We noted back in January that Cameron Henry, the Metairie Republican who currently holds the presidency of the Louisiana Senate, was not off to a great start in establishing himself as a conservative reformer. Since then, the jury deliberations on Henry haven’t gone any better.
Back in January, we noted that Henry had bestowed a good deal of patronage on the 11 Democrats in the Louisiana Senate, a puny minority of the 39 members of that body. He made Baton Rouge senator Regina Barrow the Senate’s president pro tem, despite her awful voting record, and he gave three Democrats committee chairmanships and seven vice-chairmanships. That essentially meant all the Democrats got leadership positions in Henry’s Senate, something you certainly couldn’t say for the 28 Republicans.
That was bad. What’s worse is that Henry is now emerging as the principal obstacle to passing Gov. Jeff Landry’s agenda.
There was the extreme watering-down of a bill to move Louisiana’s elections to a party primary system. The bill did manage to fix party primaries onto federal elections in Louisiana, and some state elections. But not the Louisiana legislature, which was a key feature of the proposed reform. Henry stood in the way of that and forced Landry and his supporters to accept half a loaf.
This despite it being a key demand of Republicans and conservatives to reform the electoral process to eliminate the state’s jungle primary system, which has largely become an incumbent-protection racket.
Now in the regular session, Henry is becoming an obstacle again. We’ll let the New Orleans Advocate’s left-wing hack columnist Stephanie Grace, who has now made the Senate president into something of a political boyfriend, tell the tale…
In a Capitol now led by an aggressive conservative administration and a legislative supermajority of the governor’s own party, Henry has emerged as pretty much the only obstacle on the road to rapid, massively disruptive change, some in the name of long-standing right-wing goals and some in pursuit of Landry’s personal political agenda. In an interview, Henry rejected the characterization, but from the outside, it’s hard not to view him as kind of a Senator Speedbump. Which is not to say that he’s nursing deep policy disagreements with the administration or the more compliant House. Henry is a conservative Republican who once worked for Steve Scalise, the former Louisiana legislator who is now majority leader in the U.S. House. Back in 2016, Henry lost out on his bid to become House speaker because more moderate Republicans balked, choosing instead to support former Democrat Taylor Barras. In a strange twist, Barras is now commissioner of administration with the ultraconservative Landry administration, while Henry has become something of an opposition figure on select issues. His independent streak first really showed itself in the special session on election issues, when the Senate diluted Landry’s quest to switch from open primaries to closed party primaries following what some described as shouting matches between the governor and Henry, who labeled it a “spirited” discussion.
And then Grace showered Henry with praise for his opposition to the Educational Savings Accounts bill which is moldering in the Senate after passing overwhelmingly in the House…
In the current session, Henry and the Senate are taking a hard look at an expansive proposal that has already careened through the House to put public money toward private school tuition. Henry supports the general concept of giving parents more choice, he said. But the Senate has its own bill, and he’s been studying how the runaway costs in states that have enacted so-called education scholarship accounts have busted budgets, mostly because the ESAs are being used by parents who already pay for private school. He said senators want to understand the costs, and figure out how to prioritize should money not be available for all takers — a goal that really comes down to understanding more about how ESAs would work, and how many and which students would be eligible under what criteria. “There are a lot of unanswered basic questions,” he said. “I think they got a little ahead of themselves on the bill.”
This is ridiculous. ESA bills have been passing in Louisiana for several years now; they’ve just been vetoed by Landry’s predecessor John Bel Edwards. And the supposed runup in costs is based on the assumption that public schools which would be drained of students whose parents would take advantage of ESA’s to move their kids to better options, whether those might be private, parochial or non-traditional schooling models like learning pods or microschools would keep catching the same funding they’re getting now.
Henry is spouting the talking points of the educational status quo. Which naturally would make Stephanie Grace shower him with her pleasure. The question is why he’d want that.
Then there’s the other thing…
Henry has already put his stamp on the current session’s most potentially disruptive idea of all, to rewrite the state constitution in extremely short order. House author Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia — his college roommate as Henry frequently points out — changed the proposed timing so that a convention would end the session’s final day of June 3, not mid-July, after Henry made it clear that no senators would support staying in Baton Rouge any longer. The proposal now would require the new constitution to be approved by separate House and Senate majorities before going to voters. The original draft gave each lawmaker an equal vote, which, as Henry pointed out, would have allowed it to pass even if every senator opposed it. Asked if the idea is now on track, he said this: “I don’t think it’s on track or off track. I still think members have a lot of unanswered questions.” They’re hardly alone on that.
The main issues to be covered in a constitutional convention which would start in about three weeks if Henry were to relent are things which have been talked about for years – and they’re things Henry has generally been in favor of.
Not to mention that Henry himself has signed pledges to support both ESA’s and a constitutional convention. This cold-feet act and the line that this stuff has to be reviewed as though it’s new speaks to character a little.
For example, the constitutional convention would focus on getting rid of a bunch of dedicated funds so that low-priority and generally bloated items protected by those dedications could be opened up and brought under control with the cost savings applied to higher-priority things like health care and education, which always go on the chopping block when there is a “fiscal cliff.”
This matters, because the “fiscal cliff” comes next year when John Bel Edwards’ massive, economy-killing tax increases come up for a sunset. Edwards blew up Louisiana’s budget in his eight years in office thanks to those giant tax increases, and Henry was one of the main critics in the Legislature at the time.
Now he wants to hold off on revising the state constitution to give the governor and legislature the tools to best implement a rollback of Edwards’ bacchanal?
Let’s hope what’s happening here is not Cameron Henry deciding he’d rather get bouquets from Stephanie Grace than do the hard work of reforming this state along conservative lines. There is way too much time, money and effort invested in this Louisiana legislature than to allow Henry to be Senator Speedbump against a reform agenda.