Guns, abortion and race are the key identifiers of political leanings across the nation.
State Rep. John Stefanski says he’s been on the phone pretty much nonstop since returning home to Crowley after the 2022 legislative session ended Monday.
Since the session began in March, Louisiana legislators have engaged in plenty of fractious debates over political wedge issues from abortion access and gun rights to transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports and government efforts to …
The Schoolhouse Rock song gives short shrift to what actually happens while a lonely bill “hopes and prays” to one day become a law.
Staffers sprint back and forth across Memorial Hall seeking signatures as the clock ticks. Legislators storm the podium demanding a vote in the minutes before the legislative session adjourns.
After about an hour last week of reviewing U.S. Supreme Court decisions that stated the bill was unconstitutional, the Republican majority on the Louisiana House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice advanced the legislation for a fu…
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Almost a decade had passed when Lake Charles Republican Rep. Brett Geymann recently approached the podium in the Louisiana House to add dense financialese on page 12 in the preamble of the state operating budget. The House agreed.
“Time is running out” on America’s democracy that socialists are working tooth and nail to destroy, at least so claims a fundraising appeal emailed last week by incumbent U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican who has represented Lafayette, Lake Cha…
Spencer Hudson was making drinks March 20 behind the bar at the Cat’s Meow in the French Quarter when he crumpled dead to the floor, shot in the chest by a stray bullet that was fired at someone else outside on Bourbon Street.
If one thing rings true about the Louisiana Legislature, it’s full of irony-impaired lawmakers.
After a relentless campaign among Republican legislators to lower auto insurance rates by complicating the filing and winning of lawsuits, some lawmakers last week said they’ve had enough.
It probably wasn’t as bad a week as when homes started flooding with little warning in August 2016. Or the week in July 2016 that started with being told while getting ready for church that three law officers had been killed in an ambush amid raci…
After a brief respite because of the COVID pandemic, legislative attention has circled back to the 62 death row inmates living on the backside of Angola.
Democratic state Rep. Cedric Glover recently finished his fourth redistricting effort and one theme has flowed through each: If you give partisans the power to draw the lines of their own districts, they will do so in a way that guarantees their p…
As one of Louisiana’s most outspoken knockers of critical race theory, Denham Springs Republican Rep. Valarie Hodges recalled one of the most profoundly embarrassing moments from a 2021 legislative session that featured many.
Next week Louisiana heads into its regular legislative session, which begins March 14, with a plate full of bills on issues from abolishing capital punishment to expanding gun rights to limiting transgender athletes’ access.
At the start of each Louisiana Voting System Commission meeting, First Assistant Secretary of State Nancy Landry reads the law that formed the group. Her usual monotone became animated Wednesday — the day the commission was to make its formal reco…
After months of gathering voter opinions and weeks of deliberation, Louisiana legislators delivered plans Friday that protect themselves from being turned out of office by voters for the next decade.
House Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee repeated variations of “We looked at all options and this is the approach we took” during Thursday’s debate of House Bill 1.
No lawmaker will say it aloud, though several privately admit to the strategy of asking the courts to redistrict Louisiana should Republican legislators fail to voluntarily give up power — particularly over whether this state sends two Black congr…
A dream in Baton Rouge, the one passed from parents to children, is building another bridge across the Mississippi River that can drain off enough Interstate 10 bypass traffic to keep everyday errands and commutes from becoming grinding slogs.
For years, White legislators have neutered minority participation in Louisiana politics and that needs to be corrected, at least so say the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and 15 other human rights organizations that have submitted dozens of proposals re…
President Joe Biden likened senators opposing federal voting rights legislation to Confederates and segregationists.
Moments after the Louisiana Department of Health last week tweeted about a new program promoting COVID-19 vaccinations for teenagers, the Twitter comment section filled with derogatory statements.
Many people would be happy picking up the latest Paula Hawkins thriller to while away the holiday.
Within two weeks of Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ March 11, 2020, suspension of most business activities in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, protesters showed up outside the Governor’s Mansion carrying signs saying “JBHitler, free Louisiana!”
