This past week has not gone as planned. Over the past four days, this special session for the Louisiana legislature has gone from bad to worse, and Louisiana Republicans in the state legislature are cucking out once again.

The tipping point for this special session came yesterday. After hearing Rep. Julie Emerson’s closed primary bill (HB 17) yesterday afternoon, the Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee decided to amend Emerson’s bill. The adopted amendments to this bill were quite devastating to the “Louisiana First” agenda. The amended closed primary bill now only applies to the US Congressional and Louisiana Supreme Court elections.

You know what that means: no closed primary for state legislative races and no closed primary for statewide office elections. After years of promises about closed primaries in Louisiana, we are still stuck with the antiquated jungle primary system for most of our state’s elections.

That’s an absolutely brutal reversal. The bill, in nearly its original form, passed easily by a 64-40 margin in the House. To get it through a Senate committee with a 6-3 Republican majority it had to be gutted.

Our State’s Legislative leadership failed to deliver an acceptable effort at closed primaries–plain and simple.

The only winners in the watered-down closed primary bill were RINOs and Black-Establishment Democrat legislators.

As Scott McKay pointed out earlier this week in The Hayride, both groups no longer have to fear the grassroots conservatives and Progressives in the Republican and Democrat parties respectively now that closed primaries are off the table. Closed primaries might – at least the concern goes – have transformed the Louisiana Democrat party completely over to the Davante Lewis and Gary Chambers of the world.

However, keeping with the status-quo jungle primary system keeps Establishment RINO Legislators–such as Joe Stagni and Stephanie Hilferty–from having to remain accountable to the Conservative-majority base in the GOP. Stagni and Hilferty were among the nine House Republicans who voted against the bill.

When all will be said and done, both RINOs and Black-Establishment have made out like bandits from this special session, and it’ll be hard to argue otherwise when one looks at the results–especially when it comes to Congressional redistricting. The Republican supermajority in the Louisiana legislature is gifting Black Democrats with a heavily gerrymandered second Congressional District (i.e. District 6) if Senator Womack’s SB 8 passes.

While Dems get another Congressional seat, consider that Democrat legislators made ZERO concessions to Louisiana conservatives in the special session. Democrat legislators did not hold up their end of the either implicit or explicit “bargain” with conservative Republicans by supporting closed primaries. Instead, Democrats sided with RINOs legislators to ruin any chances of getting closed primaries in most state elections passed in the session.

And then there was this…

As I continue to work with the legislature on our primary election reform, I have appreciated @SenJohnKennedy’s advice and leadership throughout the process. Thank you Senator Kennedy for supporting this important structural reform. https://t.co/T9q2cVJceJ

— GovJeffLandry (@LAGovJeffLandry) January 19, 2024

It looks like the primaries aren’t even going to be closed, meaning that independents get to influence who wins Republican primaries. This defeats the point of bringing the bill in the first place.

Time and time again, Republican politicians fail to deliver for their constituents. They promise the world to their conservative voting base only to end making backroom deals with Democrats to screw us over. Unless something drastically changes, Senate President Cameron Henry and House Speaker Phillip DeVillier will end up no different than Establishment hacks Page Cortez and Clay Schexnayder.

As conservative Louisiana voters, we can’t keep allowing our politicians to play Lucy to our Charlie Brown as we try to kick the football.

So then, who are the losers from this special session? The answer: you, me, and the conservative majority voting base in this state.  We have gained nothing from this special session, and I don’t feel confident about our legislative leadership after only one week on the job.

At this dire point, I only see one way to salvage this disastrous special session, and it’s a longshot.

The only viable option to salvage this session is to support Senator Alan Sebaugh’s bill on redistricting the Louisiana Supreme Court (SB 5). In this bill, Seabaugh proposes to convert all of Louisiana’s Supreme Court seats into a statewide elections.

There is precedent in formatting a State Supreme Court as a state-wide election. Just look at states like Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and others. Those states have their state Supreme Courts as a statewide partisan election.

Why shouldn’t Louisiana? After all, the State Supreme Court is not a local political office. This court deals with statewide issues, so shouldn’t the Supreme Court acts more like a statewide office–like Governor or Treasurer.

Of course, statewide Supreme Court elections would hurt Democrats. This past fall, Louisiana Democrat candidates were crushed by a 2-1 margin in all of the statewide runoff elections.

At the end of the day, bad actions need to have consequences. Establishment Democrats in the Legislature worked with RINOs to water down closed primaries, so they have not earned the proverbial “pat on the back.”

Things didn’t have to be this way. All Democrat legislators had to do was sit back and let a strong closed primary bill pass, but events have not unfolded that way.

Louisiana Republican legislators can only make up for this disappointing special session by supporting Sen Seabaugh’s bill (SB 17) and disciplining Democrats for their chicanery. If party primaries isn’t the cost for surrendering a congressional seat, then aligning Supreme Court elections to the function of the position – meaning that all seven Supreme Court seats would be at-large seats, without any racial component at all – should become that cost.

The complaint will be that this would preclude any black lawyers or judges from winning a Supreme Court seat. But that isn’t true at all. It probably ends much chance that a black Democrat would win one of those seats, but it’s a fairly decent bet that should a black Republican run for one of them, and demonstrate the basic political chops to win (ability and desire to raise money, fairly good speaker, can build a campaign team and exercise decent strategy), he or she wouldn’t have much trouble. After all, Daniel Cameron was the Attorney General and very nearly the governor of Kentucky, Winsome Sears is the Lt. Governor in Virginia, Mark Robinson is the Lt. Governor – and possibly soon to be the governor – in North Carolina. There is no reason someone similar couldn’t win in Louisiana.

Now, the biggest obstacle in passing Sen Seabaugh’s bill is time. The Legislature is working on a compressed timeframe because the special session is required to close by Tuesday night. So, Republican legislators are running out of time to salvage this special session.

The good news is that the Senate is scheduled to hear Seabaugh’s bill on Friday morning during its morning session. Let’s hope that Senate Republicans make the appropriate move to pass Seabaugh’s Supreme Court redistricting bill. I won’t hold my breath though.

Nathan Koenig is a frequent contributor to RVIVR.com, a national conservative political site affiliated with The Hayride. Follow his writing on the Louisiana First Standard substack, on Twitter (X) @LAfirststandard, and on Instagram @tincanconservative. Email him here: thechristianmajority@gmail.com