Sick of the Legislature and politics and the State Capitol? Don't look now, but the jockeying for 2019 is well underway, and has been for months.

At one late-night shooting scene, all too familiar in Baton Rouge, the new chief of police got some encouragement: a young woman started to describe, not quietly, the getaway car and what she had seen of the driver and passengers.

With apologies to the president of the United States, the current titleholder, if we could combine Chauna Banks and John Schroder into a single public official, we'd get a Republocrat whiner of epic proportions.

Is a power play worthy of the U.S. Capitol the right way to approach the Metro Council in East Baton Rouge Parish? No, and it is that lack of proportion that has led four members of the council into a boycott that makes the Democratic members look petty.

A motto for the new city of St. George, should it come into being, would be appropriate from a historian of Britain's Conservative Party, the late Lord Blake: "It is the tendency of government expenditures to increase."

Throwing the bums out is unfortunately not entirely possible with this Legislature, in large part because term limits mean that a significant number will not face the voters again, at least not in the same districts.

An old story from the U.S. Capitol is that of a young representative who is flattered to be invited for drinks with the old bulls of the House Democratic leadership, talking legislative strategy. The green young man offers an idea about how to con…

Perhaps because he is a bit younger than the general run of legislators in the Great Silo of Statesmanship in downtown Baton Rouge, Ted James is catching on to the new lingo of state politics quicker than the rest of us.

It is a drearily familiar scene.

If you want to campaign on God, country and patriotism, the usual stuff, don’t run for secretary of state in Louisiana.

"A change of scenery," Gov. John Bel Edwards called it, to contemplate the "end of the road" for the Legislature that has refused to deal with the "fiscal cliff."

In 1950, Baton Rouge's consolidation of city and parish government was considered all the rage in progressive circles, a way to make public services more efficient and provide a broader tax base. Lafayette government made the same decision in 1996.

There's no inherent contradiction between being nice and being persistent, but the combination of the two words used most often to describe urban planner Elizabeth "Boo" Thomas understate the case.

Few politicians do not enjoy attention, and Mitch Landrieu has been getting a lot as he winds up eight years as mayor of New Orleans. It has been an era of turnaround for the city, flooded after Hurricane Katrina.

As leader of the state House Republicans, state Rep. Lance Harris of Alexandria is often at odds with Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, and even with Jay Dardenne, the Republican budget officer for the state.

For the economic analysts, the location of a giant new Formosa plant in St. James Parish, promising 1,200 permanent jobs, is a function of objective factors. There is the Mississippi River and Louisiana’s network of pipelines, the neighboring petr…

It’s all conservative all the time, with Gov. John Bel Edwards himself joining in the avid discussion of work requirements for Medicaid recipients, almost all of whom are elderly, disabled or children.

What do Republican legislative leaders want?

For the economic analysts, location of a giant new Formosa plant in St. James Parish, promising 1,200 permanent jobs, is a function of objective factors. There is the Mississippi River and Louisiana’s network of pipelines, the neighboring petroche…

Of the frauds making the rounds of the State Capitol, the notion of a fresh start on a new Louisiana Constitution is one of the most durable.

When the Pilgrims found dry land at Plymouth Rock, the outcasts had to start the political thing from scratch. After all, as Puritans, they were dissenters, the second-class citizens of Britain, ineligible for most offices and functions in society.

With the Louisiana Legislature tied in partisan knots over the budget, could things be worse?

With party divisions entangling the Legislature in the State Capitol, the body's approval ratings have to be in the single digits, and that is particularly annoying to state senators, who feel dragged down by the collisions over budget and taxes i…

Last week, Jay Dardenne’s long and distinguished career was one of those featured in a video for his induction into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame, including his early activity as a Republican candidate and then officeholder.

The Daily State-Times of Baton Rouge bannered the news in 1909: “Five Million Dollar Company to Build Two Million Dollar Plant Here.”

Contrary to the popular image of the legendary leader during the Great Depression and the Second World War, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a politician who could be shiftier than Bill Clinton, more unreliable than Donald Trump and more brutal…

A famous and very mistaken assessment of a politician was made by columnist Walter Lippmann, who wrote before the 1932 election that Franklin D. Roosevelt was a pleasant man without apparent qualifications who very much wanted to be president.

A spokesman for Ohio’s state treasurer, Josh Mandel, wowed the crowd at the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry with a demonstration of Mandel’s pet project: the Ohio Checkbook.

After a decade of irresponsible budgeting and recurring crises, Gov. John Bel Edwards has won the argument at the State Capitol with one sentence: "This is entirely a self-inflicted wound."

When John Kirwan was recruited from the Cleveland Clinic, one of the premier medical institutions in the world, he came to Louisiana just in time for a doomsday budget — exactly the kind of problem that the new head of LSU's Pennington Biomedical …

With the decision of state officials to borrow $600 million from future federal highway revenues to jump-start three big projects, the allocation of more than half the money to Baton Rouge's interstate system shows how big the capital city's conge…

Officially, governors never do such things as trading state projects for votes in the Legislature. That would be wrong.

Even in the hothouse atmosphere of the Louisiana State Capitol, and with a new legislative session weeks away at least, tempers are getting short.

Former Gov. Edwin Edwards, at 90, has many times demonstrated the wisdom of one of his favorite sayings, a Chinese proverb: Wait by the river long enough, you’ll see the bodies of your enemies float by.