Baton Rouge won’t have an election for mayor-president until next year, and the incumbent Sharon Weston Broome is eligible to run for re-election because there’s a three-term limit and she’s just in her second term. What’s more, the demographics of East Baton Rouge Parish now appear such that there simply aren’t enough white Republican voters to stop Broome or someone who’ll govern just like her from winning the 2024 election.

We talk often here at The Hayride about Weaponized Governmental Failure as it explains the deliberate decline of cities controlled by Democrats. It turns out that Weaponized Governmental Failure is a modern version of something which used to be known as the Curley Effect. And if you don’t know what that is, it refers to the exploits of one James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20^th century (none of them consecutive; Curley was elected in 1913, 1921, 1929 and 1945) and a one-term governor of Massachusetts (from 1935 to 1937). Curley famously governed intentionally badly, using wasteful redistribution to the poor Irish constituents his machine served, along with colorful incendiary rhetoric and Otherization to drive the rich English and Protestants out of Beantown.

Boston stagnated badly under his misrule, but Curley kept winning elections, bouncing from the mayor’s office to Congress and to the governor’s mansion throughout a long and corrupt political career.

The modern version of the Curley Effect doesn’t contain very many Irish. Most of the foot soldiers in the Weaponized Governmental Failure model are the more contemporary identitarian groups – blacks, Hispanics, gays, perpetually single women and the other core Democrat constituencies – but the bulk of them are very similar to Curley’s mob in that they’re urban and poor.

And the process is very similar.

You don’t fill the potholes with the pothole money; you steal it. You spend lavishly on intentionally horrific public schools; that money is stolen and wasted, too. You denigrate the police to the point where morale is poisonous and the force stagnates and declines, and you insure the district attorneys and judges pander to the criminals rather than punishing them. You destroy the sewerage and water system, you fail at trash pickup, you don’t clean graffiti and you make the tax and regulatory environment so poisonous for business that all but a few favored firms give up and leave.

And you make sure that your rhetoric is as radical, unconventional and insane as you can make it. You attack churches, especially white ones, and you assail traditional morality as bigotry and celebrate as much cultural deviance as you can.

Baton Rouge’s government doesn’t embrace each and every one of the tenets of Weaponized Governmental Failure, but particularly under Broome it embraces enough of them. Like Curley, she has shaped the electorate such that she can’t lose.

Or can she?

Not that it would make Baton Rouge any better if Metro Councilwoman Chauna Banks, quite literally one of the stupidest human beings to ever hold office in Louisiana, were to somehow unseat Broome in the next election. But given the right field of candidates, there are scenarios where someone like Banks could either win or, as in what happened in Shreveport, damage Broome enough to squeeze her out of a runoff.

We’re not sure we’d bet on that happening, but it’s a possibility. And maybe it’s a possibility she’s considering – or at least that’s a reaction presented to us after this happened…

It was an explosive Metro Council meeting this past week. Many councilmembers were upset after the mayor’s office outsourced jobs for plant workers at a water treatment center.

Employees told the council they had little to no notice that this was going to happen.

“We received two memos. That’s it, two. The first one said we weren’t good at our jobs and we are going to give it away. The second one said ‘Omar got the job, pack your stuff up,'” a worker told the council.

Councilwoman Chauna Banks says there was a lack of communication on what would happen to the workers once their jobs were outsourced. She placed that blame on Mayor Sharon Weston Broome.

“We have absolutely the worst mayor and mayor’s administration that I have experienced in my 61 years,” Banks said.

But it’s an accusation that Glenn Curtis, the Chief Administrative Officer with the mayor’s office, disputes. He says the council knew what was going on with the workers for almost a year.

“The mayor is staunch on her commitment to make sure these employees have a soft landing that they want, as we can,” Curtis said.

This is a big fat nothing of a fight. It involves a wastewater plant on Gardere Lane that the city-parish is slowing running aground in much the same way that Jackson, Mississippi slowly burned down its water system, and the hiring of a private contractor in an effort to inject some measure of competence.

It’s a day in the life of Weaponized Governmental Failure, in other words, and it isn’t something you’d expect Banks or anybody else to get wrapped around the axle about. But what it portends, at least possibly, is Banks is trying to set the stage to run against Broome.

That has a certain Godzilla-vs-Rodan nature to it. The prospect of Broome and Banks duking it out in the middle of next year’s elections would be entertainingly depressing, and you’d almost hope they’d burn each other down completely.

We’re going to guess this doesn’t come off. We don’t know where the money would come from, for example, to finance a Chauna Banks mayoral run. Still, it’s the best explanation for why Chauna Banks would publicly pop off like that.

And yes, of course, she happens to be right. Broome is the worst mayor Baton Rouge has had in six decades, probably more. What’s more depressingly entertaining is the fact that if we were ever subjected to Chauna Banks in charge of Baton Rouge Sharon Weston Broome would look like Fiorella LaGuardia.