Rep. Dodie Horton’s takedown of the idiocy surrounding Louisiana’s budget is well worth reading this morning, but there’s something else you’ll want to have a look at if you want to truly understand just how bad the spending orgy was at the Louisiana legislature.

It’s a series of tweets by The Pelican Institute’s Jamie Tairov, who spent more than a decade analyzing the Louisiana budget as a legislative staffer. Jamie went through HB 560, which was the supplemental budget bill, after it was passed and what she found was downright ugly.

Specifically, that the members of the Legislative Black Caucus had projects showered on their districts while conservatives like Horton found themselves shut out.

Louisiana's HB 560, the supplemental funding bill spending excess dollars in FY 23, passed out of the Legislature at the very last minute on Thursday, with very few members understanding what the over $800 million was spent on.
699 "pet projects" totaling $196 million.

— Jamie Tairov (@JamieTairov) June 10, 2023

$1.5 million to 10 festivals and fairs
$750,000 to 5 towns for "beautification" projects
$188,000 to Tulane

— Jamie Tairov (@JamieTairov) June 10, 2023

The bill, which should contain only spending for non-recurring items, (things you won't need year after year) also includes funds for salaries, benefits and other recurring expenses for the Department of Corrections over $80 million.

— Jamie Tairov (@JamieTairov) June 10, 2023

$2.2 BILLION in additional spending, and not one dime going back to taxpayers. https://t.co/0NusLNdq2b

— Jamie Tairov (@JamieTairov) June 11, 2023

Needless to say, this shouldn’t have happened. A Republican legislature led by Republican House Speakers and Senate Presidents should have been very careful not to spend all the money blowing into Louisiana’s treasury due to what everyone knows is overtaxation (we’ve lost more than 200,000 people in net outmigration thanks to John Bel Edwards’ time in office and our private-sector economy is utterly sclerotic by any measure) and federal deficit spending.

That money should have been used to prime the state’s economy through tax relief, and it should have been used to pay down state debt. Instead it has been wasted on the legislative equivalent of hookers and blow.

It’s a terrible, terrible shame and an utter disgrace that the Republican Party’s label has been put on this. Particularly when Republican voters and activists and the state party specifically demanded that it not happen.

What do you do when you give your imprimatur for someone to serve in the legislature, and that someone publicly betrays you and stabs you in the back to do deals with the other side?

Well, what you would hope is that traitor pay the ultimate political price and be sent into oblivion, never to be elected again.

We’ll see if it’s possible to clean out the legislature of the faux-Republican traitors who voted to slather the Legislative Black Caucus, who never had to bend on a single vote, with pork projects and NGO bribes. On Wednesday that legislature had the opportunity to hold the line and preserve the state’s spending caps – doing so would have allowed Louisiana to pay off state debt and shrink the size of government while creating tax relief for the put-upon producers in this state – and only 19 of 144 of them opted to do so.

Unacceptable.

Louisiana’s legislature is full of useless RINOs.

Other than the Freedom Caucus and its allies in the House there isn’t a single member of that Legislature who can credibly claim to deserve your vote this fall. Demand an apology – and/or resignations – from the rest, and do not vote for them, Vote for real conservatives who won’t betray you.