We’re seeing a good bit of caterwauling by leftists over developments at the current legislative session. They’re complaining about virtually every bill winding through the process and screeching over what they think is “destruction” of the state’s lower classes. For example, there’s this…

Hear the lament of the discredited and despised white leftist, who had someone in the governor's mansion for the last eight years and placed this state DEAD LAST In economic development.

They've chased away a quarter-million of our friends and neighbors. Maybe it's their time to… https://t.co/GAUwZsbLas

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) April 18, 2024

You see a nonstop parade of these miserable people now. Many of them are Louisiana’s “mainstream” media who are unhappy over SB482, a bill by Sen. Heather Cloud which would “gut” the state’s open records law…

The Louisiana legislative committee voted to gut the state’s open records law by shielding many government records at all levels from the public.

The bill has been touted as a way to protect the governor and his family but a portion of the bill also blocks the public from seeing part of the decision-making process.

SB482 exempts government agencies from having to share records that have to do with “opinions” and “deliberations” of how government policies and decisions are made.

Gov. Jeff Landry said in a statement, “These laws have become weaponized to stifle deliberative speech.”

“There is an impression by some that they are privy to that information and to put that information out prematurely would be disingenuous, misleading and potentially catastrophic,” said State Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek.

Cloud referenced a Supreme Court case that deals with the executive branch of the federal government releasing deliberative information after a decision is completed. She believes it sets a legal precedent for blocking these records from the public.

Journalists who routinely file public records requests stated if the case was precedent then a judge would have stopped them from getting those records, but it has never happened.

“I am 100% committed to the transparency of final decisions and to communicating with our citizens those decisions,” Gov. Landry stated.

SB482 does not allow for the release of information after the fact or before. It would be up to public officials to divulge that information to the public.

Landry pointed a finger at journalists for not having to share the entirety of their interviews, notes, etc. when crafting a story. Journalists are protected by the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, are not paid with taxpayer dollars, are not elected, and do not craft public policy.

The language of the bill is so broad that deliberations and opinions could mean nearly any document, email, text, or other communications for not just the governor’s office – but all levels of government in the state.

“This exception is a repeal of the public records law. What document is not a part of the decision-making process of your local government? These are our tax dollars, my tax dollars,” said Scott Sternberg with the Louisiana Press Association.

It’s funny, because we here at The Hayride used to do public records requests all the time and it was almost comical how little cooperation, transparency or truth we got from Louisiana’s bureaucracy.

And it isn’t just us.

There were two bills – and now there’s just one – in the Louisiana legislature this session which would put a stop to the state’s pension funds doing far-left ESG investing. SB 5, which was Sen. Blake Miguez’ bill on this subject, died in the Senate. But HB 902, a bill by Rep. Michael Melerine, would do the same thing and it came out of the House Labor and Industrial Relations Committee today on its way to the House floor.

The pushback here is that this is a solution without a problem, because Louisiana’s pension funds don’t do ESG investing. Well, it turns out that’s not true – and it looks an awful lot like LASERS, the main state-employee pension fund, does it all the time. A report from the Heritage Foundation last year discussed the pension fund’s involvement in numerous sketchy “climate change” investment schemes and warned Louisiana’s legislature it needed to address the issue.

We’re told that there’s a new report out which shows some 400 incidents of LASERS making investment decisions which favor the ESG perspective. When we see a copy of that we’re planning on doing a follow-up to this, because it’s not acceptable for the state’s pension funds to do things directly opposite to the will of the people as expressed by our elected officials and if LASERS is doing that, then we’re going to need a whole new cast of characters running that pension fund.

LASERS’ current management team is made up of four people, all of whom have been involved in that pension fund for decades. We’re talking about people who go all the way back to Kathleen Blanco’s time as governor.

That isn’t to say these are bad people, or that they’re unqualified to continue in those jobs, or that they’re a bunch of lefties. That’s not the point of this. The point is to say that there is a swamp at the Louisiana capitol which is every bit as self-dealing and status-quo defensive as the one in Washington, and like the one in Washington it is absolutely not invested in the conservative movement.

And that swamp has a very bad track record where it comes to telling the public the truth about what it’s doing.

So now you have members of that swamp screaming about Landry wanting to protect his administration from getting bled to death by public records requests from left-wing propagandists disguised as journalists.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a mischaracterization. It’s absolutely the case that the leftist non-profits which fund the Advocate, for example, have plans to deluge Landry’s office with public records requests about every last thing they’ve done, and especially all the deliberative processes surrounding the making of policy. And they’re doing this because when the Landry administration is talking with conservative groups about making policy they’re going to have the Advocate, and other left-wing media organs in the state, write screeds about how Landry traffics with “racists” and “homophobes” and “conspiracy theorists” and all the other awful names they ascribe to people who aren’t Democrats.

Not to mention this is a means of gumming up his administration with thousands of public records requests, in a vein not all that dissimilar to what the Washington Swamp did to Donald Trump with the lies about his supposed Russian collusion.

You’ve seen this again and again. Here’s an example from last year – the Southern Poverty Law Center slandered Moms for Liberty as a “extremist” organization, and that was used to attack Cade Brumley, the state superintendent of education, for the sin of speaking to the Moms for Liberty chapter in Baton Rouge last July. There were protesters – including drag queens who’d like to groom children for queer sex – who showed up to demonstrate against an anodyne speech about accountability and school choice.

The president of that Moms for Liberty chapter, Emily Chenevert, is now a state representative. She got elected last year. Anybody who knows Emily knows she isn’t extreme at all – the people who are extreme are the leftists who attacked her organization.

And we can say that with confidence, because we just had an election in which these leftists couldn’t win anything. They got slaughtered in every statewide race and practically every legislative seat they could be slaughtered in. The voters clearly believe they’re extreme.

And while we’re on the subject of transparency, the Advocate won’t disclose its circulation numbers so we only really have an inkling of how significant they are in representing the public – rather than the fringe and extreme non-profit foundations who fund them.

And then there’s the Louisiana Illuminator, which is another publication funded by leftist non-profits, and their Twitter war against Landry after he noted they tend to slant coverage in a way which isn’t all that transparent…

Governor, reporters do not always use full written comments just like we do not use full interviews. We are not refusing to do anything. We are doing our jobs, which is to provide the public with essential information. Not everything every public official says is newsworthy. https://t.co/CX97wavBpV

— Piper Hutchinson (@ByPiperHutch) April 17, 2024

Is Cloud’s bill a good idea? In a perfect world, probably not. But at the end of the day, what this is about is power politics.

Landry has a legislative majority, or at least it appears so, for denying the Left access to the inner workings of his administration. And he’s pushing this bill because the kinds of things he needs to do as governor, that a majority of the people of Louisiana elected him to do, are going to make the Swamp, and its propagandists at these out-of-state, extremist non-profit-funded media organs, positively irate.

And you can make the argument that Landry works for the people of Louisiana and the propagandists at the Advocate and the Illuminator don’t, so there’s a different standard which should apply. That’s a fair argument, but it misses the reality here.

Which is that this is all about power politics. And Landry, and the conservatives in his administration and in the legislature, need to understand that the mission is draining the Swamp. And that means giving not the faintest damn about the screeching.

Elections have consequences. Power has uses. Landry seems to understand this. It’s important for his supporters to understand it as well, and it’s important for the Swamp and its devotees on the Left to understand that they’ve been discredited and deposed and are no longer relevant.

If they don’t like that, as Landry has noted, then they can leave. The rest of us won’t miss them.