the Dec. 8 ballot.
In Louisiana, we call ourselves an open primary state, although political scientists would argue that is not the precise nomenclature for an election without party primaries. Paying a qualifying fee is all that it takes to run for office, even gov…
Here we go again, with Broward County.
Maybe it's not surprising, but the news is that the number of international students coming to U.S. colleges and universities is down during the Trump administration.
In 1995, when a Democratic developer in New York had delusions of grandeur about business and politics, a little-known state senator from Franklin ran for the open seat of Louisiana governor.
While the 2018 midterms have an important impact on Capitol Hill, the implications for the 2020 elections — and the 2020 Census — are probably what many political pros are pondering today.
In most of the country, there’s a sigh of relief as the 2018 midterm elections draw to a close.
Quarrel if you will with some of the tough stances taken over the last decade or so by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, but few are likely to contest the architectural judgment of BRAC President Adam Knapp on his own building.
At one time, it was liberals like F. King Alexander who were in favor of standardized tests.
Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission? LSU President F. King Alexander has pushed that saying to an extreme, unsettling a decades-old consensus on higher education policy.
Does John Bel Edwards deserve to be re-elected?
Tara Wicker cannot be more wrong. The Metro Council member says it is "a challenge just to keep the decorum ... just to keep (the meetings) from becoming almost comical." In truth, decorum left the council long ago.
The Louisiana Republican Party is like a country club that lets in too many members.
If there is one thing that the law enforcement community agrees upon, across the country as well as in Baton Rouge, it is that too many folks with mental health problems are locked up in jails.
The innocent believe that the Louisiana State Capitol is a battleground of ideology. But the realists see it as the chessboard, or stock exchange, or lottery of the special interests.
As the internal politics of city hall in Baton Rouge have become more polarized, like most everywhere else, the Metro Council has become a significant barrier to getting mayoral initiatives before the voters.
With the fire-breathing Republican advocates of the Second Amendment in full cry at the State Bond Commission, did anyone notice who gave them a lecture about what being a conservative means?
Who is the most popular governor at the White House, at least with a D behind his name? Maybe the case can be made that it's John Bel Edwards.