Mark Ballard: Despite claims from the politicians, stimulus spending not the only cause of inflation
Just prior to Thanksgiving, U.S. Sen. John N. Kennedy took to the Senate floor to say, correctly, that this holiday season people would see more expensive groceries and gasoline because of the steepest inflation in 31 years.
Two recent national surveys show that a year after Donald Trump was defeated at the polls about two-thirds of his supporters and Republicans still believe the election was stolen.
The 81st District is one of the more venerable seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives. And it’s a good example of what’s about to happen when legislators sit down in February for the political task of redrawing the lines of districts from…
The passage of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, IIJA, was a generational change in how government approaches neglected roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other fundamental structures upon which the nation’s economy…
Baton Rouge pollster John Couvillon said after Tuesday’s huge Republican wins that in many ways Virginia is a larger version of Louisiana. Blue cities, purplish suburbs, outnumbered by red exurbs and rural regions.
Fearing their children would be blamed for the nation’s history of racism, cadres of Louisiana parents last summer stormed the usually dry meetings of academics updating curriculum for about 720,000 students in the state’s public schools.
As memory of the overly hot days without power after Hurricane Ida recedes, talk about “hardening” the electrical grid will become more abstract.
The exercise is as old as the Republic, but the first thing you need to understand about redistricting is that hot-water cornbread is as ubiquitous in north Louisiana as étouffée is in the south, says Rick Gallot, the Ruston Democratic representat…
Bureaucracy doesn’t faze Houma Republican state Rep. Tanner Magee. You deal with it, he says, particularly when trying to find temporary shelter for the 10,000 Terrebonne Parish families left homeless by Hurricane Ida.
Throughout my life, our family gatherings were basically cops and pastors of all political stripes and religious philosophies sitting together to break bread and explore differences, usually at the top of their lungs. Then everyone hugged, rearmed…
All we know is that someone or a group of someones hacked into a public Zoom meeting to throw up explicit scenes of people having sex when Louisiana Public Service Commission members tried to discuss what happened to utility and telecommunications…
Now that most people have their power restored — a lot faster than in the past — Louisiana can transition back to more divisive issues, like abortion.
Along with tossing out spoiled food and mucking out saturated Sheetrock, another hallmark of a major Louisiana storm is postponing elections.
One of the silver linings of being without power for several days is that neighbors sit outside and visit, rather than cocoon in air conditioning and Netflix.
Like the dog that finally caught the car, Louisiana officials are faced with the “now what?” question.
“They can’t arrest all of us,” the Rev. Tony Spell, of Central, shouted last week spurring an angry crowd of people who refused to don masks at a hearing convened to decide whether the governor has the authority to order school children to wear ma…
To vaccinate or not has become the region’s gravest social dilemma.
Angry Louisiana conservatives are looking for reasons why they lost last week’s two-day veto override session that failed to overcome a single bill rejected by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.
The Republican majorities in the Legislature made history. They will convene noon Tuesday for the first session, ever, to override the vetoed bills of a governor — bringing Louisiana fully into the partisan warfare that has erupted across the nation.
When children are victims in, say, a car wreck and are awarded substantial damages by the court, judges generally appoint someone to ensure the money is spent on medical care and education rather than on a new boat for Dad.
Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards took several punches last week from the Republican legislative majority and likely will take several more this week as GOP lawmakers march toward an unprecedented special session to override his vetoes.
As a young student, the father of incoming LSU President William F. Tate IV gave him a copy of the U.S. Constitution. “When I was teenager, my father handed me the Federalist Papers and basically said ‘You have to understand this’,” Tate recalled …
Sen. Jay Luneau calls them “the twins” because of how often they testify side-by-side before his Senate Labor & Industrial Relations Committee, arguing diametrically opposed views.
A lot of the television and social media coverage last week centered on state Rep. Malinda White being hustled into a side room after losing her temper at a colleague in the center aisle of the Louisiana House chamber. Not as much publicity surrou…
Will Harrell, a criminal justice warrior at the State Capitol, scolded himself last week for thinking he saw a sea change in the traditional tough-on-crime stance that has made Louisiana a world leader for incarcerating its population. What he rea…