If you aren’t a follower of the Louisiana legislature, you may not have a whole lot of information about Cameron Henry, the new president of the state senate. That’s likely going to change in the next few days.
The truth is, there are a whole lot of people who do follow the legislature who don’t know what to make of Henry. Which, by the way, is not a good thing. When it comes to politicians there are relatively few pleasant surprises.
Let’s hope Henry turns out to be one of them. So far, it’s not really trending in that direction.
Eight years ago, Henry was the Republican choice to become Speaker of the House. There was a GOP majority in that body, though it was nothing at all like the 73-vote behemoth Louisiana’s House currently boasts. In addition, there was a newly-elected governor in John Bel Edwards who was not just a Democrat but whose leadership style could best be described as authoritarian and tyrannical.
Edwards actually demanded that Walt Leger, a Democrat from New Orleans, be elected as Speaker. Amazingly, there was a not-insignificant number of Republicans who thought it would be a good idea to honor that demand. Henry found himself a couple of votes shy of the needed 53 to become Speaker thanks to weakness in his own party.
In response, Henry executed one of the more skillful flanking maneuvers in recent Louisiana political history. Henry backed his friend Taylor Barras, who had the ability to corral the Republicans and a smattering of Democrats, as the Speaker and secured for himself the coveted position of House Appropriations chair.
And for four years Henry did what he could to limit the explosion in state spending. Then it was on to the Senate for him, as Henry ran and won the seat being vacated by the term-limited Conrad Appel. He’s largely laid low for the last four years and then emerged as a consensus candidate to be Senate president.
Henry’s victory over Mike Reese, the other most likely candidate to lead that body, came courtesy of a slight majority of Republicans and essentially all of the Democrats supporting him. Because he had a majority within the GOP you can’t really compare his victory to that of, say, Clay Schexnayder as the House Speaker in the last term. But Henry nevertheless has become quite cozy with the other party.
And we saw that last week when three members of the Legislative Black Caucus – the Caucus comprises 10 of the 11 Democrats in the 39-member Senate; Jay Luneau is the only white Democrat left in that body – earned committee chairmanships and six other Democrats were vice-chairs. Not to mention that Regina Barrow, a black Democrat from Baton Rouge with one of the worst voting records in the Senate from a conservative perspective, was named Senate President Pro Tempore.
The vote for Barrow was essentially forced down the throats of the Republican senators. Nobody dissented. How could they? The new Senate president was demanding it. And it’s never been all that important who gets to be president pro tem of the Senate.
Nevertheless, there was grumbling among the supporters of many conservative Senators about the Barrow choice. Phone calls were made.
Then those committee assignments. Cleo Fields, who seems to have the ability to survive and prosper politically under any and all circumstances and is almost certainly going to run for Congress again this fall (he represented the atrociously racially gerrymandered 8th Congressional District way back in the 1990’s before Louisiana lost a seat in the 2000 census), is chairing the Senate and Governmental Affairs committee in which the congressional redistricting map will land. That essentially puts Fields in a position to draw the district he’ll run in.
Fields has made himself something of an ally of Gov. Jeff Landry, so his plum appointment isn’t necessarily on Henry. But the incompetent Marxist race-baiter Joe Bouie, now in charge of the Local and Municipal Affairs Committee, and the relatively inoffensive Ed Price, now chairing the Retirement Committee, were Henry choices. Democrats have the Senate President Pro Tem, three committee chairs and six vice chairs – meaning that of 11 Democrats they’ve got 10 officer positions between them.
That is a disproportionately generous allocation of power to the party Louisiana’s voters explicitly and kinetically rejected in last fall’s elections, and it makes Cameron Henry’s Senate presidency very much suspect at this stage of the game.
Now we’re in a special session, and there are essentially three pieces of legislation of note coming through the state capitol.
Two of them are changes in the district maps for Congress and the Louisiana Supreme Court which would add majority-black districts. The congressional map in particular is an especially bitter pill for conservatives and Republicans to swallow, and there is a certain Bridge Over The River Kwai flavor to that debate, but Henry is not driving the discussion of the redistricting maps so we won’t focus on that in this post.
We will, however, focus on party primaries. That’s the crucible by which Cameron Henry should, and will, be judged.
Yesterday, a House committee passed a bill that would bring in closed party primaries to Louisiana elections for federal positions (Senate and House), statewide positions, BESE, the Public Service Commission and the state legislature. The initial hope was that all elections would be party elections; that was trimmed back to let local elected offices out of the change. The bill sailed out of House and Governmental Affairs on an 11-4 vote, and it has wide support on the House floor. It should pass easily there – possibly as soon as today.
But word has it that party primaries are a “heavy lift” in the Senate.
Let’s understand something. Party primaries aren’t just something that would insure that conservatives control who carries the Republican standard in general elections. Black Democrats stand to benefit a great deal from the institution of party primaries, too; they’re some 62 percent of registered Democrats in Louisiana and when party primaries are reinstituted in the state the power in that party will be controlled by blacks, rather than the old-money-liberal White Democrats who’ve had their way since there has been a Louisiana Democrat Party.
