Mass incarceration is an epidemic of many dimensions, from systemic racism to public health. Louisiana offers a stark example.
Aug. 29 may not loom as large on the summer calendar as it did in the first years after Hurricane Katrina, but with Laura heading toward the Louisiana/Texas border, the approach of the disaster’s 15th anniversary this week was infused with a deepe…
Superficially, it would seem as if Gary Landrieu’s goal in entering the governor’s race was to misdirect voters who might mistake him for his cousin Mitch — or at least with the famous branch of the family, the one that has given the world two New…
Gov. John Bel Edwards is running his opening campaign ad of the season — in heavy rotation on air and online, his staff points out — and the very first face all those viewers will see is former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s.
I’ll leave it to the lawyers to hash out whether U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham’s gubernatorial campaign had a right to simply take an old, iconic television commercial for the Dodge Ram and slap its own logo on it. That is, if lawyers for the automotive…
Last week, in an Orlando rally that basically replicated all other rallies he’s held, President Donald Trump kicked off his reelection bid.
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Color me skeptical that President Donald Trump is in any danger of losing in Louisiana next year, despite a new poll suggesting it may be so.
As much as any politician forced out of office due to inappropriate personal behavior, former Secretary of State Tom Schedler still had a reputation he hoped to uphold.
The legislative session is over, lawmakers have gone home or gone fishing, and Gov. John Bel Edwards has shifted into campaign mode.
Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the new $30 billion state operating budget this week without making a single line-item veto, which speaks to the relative fiscal peace that eventually emerged at the end of the recent legislative session.
There was a time when former Secretary of State Tom Schedler, accused of a chilling pattern of sexual harassment of a female employee, thought he could hold on. Back in March 2018, when the Republican onetime state senator announced that he’d fore…
A new state law that could sharply limit access to abortion drew a sharp rebuke recently from a unanimous New Orleans City Council.
Maybe it’s because Arkansas borders Ralph Abraham’s northeast Louisiana congressional district. Maybe he’s a real, genuine fan of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Or maybe the GOP gubernatorial candidate is just planning ahead.
Her predecessor, Mitch Landrieu, spent more than two decades working in Baton Rouge, first as a state legislator and then as lieutenant governor. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell came up a different way, as a community organizer and later member …
Would anyone out there have predicted that former Gov. Bobby Jindal and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, might find common ground?
Some news stories come and go in a day. Some drag on for years.
I don’t think U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy makes a habit of checking this space for advice, so I can’t take credit for a decision he’s clearly made. I can, though, applaud him for doing what I believe to be the right thing.
It’s probably overstating things to call the just-completed legislative session a shoo-shoo. After all, some significant things did happen.
Sometimes, in the very last hours and even minutes of a legislative session, things just fall apart. This year, the convoluted end of the online fantasy sports betting debate goes down as Exhibit A.
Now that the current incarnation of the Louisiana Legislature has closed the books on its four-year-term, it’s easy to pinpoint the single most consequential policy vote: An agreement, after three years of fighting, to temporarily raise state sale…
It’s a nice cover story, the one that state Rep. Katrina Jackson told to explain why she pushed a vote on her controversial constitutional amendment on abortion from Election Day 2019 until 2020. Jackson, a Democrat from Monroe, said that more peo…
U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader from New York, generally don’t come down on the same side of things — particularly when those things involve President Donald Trump.
Louisiana U.S. Reps. Mike Johnson, R-Benton, and Clay Higgins, R-Port Barre, had better pray that the rains stay away from their districts. And the tornadoes and hurricanes, not to mention the other unpredictable but increasingly common extreme we…
The legislative session is almost over. So maybe it’s time for lawmakers to stop doing damage.
The looming retirement of state Sen. Gerald Long, R-Winnfield, marks the end of Louisiana’s most storied political dynasty; once he leaves the Capitol, no member of the family will hold state or federal office in Louisiana for the first time in 72 years.
Louisiana generally doesn’t get to play much of a role in presidential elections.
