Earlier this week, I subjected myself to watching the House Local and Municipal Affairs Committee hear a couple of library bills. I recognize that might not have been the most fulfilling use of my time, especially given what took place.

If you are wondering why I would do that to myself, you ask an excellent question.  It certainly wasn’t because I wanted to see great examples of our best and brightest in action.  But in case you have been living under a rock, you know we have a big problem with wokeness in the libraries, and some good solid conservative legislators are attempting (attempting being the key word here) to do something about it.

There were two much needed bills heard before the committee on Wednesday.

HB640 by Representative Jay Galle’ would have clarified that the parish council members who appoint members to their respective library boards of control can also remove them.  That’s a common-sense bill, no? If you appoint someone, you should also be able to remove them.  If someone hires me, I reasonably expect that they can also fire me.  Meanwhile, parish council members across the state are afraid to remove their board members because they can’t figure out if they have that power or not, and the library board members are well aware of that and choose to do whatever they want since they are confident that they won’t be removed.

Unfortunately, Rep. Galle’ got lost in the land of lefties and RINO’s Wednesday.  His bill was killed by the committee after some of the least intelligent commentary that I have been unlucky enough to hear in a long time.

The real fireworks came later when Representative Kellee Hennessy Dickerson’s HB777 was heard.  This bill was intended to make it illegal for public funds to be used for any American Library Association training, conferences, etc.

Why, you might ask?

Again, that is a story in and of itself, but for now let’s just say that the ALA is the ultimate source of the wokeness in the library systems of this state (and others that haven’t already separated themselves from the organization).

But I’ll give you just a little background. The head of the ALA is a radical communist named Emily Drabinski, who has committed the organization to pushing for the LGBTQ agenda – drag queens reading to kids, gay porn on the shelves, the lot – and openly campaigned on turning libraries all over America into radical Marxist indoctrination centers. No, I’m not exaggerating.

With an open agenda like that being handed down from the top of the organization, there is a clear and obvious state interest in severing Louisiana’s public libraries from the ALA. Dickerson’s bill was an elementary effort at serving that state interest.

You’d think she could have easily gotten it out of committee in a heavily Republican House of Representatives, but that’s not what happened.

To start off with, Rep. