Something tells us the next time there’s a congressional oversight hearing on flood recovery, John Bel Edwards is going to send some of his people to testify rather than doing it himself.

A pitcher who gets rocked this badly usually gets the hook from the team’s manager as fast as possible.

When the chairman of the committee asks you “You’re that clueless?”, it’s a bad day at the office.

And here was Rep. Mark Meadows asking Edwards about the controversy over the IEM bid for the flood recovery contract which was rejected for licensing issues (the Q&A starts around the 1:45 mark)…

And then there was the back-and-forth with Rep. Garret Graves, who has a major problem with the fact that the first tranche of federal money to the state, some $438 million worth, has apparently been held back at the state’s request. Edwards denied that and said the reason the federal government released both the $438 million and the subsequent $1.2 billion together is that the second tranche was expedited and the state couldn’t have gotten federal dollars any faster. Graves had little use for that statement and an argument ensued. Later in the hearing, Graves noted that he was in possession of several documents proving that what Edwards said about expediting funds was not true; when we get hold of those we’ll cover them in a separate post.

All in all Edwards suffered pretty badly at the hearing, which can only be described as a setback for him.