The opposition to party primaries comes chiefly from the RINO crowd. Sen. Bill Cassidy has been on X screeching about the “cost” of instituting party primaries, something which is utterly laughable – Cassidy enthusiastically supported the utterly wasteful $1.9 trillion Biden “infrastructure” package, and now he’s grousing about the potential $7-9 million annual cost of party primary elections. That isn’t the cost Cassidy is really concerned about, of course; what he’s worried about is that when he comes up for re-election in 2026 he’d have to pay a steep price for betraying his voters by voting to impeach Donald Trump post-presidency.
In a jungle primary Cassidy might be able to position himself as the Democrats’ favorite Republican and survive. In a closed party primary he’s dead in the water and a conservative is almost certainly going to knock him out. Everybody knows this, which is why nobody has to listen to Cassidy’s self-serving drivel.
Are there enough RINOs in the Louisiana Senate to derail closed party primaries? You wouldn’t think so, and yet we’re being told this is going to be tough to pass. Henry has been putting out quotes to legacy and leftist media sites along the lines that he doesn’t think Senators know enough about this stuff to make a vote on party primaries.
And there’s a much-touted survey by pollster John Couvillon, which was commissioned by the RINO/open primary gang, which supposedly says party primaries are unpopular. But pollsters Bernie Pinsonat and Greg Rigamer came up with an entirely different result…
- A majority (60%) believe the way we elect the President of the United States through closed Party Primaries makes more sense than what we do in state and local elections.
- 59% agree it makes sense for Republicans and Democrats to pick their own party candidates for all voters to then vote on in the General Election, believing it is a fairness issue.
- A majority of voters (56%) believe Louisiana should simplify elections in November, with ballots that have just one Democrat, one Republican, and potentially independent candidates on the ballot. This sentiment was expressed consistently across demographic, geographic, and political interests.
- 50% said Louisiana should be more like others states who elect candidates by “plurality” rather than a required majority vote. Only 35% did not share this opinion.
- 62% said election reforms that resulted in fewer elections and potential related cost savings would be good.
- 70% said party primaries in the spring and general elections in the fall would give voters more time to understand the candidates.
Bear in mind that this is a priority item for the new governor. It’s a priority item for the governor’s political party. And it benefits the Legislative Black Caucus.
Why aren’t all of those black Democrats supporting the closed party primary bill?
What we’re hearing is amazing. Apparently, the opposition to party primaries from the black Democrats is that they’re afraid if the primaries are closed, they’re going to start losing elections to the Gary Chamberses and Davante Lewises of the world. That the Hard Left crazies will take over and then the Democrats will essentially vanish as a relevant party even in majority black areas.
They’re afraid they’re going to be chased out of the party they’re about to control…by Gary Chambers.
If this is true, these have to be the laziest, most shiftless and ultimately most worthless bunch of whiny brat politicians anybody has ever seen.
Let’s understand something else – if you’re black and you’re just a voter, you are not harmed in any significant way if your congressman is Steve Scalise rather than Troy Carter. You might be a Democrat and you might not want Scalise as your congressman, but there isn’t going to be any appreciable difference in constituent services between the two if you’re black, and the amount of federal swag coming home to the district isn’t particularly attributable to race. This is just a matter of preference. Ditto for the Supreme Court districts. And if you really can’t stand it, you can always move.
The people who are directly affected and who would benefit from, say, a second majority-black congressional district aren’t the black voters but the black politicians.
In other words, these guys are getting an extra ready-made opportunity for higher political office, delivered to them by a Republican governor and, by extension, the Republican Senate President in Cameron Henry. We can argue about whether this is smart for Landry to be doing, but the point is, they’re getting political manna from heaven.
And they can’t pass the one thing Landry is demanding in return because they’re afraid of Gary Chambers?
If this is really the reason why the Legislative Black Caucus won’t get on board with the closed party primary bill and pass it, then Cameron Henry is coddling these people to an unacceptable extent.
A House Speaker or a Senate President has an enormous amount of power in the body he governs. One assumes those Black Caucus members are aware of this.
We’re shocked that Henry hasn’t spelled out – at least for Fields, Price and Bouie, not to mention Barrow – that they owe their positions to his munificence and that can be rescinded very, very quickly, and therefore the ante for those positions isn’t just their votes for core items on the agenda but their influence used to supply the votes of the entire Black Caucus.
This is very basic power politics. Those senators ought to know damn well that opposition to the closed party primary bill will mean a great many negative and unfortunate consequences, for example in the state budget and the prospect of ever passing any legislation at all during this term, may befall those who are so ungrateful as to vote against this bill.
And frankly, conservatives in the Senate ought to be demanding those votes as well, particularly if they’re going to be asked to voluntarily surrender a congressional seat to Cleo Fields.
We’re going to find out whether Cameron Henry is any good at his new job. If he fails this very basic test of legislative effectiveness, it might be time to rethink whether he’s the right guy to be Senate president.