You probably didn’t hear what happened on the floor of the Louisiana Senate yesterday. That’s really not a surprise, as nobody would have been paying attention to the Senate over the Memorial Day holiday.

But there they were on the floor, slaving away at the state budget.

Well, not really. The Senate passed a measure busting the state’s statutory spending caps and frittering away all of our surplus money on the legislative equivalent of hookers and blow. They want to piss away $2.2 billion that could go toward paying off state debt and thus shrinking government.

Surely there was conservative opposition to that, right? Well…

Perhaps there might have been some, at some point, but the Senate passed their spending-cap-busting bacchanal by the slim margin of…

39-0.

With 34 co-authors.

This despite every reasonable observer on the center and right demanding that Louisiana’s budget surplus, coming as it does not from a healthy, growing economy but instead from rampant overtaxation (people are leaving the state in droves, not coming in, and that’s a reflection on the price of being here as too high) and a mountain of swag dumped on us from the federal government.

The Soros-funded Louisiana Budget Project has advocated the hookers-and-blow strategy. LABI says keep the budget caps in place.

And a Senate with 27 Republicans and 12 Democrats goes with the Budget Project’s recommendation. Unanimously. And they do it under cover of a holiday, so nobody’s around to see what they’re doing or to report on it.

Now it’s up to the House to stand firm against breaking the spending caps. There are 46 House members who are on record publicly opposing busting the caps. We’ll see if 36 of them stick to that position; if they do, then the Senate’s vote yesterday was meaningless. But the pressure to cave will be enormous, and it’s really remarkable that we’re in this position with what’s supposed to be a Republican supermajority in both houses.

Which tells us that the default position this fall ought to be not to re-elect anybody in the Louisiana Senate. All of them ought to be run off.

Which hurts, a little, because there are some people in that body we thought were somewhat useful.

But we can’t support the re-election of somebody who votes for blowing $2.2 billion in non-recurring funds on things like roads which won’t be built for 10 years. Or buildings at Louisiana’s public colleges which aren’t all that likely to be used. If you’re voting for that, all you’re doing is sucking up to Senate President Page Cortez, who’s little more than a sock puppet for John Bel Edwards.

Cortez is singing a happy horseshit song about how you’re better off spending money on infrastructure now when you have it than trying to bond it out later when interest rates are high as a result of Joe Biden’s stupid inflationary policies (which are the reason all this money has landed in Louisiana’s treasury to begin with). In something other than the real world there would be some sense in that, but here’s the problem: the construction industry in this state, or at least the segment of it that builds roads, is fully employed now. Letting a new road project at this point can’t even hardly be done, because the construction companies who’d bid on it are already loaded down with work.

So anything you fund now just goes into a backlog.

Why would you insist on spending government money in such an environment? You have people leaving the state in droves because our tax environment is confiscatory for productive citizens compared to our neighbors in Texas, Tennessee and Florida, and even in Mississippi and Arkansas, sad to say, and you don’t invest your surplus in tax relief?

What kind of Republicans are these people?

The state GOP put out a press release on Friday asking legislators not to bust the caps. Here’s what it said…

Earlier this month, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed legislation to use surplus funds to pay off decades old retirement debt for state and local school boards. Paying off this debt will save Louisiana hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments and will empower locals to give long term pay raises to our teachers without putting the state in an unsustainable financial position.

Congratulations to House Republicans for adopting such an outstanding fiscally responsible plan. Please let your legislators know that we must stay the course and reject efforts to bust the state’s constitutionally mandated spending cap. This will save the state more than two billion dollars.

Just three days later every single member of the Senate flipped the GOP the bird on orders from Cortez and John Bel Edwards.

Well, the bird is flipping right back at you guys. Right now none of you should be re-elected. That vote yesterday makes worthless bums out of all of you, and it’ll take a significant act of repentance and a damn convincing mea culpa before we’d entertain the idea of supporting your re-election. We’ll go and elect a new class of bums rather than reward the current bums, if you’re going to be bums.

It’s sad, but doing the same stupid things gets you the same stupid results. The House has figured out how to wise up and show some fiscal restraint, but the Senate is stuck on stupid, and so we need as many new members of the Senate as we can get next year.