…because of course they do. Wicker wouldn’t agree to go along with a stupid plan to block the Baton Rouge Metro Council’s appointment of Denise Amoroso to fill her deceased husband Buddy Amoroso’s seat, and this makes her Judas Iscariot in a dress, dontchaknow.

Two Old South Baton Rouge residents and an NAACP representative filed a petition Thursday to recall Councilwoman Tara Wicker, who came under fire from the NAACP after voting last week to appoint  Denise Amoroso to a Metro Council seat previously held by Amoroso’s husband.

Old South Baton Rouge residents Cynthia Jones and Peter Menson and NAACP President Byron Sharper filed the recall petition together, though Sharper does not live in Wicker’s district. Jones said the desire to file the petition has grown stronger and stronger as she said Wicker has become less and less responsive to her community’s needs.

“She doesn’t communicate with the public,” Jones said. “I’m not angry with Tara, but I want to see some progress in south Baton Rouge. Everything is being built downtown and at LSU.”

The petition organizers now have 180 days to gather signatures from 33.3 percent of registered voters in Wicker’s council district, which encompasses Old South Baton Rouge, downtown and parts of north Baton Rouge as well.

Now would be a good time to reiterate something we said last week after the depressing horror show put on by the social justice crowd at the Metro Council meeting at which Amoroso was appointed as the District 8 representative – namely that what the opponents were attempting to achieve was never going to happen.

Their hope was to throw the Metro Council appointment to Gov. John Bel Edwards, to whom by state law it would have gone if the Council wasn’t able to deliver seven votes for a replacement, and then have Edwards appoint a black Democrat to represent a district which is only 31 percent black and in which Amoroso, a conservative white Republican, got 67 percent of the vote in a three-way primary election in 2016. In this way a 7-5 white Republican majority on the Metro Council would become a 6-6 deadlock until the March 2019 election of Amoroso’s more permanent replacement.

Edwards was never – NEVER – going to do that. District 8, which is roughly bordered on the west by Sherwood Forest Boulevard, on the north by Old Hammond Highway, on the east by O’Neal Lane and on the south by Airline Highway, Jefferson Highway and Tiger Bend Road, is one of the places in Baton Rouge in which might be found the “Jay Dardenne Republicans” in sizable numbers – Republican voters who nevertheless opted for Edwards over David Vitter following Dardenne’s cutting a deal with Edwards to be his Commissioner of Administration in exchange for an endorsement. Saddling them with someone sounding and voting like Chauna Banks as a Metro Council representative would be tantamount to surrendering any hope of retaining their votes in next year’s gubernatorial election, and Edwards was hardly going to do that.

Particularly when doing so would net him not a single extra vote from the black community in 2019.

Wicker recognized this, though her primary motivation wasn’t to be found there. She didn’t join the cabal of Banks, Erika Green, Donna Collins-Lewis and Lamont Cole in attempting to block the appointment because she knew it was morally wrong to use Amoroso’s death as a political tool.

So now they’re going to try to recall her, and that’s a petition worth watching. Because if that recall effort is successful – a prospect that at first glance we find doubtful – then it’s an indication of just how far gone the black community in Old South Baton Rouge and parts north of Florida Boulevard actually is and whether there is anything left to salvage.

In the meantime another petition in circulation, the one to incorporate St. George in parts of Amoroso’s district and elsewhere in the unincorporated areas in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish, continues to add both steam and an air of inevitability. It’s hard to blame the St. George crowd, after all – Wicker’s ordeal shows just how hostile some of their opponents really are.