There are three Republicans and two Democrats on the five-man Louisiana Public Service Commission, and that ought to mean the three Republicans should be rotating the PSC’s chairmanship between them.

At least, that’s how you would expect it would go. But you’d be wrong, because yesterday one of the three Republicans was happy to flip over and make a Democrat the chairman.

Foster Campbell of North Louisiana was elected chairman of the Louisiana Public Service Commission at the LPSC’s first meeting of 2023 today in Baton Rouge.

Campbell, D-Bossier City, is District 5 representative on the LPSC. He is in his fourth six-year term on the commission representing 24 parishes in North Louisiana.

Campbell was nominated for chairman by Craig Greene, R-Baton Rouge, District 2 commissioner. New LPSC District 3 member Davante Lewis, D-Baton Rouge, seconded the motion.

Republican commissioners Mike Francis, District 4 member from Crowley, and Eric Skrmetta, District 1 member from Metairie, voted no.

“As Commissioner Lewis said, a lot of people in our state are depending on us,” Campbell said. “The work of this commission affects everybody’s pocketbook every day.

“I will allow everyone to speak and try to keep us getting along so we can do the people’s work.”

Campbell agreed to Greene’s suggestion that the LPSC return to a previous practice of rotating chairmanships among the five elected commissioners without favor or partisanship.

Foster Campbell has been on the PSC for a long time, and he’s specialized in essentially running an extortion racket to shake down companies the PSC regulates. He’s one of the most partisan hacks in Louisiana politics, constantly drumming up schemes to raid the private sector for more and more state-government swag as jobs, capital and people flee the Bayou State for better-run locales.

In other words, no Republican in his right mind would be breaking bread with this guy, and yet Craig Greene is doing it.

It’s unacceptable.

We don’t cover the PSC a whole lot here at The Hayride, because most of its work is hyper-complicated and very much in the weeds. One of the quickest ways to get a headache is to begin contemplating regulatory and systematic issues involving public utility transmission and pricing; it’s every bit as bad as insurance regulation as a subject for a political blog to provide analysis.

But choosing not to give the gavel to Foster Campbell, the leading – if not the last – Longite socialist in Louisiana politics isn’t complicated. It’s an easy call. If you want to put an “R” next to your name what you don’t want to do is to give Campbell any more power than he absolutely must have per the office the people of North Louisiana mistakenly elected him to.

And what’s worse is Greene joining with the Democrats to rotate the chairmanship among all five, which will lead to Davante Lewis getting to chair the PSC. Lewis, a crypto-gay Green New Deal neocommunist, might literally be the worst public service commissioner ever elected in Louisiana in terms of a lack of qualification for the position and the utterly destructive beliefs he possesses.

Everything about Lewis’ election was a disaster. He rode into office on the strength of $2 million spent by out-of-state environmental fascist organizations bent on shutting down the oil and gas industry in Louisiana and thus preventing its inputs into our power grid (they don’t want natural gas or coal fueling power plants, and they installed Lewis on the PSC to make that case). He ran on a promise that he’d lower electric rates, which have leaped skyward in the last two years thanks to Hurricane Ida and the expensive damage that storm did to Louisiana’s power grid and also the spike in natural gas prices thanks to Biden administration policies, and an informed electorate would have laughed him out of the race for the obvious fraud in his message.

But thanks to the massive spending imbalance on Lewis’ side as opposed to incumbent Lambert Boissiere, who was a bad vote on the PSC but not a catastrophic one, the voters in District 3 (the majority-minority district) never put two and two together.

Oh, and after Lewis won, every LGBTQ group in America put out press releases crowing about how he was the first “openly gay” elected official in Louisiana, something which was a big shock to the electorate – as those post-election press releases were the first they’d heard about his sexuality.

So Craig Greene thinks it’s a great idea for the PSC to have, two years out of every five, a Longite socialist extortionist and a crypto-gay Green New Deal neocommunist in charge of the commission. The question this brings is how often Greene is going to vote with the Democrats on matters of policy.

Should we start calling him Craig Greene New Deal now? Or is there a limit to the Stupid Party capitulation we saw yesterday?