If you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the Louisiana legislature as it enters the final week of this year’s regular session, what you know is that Senate President Page Cortez, who has an uncanny and hard-to-understand Jim Jones-esque hold on his fellow senators, have decided to embark on the most irresponsible and weird budgetary suicide mission imaginable.

They’re hell-bent on drinking the Kool-Aid, to follow our Jim Jones/Guyana analogy, and busting the state’s statutory spending caps so they can blow $2.3 billion in budget surpluses now.

And they’re engaging in a brinksmanship even more intense than ever. Supposedly over the weekend the Senate came up with some 2,000 budget amendments they’re going to vote on before sending the entire mess back to the House with virtually no time left on the clock before this session is due to end on Thursday.

And we’ve yet to find any real opposition to this gambit on Cortez’ part.

These are supposedly Republicans, by the way – or at least 27 of them are.

At Citizens for a New Louisiana, Mike Lunsford had a very good piece well worth reading which noted that 36 House Republicans can put a stop to this Jonestown-style fiscal suicide by simply standing firm against breaking the caps. A quick excerpt…

The term “busting the cap” refers to the spending cap. The idea is to explode spending beyond the limits set up a long time ago as something of an agreement between voters and the legislature. In this particular session, Senate President, Page Cortez (R 1/10), is the author of Senate Concurrent Resolution 3 (SCR3). That resolution’s goal is to throw all inhibitions aside, remove the state’s spending cap, and empty the treasury on his way out the door. The increase he’s proposing is $2.3 BILLION in total.

The only problem is, nobody knows upon what he wants to spend that $2.3 BILLION! Session ends on Thursday, June 8th. As of this writing, the budget (House Bill 1, or HB1 for short) has been sitting in the senate for an entire month. No senate amendments have been made public. They’re waiting to reveal their grand plans for this new spending spree too late for any reasonable debate on any of it. Just pass it, or else.

That was before the 2,000 amendments dropped, but the point still remains. This is a smash-and-grab operation for outgoing legislators like Cortez to spend all of the money so they ride off into the sunset with post-politics favors they’re owed.

A little more from Lunsford’s piece…

The theory goes that the Senators, rather than making enemies with President Page Cortez, just abdicated their fiscal responsibility to the House. Normally, to move good legislation in the house, it requires fifty-three (53) to agree. That’s the majority vote with a hundred and five (105) legislators. However, because “busting the cap” breaks the rules, it requires a two-thirds (2/3) vote, or seventy (70) legislators. That means 69 votes won’t do it, so the fiscal conservatives only need 36 to hold the line.

Never before in Louisiana history has the course for our entire future been in the hands of such a small number of legislators. These 36 control the fate of $2.3 BILLION that Page Cortez, Clay Schexnayder, and John Bel Edwards want to squander before time runs out.

The list is guarded, however some legislators have the courage to wear the “36” label on their lapels. They are the mighty 36 – not the fraud squad gang of 23. It’s absolutely fantastic that they are wearing an outward symbol of their oath of office as a clothing accessory.

Failed shenanigans so far

On May 31st, Speaker Clay Schexnayder (R 1/10) called a vote to hurry SCR3 through the process. He tried to break the rules to send it to committee earlier than allowed. That motion failed to garner the required two-thirds vote, achieving only 57:41. Then, yesterday, they held an impromptu meeting at the desk of Paula Davis (R 3/10). Apparently they couldn’t find sufficient agreement so nothing happened.

We’ve heard from several members that the meeting was about finding enough votes to discharge SCR3 from the appropriations committee. That would have eliminated all public comment on the bill. However, of the 57 members who voted to break the rules to send it to committee early, they couldn’t find the 53 votes necessary to avoid public comment.

We can’t say that there will be 41, or 36, House Republicans who’ll continue to say now to the pressure tactics Cortez is trying to impose.

But what we have to add to this is that it isn’t just a simple spending bacchanal. Something else is going on.

Cortez has told people of his animus toward Jeff Landry, the conservative frontrunner for governor. He’s also let it out that he’s out to get Landry, for whatever personal reasons he might have. And everybody knows that Edwards is also out to get him.

It has happened before in Louisiana history that an outgoing governor – even and especially one named Edwards – has sabotaged his successor by leaving him with a budget mess, or a “fiscal cliff,” that hamstrings him.

Edwin Edwards did it multiple times, first to Dave Treen and then to a lesser extent to both Buddy Roemer and Mike Foster. And though she didn’t specifically design it that way, Kathleen Blanco did it to Bobby Jindal. Blanco’s massive budgets were bloated with Katrina recovery money which melted away over time, and the Obama “stimulus” money which buttressed state finances in Jindal’s first term also melted away. His failing was that he wasn’t aggressive enough in drawing down the state’s spending early, so he was constantly cutting the budget as the federal dollars dried up and being lambasted as “destroying” the state.

Landry is all but certain to be accused of the same, because he’s almost certainly going to attack the utter waste and fraud – and total governmental overreach – loaded into the budget as it stands. The best way to set the stage for that is to hold the line on spending the $2 billion plus in surplus dollars the state is sitting on now, so that the money can be used to pay down debt and earn a bit of a return sitting in the rainy day fund, so that when things like tax reform come, the state can pad its budget shrinkage with less overhead and more savings.

We already know that the 0.45-cent state sales tax hike Edwards demanded (which Louisiana did not need, contrary to his histrionics about canceling college football if he didn’t get the tax increase) is scheduled to roll off the books. We’re told that this will bring on a “fiscal cliff” and a budget disaster. Well, if you’re running a big surplus now and you can use it to pay off debt and shrink the amount of money that will need to be spent on debt service, that would mean less of a fiscal cliff, right?

If you were a responsible leader, then that’s what you’d do. If you were a jackass committed to a hookers-and-blow, drink-the-Kool-Aid-in-Jonestown strategy, you wouldn’t.

And if you were deliberately trying to set the likely next governor up for failure by saddling him with the biggest “fiscal cliff” you could, so that he’d come into office having to either raise taxes or embark on budget cuts the state media would scream and howl are “draconian” and “destructive” and “irresponsible,” you absolutely would.

Which is what this is.

That Edwards is trying to do it isn’t surprising. Elect a Democrat and that’s what he’ll do, which is why you should never elect a Democrat.

What’s unforgivable is that Cortez is carrying Edwards’ water on this project, and that the other Republican senators are going along with it.

Landry really should address this publicly, and he ought to call out Cortez for his fiscal irresponsibility and challenge the rest of the Senate, and particularly the senators who expect to run for re-election this fall, to have a lot more forward-thinking mentality.

But what’s starting to become clear is that this fall’s election in Louisiana won’t just need to produce a conservative Republican governor committed to dismantling the blue-state Huey Long socialist model of governance we’re saddled with. We need a state legislature full of people willing to shed some political blood for that project as well. And at least in the Senate we don’t have much of anybody we can count on for that endeavor.