Jeff Sadow and Nathan Koenig both have posts up this morning about the resolutions being filed by Legislative Black Caucus members (Joe Bouie in the Senate and Edmond Jordan in the House) attempting to trash Prager U for its supposed “racism” and “anti-semitism,” and I would highly recommend reading both. You’ll find much truth there.

The way House and Senate resolutions usually work at the Louisiana capitol is they’re offered and passed without any real debate or even objections. Because typically those resolutions are about congratulating the Pine Prairie High School girls’ volleyball team who just won a state championship, or naming a community center for some deceased citizen who was a family friend of the legislator bringing the resolution.

In other words, things nobody cares about.

Now – concurrent resolutions are a different animal. Those get treated like bills, because they would reflect – as a bill does – the combined judgment of both the House and Senate.

Resolutions being brought in both houses ought to be concurrent resolutions.

But HR 323 and SR 152 aren’t being brought as concurrent resolutions. They’re being brought as ordinary resolutions.

There is only one reason why you’d do that – and it’s to attempt to steal a march on an unsuspecting majority weighted down with a ton of more important things, in the hopes that nobody is paying attention.

And that often works. For example, here was how Cleo Fields managed to kill a bill by Beryl Amedee, the head of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus earlier this week…

Why do Republicans allow a Democrat to run the Senate and block Republican bills? Here Chairman @realCleoFields blocks HB265, by @BerylAmedee . He’s also preventing HB800 by @beaubeaullieu from being heard in his committee. #lalege pic.twitter.com/Tprx0jHpPm

— Citizens for a New Louisiana (@newlouisiana) May 30, 2024

It could be that Republican members of the Senate are exasperated with Amedee, who has a way of irritating old-school status quo types and others, but on the whole, Amedee’s bill was about banning the use of the word “free” when it comes to anything taxpayer-provided in state law or communications. Which is a good bill but not the weightiest thing in the world.

So there’s a lot of inattention in a legislative body that can be exploited.

And Democrats exploit it every chance they can.

The good news is that conservative activists got VERY riled up yesterday when Fields and his Democrat colleagues Gary Carter and Sam Jenkins opted to put state education superintendent Cade Brumley through a struggle session over Prager U being added as a curriculum option. They did it behind closed doors under the color of a “confirmation hearing,” though as Sadow noted there is some real debate over whether Brumley is subject to confirmation by the Senate.

Supposedly it’s common practice to do questioning about confirmees and their personal lives and qualifications in executive sessions, in order to protect their privacy. But Brumley’s decision to partner with Prager U isn’t a private matter; it’s a public policy matter and it’s a bright-line abuse of the process for that questioning to be held away from the eyes of the public.

We know why Fields did it. He did it for the same reason those resolutions today aren’t concurrent resolutions as they should be. Cleo Fields didn’t want that room to be full of conservative activists filling out comment cards and letting him have it over the idiocy of, for example, claiming that Prager U, founded by Dennis Prager, perhaps the most prominent Jewish radio talk host in America, is “anti-Semitic” – or declaring that CAIR, an organization tied closely to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, has declared Prager U content bigoted. The public would rightly have laughed Fields, Jenkins and Carter right out of the building for spouting such inanities.

It isn’t that these resolutions are going to pass. They’ll be objected to, and their authors will likely pull them at the first sign of debate because that will go very badly for them.

But – and I keep saying this, and there seems to be a constant stream of developments proving me correct for doing so – there have to be consequences for this sort of bomb-throwing.

Louisiana’s voters spoke very definitively last fall that we want this place to be run as a red state. Not only did Jeff Landry, seen as the most conservative candidate of the bunch, get elected without a runoff, but conservatives swept every statewide race there was, the GOP got a supermajority in both houses of the legislature and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education races went hard to the right as well. Another way to frame that is that Louisianans have forcefully rejected the Democrat Party and are demanding that its politicians be relegated to utter irrelevance in this state.

But that hasn’t been done in the state legislature. Not only is Fields the chair of a committee, so is Bouie, who is every bit as shady and corrupt as Fields but lacks his intellectual candlepower. Bouie chairs the Local and Municipal Affairs Committee, which might be the least desirable chair to have but it’s still ridiculous to give him any power at all.

None of these people should have leadership positions. None of them should be allowed to pass any legislation unless there are Republicans who agree to co-sponsor it (which is a matter of simple hygiene, seeing as though they’d need Republican support to pass anything anyway). The voters chose to relegate them last year, and events nationally, like for example the one in New York yesterday which has forever broken the presumption of legitimacy within our legal system, have shown that the Democrat Party is an enemy organization and not a partner for peace and prosperity in public policy.

Treat them accordingly. Especially Fields, who is clearly abusing the position stupidly afforded him in order to burnish his reputation as a leftist agitator so the national Democrat Party will shower him with campaign cash he doesn’t need in order to win that comfortable congressional sinecure he’s been given. That money will be doled out to friends and confederates and much of it will find its way back into Fields’ pockets; everybody knows this.

Maybe finally there will be some consequences.

But not until Republicans start to understand how badly they’ve been played by these people and recognize they’ve got the power, the right and the responsibility to do something about it.