While many of his fellow leading congressional Democrats are holding back and waiting for the party’s large presidential field to winnow, U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond decided to get out front and make an early endorsement. His candidate: Former Vice …
Legislating during an election year is often one part theater and one part governance. The just-concluded drama over whether lawmakers would roll back the sales tax they approved just last year certainly fits the first category, right down to a pr…
When I first saw the tweet attributed to Attorney General Jeff Landry, I thought the source might be one of those mischievous parody accounts, not the official lawyer for the state of Louisiana.
Last week, during a monthly radio call-in show that normally doesn’t veer into such sensitive territory, a caller asked Gov. John Bel Edwards why he’d “prefer I have to give birth to my rapist's baby" rather than have an abortion.
For a long time, proponents of the National Flood Insurance Program — well represented among Louisiana’s delegation for obvious reasons — had to work around a Republican Congressman from Texas. Jeb Hensarling was chairman of the House Financial Se…
The wider world, and even some Louisianans who weren’t paying attention, seem to just be discovering a basic truth about Gov. John Bel Edwards. Yes, he’s a Democrat — a real, true-believing, progressively minded one. And yes, he opposes legal abortion.
I wrote the other day about a meaningful vote that never happened, presumably because members of the state Senate didn’t want to be identified as opponents. The bill on the table would have allowed Louisiana voters to decide whether to institute a…
The Louisiana Senate doesn’t want Louisiana residents to vote on whether to raise the minimum wage.
The juxtaposition jumped out at me from my Twitter feed, as it was clearly designed to do. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the Taliban.
Grace Notes: Without leaving any fingerprints, minimum wage opponents kill bill to let voters decide
Watching the Legislature in action is rarely an uplifting experience, but Tuesday afternoon’s Senate consideration of a constitutional amendment to allow voters to decide on a modest minimum wage increase was particularly depressing.
Roy Wright, the former director of the National Flood Insurance Program, has a point. It’s not at all clear that Congress has the will to make any hard decisions about reforming and stabilizing the program he once headed, one that enables many res…
When Republican President Donald Trump stopped in Louisiana last week, I don’t think anybody imagined he’d leave behind a big gift for Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Thankfully for millions of people who currently benefit from the law, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy’s efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act two years ago faltered. So for now, people with pre-existing conditions are still guaranteed coverage at general…
When Republican President Donald Trump stopped in Louisiana last week, I don’t think anybody imagined he’d leave behind a big gift for Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Thankfully for millions of people who currently benefit from the law, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy’s efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act two years ago faltered. So for now, people with pre-existing conditions are still guaranteed coverage at general…
Political history is replete with rise-and-fall stories, but rarely has someone risen so fast and then fallen so far as former Gov. Bobby Jindal.
You can forgive Kirk Williamson, a Republican candidate for the state House this fall, for being pumped over his brief recent encounter at Louis Armstrong International Airport with President Donald Trump, which ended in what sounds like a fly-by,…
Stephanie Grace: Louisiana teachers deserve higher pay. We all know it. So why the political battle?
If you’re a public school teacher or support worker in Louisiana, there’s some indisputable good news emerging from the ongoing legislative session: Just about everybody gathered in Baton Rouge wants to give you a raise, albeit a modest one.
For nowhere near the first time and definitely not the last, the New Orleans City Council is meeting on Thursday to consider the future shape and scope of the city’s short-term rental market. This time, the agenda calls for council members to once…
It’s one thing to know that New Orleans is suffering, badly, from a chronic case of aging infrastructure. It’s another to see it in black and white, not to mention red.
President Donald Trump is spending Tuesday in Louisiana visiting a liquified natural gas facility in Cameron Parish to highlight his policies deregulating the industry, and then raising money in Metairie for his reelection.
I’m picking up a little bit of defensiveness from Attorney General Jeff Landry when it comes to this whole protecting people with preexisting conditions thing. Could it be that he’s figured out, finally, that he’s on the wrong side of the fight th…
The median household income in Jefferson Parish between 2013 and 2017 was just shy of $51,000, according to U.S. Census figures. As an at-large Parish Councilman until late last month, Chris Roberts made more than twice that, $112,000.
Anyone who’s casually following the legislative session might be tempted to lump the so-called “tampon tax” bill in with the season’s less-than-serious initiatives, like proposed laws to prevent the product commonly known as almond milk from being…
There was widespread horror when the general public found out that Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office had jailed victims of sexual and domestic violence to force them to testify in court against their abusers.