Events over the past couple of weeks signal trouble ahead for Louisiana House of Representatives Republican Speaker Clay Schexnayder.

Term-limited, Schexnayder spent months expressing interest in various statewide offices to continue his political career. Finally, after current Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin surprisingly announced he would desist from reelection, Schexnayder threw in his lot for that post.

That pits him against former SOS candidate and current Republican Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, who carries a hefty war chest and extensive connections with state Republicans from his past party service including a stint as chairman. Grocery chain owner Brandon Trosclair also stands in his way.

And now so does another past GOP politician of some repute. Republican former state representative and current First Assistant Secretary of State, Nancy Landry has announced she will contest for the job as well. Landry gained notice during her 2008-20 service in the House for promulgating and protecting an education agenda that focused on school accountability and choice. The last two chief lieutenants of the secretary succeeded their former bosses at the ballot box; prior to Ardoin’s deferral the previous three elected ones had left before their terms were up because of death, winning another office, or resignation.

But by all appearances, this hadn’t been Landry’s plan. Her campaign finance account has next to nothing in it and hasn’t been active in years. Further, she threw her that into the ring publicly nearly a month after Ardoin revealed he wouldn’t seek reelection, meaning she had no warning of that this would happen and was starting from scratch without any premeditation on pursuing the top spot.

Her jumping in also serves as a political indictment of Schexnayder. When he entered the race just after Ardoin’s exit, it appeared he was angling for Ardoin’s supporters as his base. Both obviously are capitol insiders, and Schexnayder was carrying about $700,000 in campaign funds which could go a long way towards capturing his support.

Yet Landry wouldn’t have undertaken a surprise campaign, and particularly with no real resources, unless Ardoin’s backers assured her of some support. This means at least some substantial portion of them vetted Schexnayder, found him coming up short, and searched for if not petitioned somebody else like Landry to step up.

That political fact of life adds another pessimistic piece to Schexnayder’s political future beyond what has happened within the body that he leads. Last month, he fronted HB 562 that would have canceled the 2025 sunset of the Motion Picture Investors tax credit and restored it to an open-ended status – the dream scenario of an industry that has raked in over $2 billion in the past two decades of taxpayer resources.

When a speaker sponsors a bill, typically members of his party fall in line behind it since their party leader has authority over their committee assignments and considerable influence over the fate of their bills and line-item budget requests. And for Democrats in the Legislature recently this cause and anything having to do with renewable energy are the only forms of corporate welfare they have backed. These dynamics ordinarily would have assured HB 562, despite a vocal minority opposing rescuing the credit in any way, relatively unmolested smooth sailing.

Instead, at its committee hearing the panel jettisoned getting rid of the issuance cap and merely pushed back the sunset until 2035, actions which could not have occurred without Schexnayder’s blessing, whether he faced pressure from an inability to round up enough votes without the changes. Things became worse when this month it hit the floor where the giveaway nature of the program was attenuated by amending into it a progressive reduction in credit refundability to its elimination by 2035 that had been telegraphed in committee questioning, clearly indicating that he hadn’t exactly volunteered to what in the main became a neutering of the bill from its original intent.

The roughing up of a speaker’s bill simply doesn’t happen unless he has an unsteady grip on power. Then, even more humiliatingly, last week his speaker pro tem GOP state Rep. Tanner Magee, as the only floor amendment to HB 1 or the general appropriations bill over which the speaker has enormous influence, inserted a provision designed to encourage elimination of the film tax credit immediately, although it is highly unlikely to come to fruition.

This chain of events can be explained only in one of two ways. Either Schexnayder totally sandbagged the rent-seeking film crowd, which wouldn’t help his campaign much if they felt he burned them, or he made promises his diminishing political stroke couldn’t cash in. Add to that Landry’s entry only can mean he doesn’t impress much the very base he hoped to rope in, altogether paints a picture of a politician’s power eroding significantly to the point he doesn’t stand much of a chance to extend his political shelf life.