Our readers likely already know that Banks is the Baton Rouge Metro Council member pushing the bad idea to impose a residency requirement on police officers. She’s been attempting to push that dinosaur turd up a mountain for two weeks now, race-hustling freakshow in tow.

But today, Banks tripled down on her longshot gambit, guaranteeing victory Joe Namath-style.

Metro Councilwoman Chauna Banks says she’s confident a controversial measure requiring Baton Rouge Police Department hires to live within East Baton Rouge Parish will be approved by the council at today’s meeting.

Here’s a clue for Chauna – no, it won’t be approved.

There were nine votes out of 12 on the Metro Council two weeks ago to kill Banks’ residency requirement. Somehow, she thinks that because she’s amending it to only apply to new hires that’s going to flip four votes?

Umm, no.

John Delgado is the only Republican on that council anybody would even think might vote for a lefty move like that, and Delgado has blasted it in no uncertain terms. Here’s what he said about it to the Baton Rouge Business Report…

Councilman John Delgado remains strongly opposed to the proposal, which he says artificially limits the police department’s recruitment pool and is poorly thought-out.

“I fully expect the item to fail,” says Delgado, adding that he expects a lot of public discussion on the issue today.

Delgado says the proposal diminishes the memory of Matthew Gerald, Brad Garafola and Montrell Jackson. The three local officers were shot and killed by a lone gunman in July; all of them lived in Livingston Parish.

“Were they worse police officers because they didn’t live in the city?” he asked. “I think it diminishes their memory to suggest that they would have been better police officers if they would have been from Baton Rouge. They still protected us.”

There are seven Republicans out of 12 on the council. You can’t pass anything without seven votes. Banks would need two Republicans not named John Delgado in order to pass this requirement. She’s not getting any of them.

What she is going to get is a pissing match with Delgado…

“Anybody who votes against this, they’ve got to be checked,” Banks says. “We have to look at them and say, ‘Where is the hypocrisy in you?’”

…

Banks says there’s no relationship between the fallen officers and the residency requirement.

“I think it’s very inappropriate for him, especially when it was so fresh with these families, to try to bring politics into something that was so horrific,” she says.

The thing to watch for this evening, if it happens, is for one of the Metro Council members to amend Banks’ proposal to change out her residency requirement for, instead, a bonus for police officers who choose to live within the parish.

If that becomes the question, it changes the debate in a way that makes Banks look like an idiot. For one thing, it co-opts her message about how cops living in the jurisdiction whose laws they enforce is a societal good, something which is certainly an open question, but it changes the approach from the stick to the carrot.

And for another, consequently, it exposes Banks and her supporters as cop-haters if they won’t agree to provide incentives rather than penalties to get the desired result.

Either way, one thing we’re sure of is that residency requirement is just as dead today as it was two weeks ago. And Banks knows that. Why she’s guaranteeing a result which will not happen is beyond us.

Perhaps she never heard the old adage “Better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”