Last week I drove more than a few of the dead-ender Louisiana leftists insane on Twitter by suggesting that there be a universal adoption of the “Seabaugh rule” in the state legislature.

That is, no bill authored by a Democrat which doesn’t carry a Republican co-sponsor’s signature should ever make it out of a committee. Those bills should all be dead on arrival in the house in which they’re filed.

That sounds partisan and petty, but it’s the only proper response to the kind of abuse legislators like Denise Marcelle and Mandie Landry are heaping on the majority. They clearly don’t want to play a constructive role in the governance of the state, and in fact what they’re trying to do is stand in the way of the kinds of reforms Louisiana needs.

And the bills they’ve filed are almost universally garbage. These are stupid bills, or worse, they’re Trojan horses which contain all kinds of disastrous provisions. Here at the site we’ve had a couple of posts about that Steven Jackson “transparency” bill, which is an unexpurgated mess. as an example.

The best way to keep these bills, and the bad-faith actors who are bringing them, from slipping into law is to institute the Seabaugh rule. No, the Left won’t like it, and the state’s corporate media, the people who spent eight years carrying water for John Bel Edwards and now can’t even recall that he was governor when we look around and see the wreckage Edwards left, will howl about how it’s “Washington politics” that Republicans are so mean to Democrats, will whine.

Who gives a damn?

The good news is that there are very, very few Democrat bills making it out of the House of Representatives right now. The House is doing a good job of killing Democrat bills.

Unfortunately, the Senate just doesn’t get it. Not yet.

An example is a sweet-sounding, but colossally dumb bill, SB 416 by one of the dumbest Democrats in the Senate, Joe Bouie. It passed out of the Senate with 26 votes, mostly because the Senators didn’t want to be seen as opposing school safety.

What does this bill do? It mandates that whenever there is a fight on a public school bus in Louisiana, the school district owning the bus will have to hire a monitor to secure the bus for the rest of the school year.

That could cost between $17,000 and $35,000 for each one.

Pretty expensive, huh? Well, that’s OK – the state has lots of money.

Except Bouie isn’t asking the state to pick up the tab. The bill’s fiscal note is zero. No, Bouie’s bill would make this an unfunded mandate on local school districts.

He says it’s no big deal, because the school districts can probably find volunteers to be monitors on school buses. Really? People are going to line up to babysit public-school hellions for free?

Anybody who’d be up for that is probably a lot more suspicious than the hellions are.

This is a jobs program for unskilled people. That’s all it is. Of course, if you vote against a bill like this you run the risk of getting tarred as not caring about the safety of the kids on those buses. That’s why it got out of the Senate with 26 votes.

A bill like this needs to be killed in committee. Hopefully it’ll be killed in House Education in the next few days, because Joe Bouie isn’t somebody who’s built up enough goodwill to have ANY of his bills pass in the House, much less a stupid and expensive bill like this.

Are we saying that school districts shouldn’t put monitors on school buses when there’s a threat of violence present? Of course not. Those districts probably should have monitors on staff and they ought to be deployed as necessary.

But that’s a management issue for a local school district. It isn’t something the state needs to be mandating by statute. Taking away the discretion of school superintendents is just plain dumb.

And there’s this last bit, which is that Joe Bouie is a stooge of the teachers’ unions in this state. And because so few teachers want to join those unions here anymore, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and Louisiana Association of Educators have both picked up cafeteria workers and school bus drivers as members. Force those districts to hire up a bunch of monitors and you can bet they’ll immediately push to unionize them.

Which means the $17,000-35,000 cost will escalate in no time flat. And all of the broke school districts will inevitably come to the state government looking for bailout money.

Don’t give these people the air to breathe in that state capitol. Just kill all of their bills on sight unless there are Republicans willing to co-author them. Call it political hygiene if you want; I don’t care. A bill like this by a legislator like Bouie should never have gotten this far.