Given the flurry of commentary and acrimony over the events of Gov. Jeff Landry’s first three weeks in office, a period dominated by the legislative special session to pass what we can safely say is an unpopular new congressional map (one about which a lawsuit was filed yesterday that many believe will invalidate the new map or at least gum up the process enough that this fall’s congressional races in Louisiana will have to be held according to the old map), it’s tempting to feel like nothing much is changed in Louisiana.
From a conservative standpoint, at least, that’s a perspective we’re seeing a lot of.
It isn’t really fair, of course. The congressional map issue was something that Landry didn’t quite choose. While there is argument over the question, Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, who had been intimately involved in the litigation over Louisiana’s current congressional map, believed that if the state legislature hadn’t drawn a new map a partisan-hack Democrat federal judge in Baton Rouge named Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee who probably should have been impeached last year after she threatened to jail then-House Speaker Clay Schexnayder if he didn’t pass a map with a second majority-black district, would have unilaterally imposed the most pro-Democrat congressional map possible.
In other words, this is not what Jeff Landry’s term as governor is likely to look like.
And you can simply check out the caterwauling from the Left, who are already pining for the golden days of John Bel Edwards, if you want to see how much different things really are.
Here was a gem in that regard…
Jeff Landry wants LSP in NOLA to bypass the consent decree’s civil rights protections. This is the same man that turned down federal money to give school kids free lunches, who fights cleaning up cancer alley, and who opened up hunting on endangered bears. He’s not here to help pic.twitter.com/IbPLybZtLm
— Matthew Wollenweber (@MWollenweber) January 31, 2024
What’s this about? It’s about Landry’s plans to bolster police protection in the crime-ridden city of New Orleans, something voters overwhelmingly favor…
“I mean, the New Orleans Police Department is in shambles because of a federal consent decree and a federal judge,” Landry said. “We have to wrestle that away from them, and even if she gave it to us today, it would take a decade to build that police department back up.”
In the meantime, Landry said he would push state lawmakers, at a special legislative session on crime, to “put in place the funding mechanism to get that [State Police] troop up and running.” The special session is slated to start Feb. 19, Landry said.
Morgan has overseen the sprawling reform agreement since its inception under Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration. Landrieu signed the agreement to fanfare in 2012, a year after the Justice Department issued a blistering report that found an NOPD rife with corruption and mired in unconstitutional practices.
The federal monitor who reports to Morgan has reported vast strides by the department since then, and two years ago Morgan projected NOPD would ease onto a 2-year offramp from federal oversight.
But steep losses in officers and evidence of backsliding on reforms prompted Morgan to pump the brakes, drawing fire from both Landry and Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
Landry, who slammed the NOPD consent decree as attorney general and on the campaign trail, hasn’t let up much as governor. His focus on the consent decree in discussing a return of troopers in force to New Orleans comes after violent crime in the city fell by more than 20% last year from historic highs in 2022.
The “Morgan” in question is Susie Morgan, another Obama judge. And it’s so cute to watch the New Orleans Advocate push the ridiculous narrative that Crime Is Down In New Orleans You Guys when most people in that city don’t quite feel like it’s all that safe in a city where more than six thousand cars were stolen last year (something like one out of every 45 cars in Orleans Parish!) and most of the decline in the murder rate was due to bad marksmanship rather than a slowdown in violence.
But this is the story they have to tell you. Crime skyrockets to a ruinous level, so much so that people and businesses start evacuating the crime-ridden area, and when there are less civilians to rob, rape and brutalize the crime drops a little and somehow, according to these people on the Left it means there is no further problem.
It wasn’t that long ago that Edwards was interviewed by a TV station in New Orleans and asked, point blank, if he would redeploy the State Police into the city to help with the runaway crime there.
His answer? He couldn’t, really, because the State Police was down some 300 troopers from its funded strength. That never really made it into the public eye because the station buried the lede. And Landry is going to be looking for funding because he has to staff up Troop Nola to attack crime in the city; he doesn’t have troopers on hand to do that work because of the damage Edwards did over those eight years.
And now, we’re told by the gripers and grousers on the Left, the State Police going into New Orleans just means more police brutality.
Oh, OK. Who was responsible for the State Police’s brutality? Who covered that up?
Why, it was John Bel Edwards, wasn’t it?
Remember when Schexnayder and the Louisiana legislature got serious for about five minutes over the question of getting to the bottom of the Ronald Greene case and the cover-up of that incident, which clearly was intended to keep black voters from falling off Edwards in advance of the 2019 gubernatorial election?
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We find it hard to forget. We also remember who was put in charge of that investigation. It was House Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee, who held a couple of hearings and then took a powder, claiming that he had too much going on to carry his “investigation” forward.
Magee ran for a judgeship and was utterly throttled, mostly because the voters didn’t want to reward him for doing Edwards’ bidding while our streets got more and more dangerous and our economy stagnated under the weight of mass outmigration. Then he decided not to run for a third term in the House.
And now he camps out on Twitter. Magee hilariously griped a few days ago that the bill passed in the first special session creating party primaries in federal and some state elections would carry a little fiscal cost…
Biggest spending increase in a decade.
After 8 years of standstill budgets and saving $. https://t.co/wZcJKUh2s7
— Tanner Magee (@TannerDMagee) January 29, 2024
Magee doesn’t go around with a truth-telling way, but even so it might be a good idea for him to check his meds seeing as though the state budget just about doubled in the eight years he was in office, four of which he spent in House leadership. To complain about a $13 million annual increase in cost when the state budget is more than $20 billion larger yearly after your two terms in that Capitol, when you voted for every single one of those budgets, is breathtaking.
Let’s also remember that he earned the nickname “Set ’em Free Magee” for his efforts to push the Edwards criminal justice “reform” bills in his first term. Obviously, those reforms didn’t help resolve much in the way of our state’s violent crime issues.
So it isn’t just the Left screaming about Landry and the changes he’s making. It’s the whole John Bel Edwards Uniparty Fan Club.
We’ll see just how angry Landry can make these people. This month there will be a special session on crime which is going to focus on juvenile justice, getting those state troopers into New Orleans with an eye toward real policing and perhap rolling back some of Magee and Edwards’ failed “reforms,” and we can expect the Peanut Gallery of the Deposed to howl just a little louder.
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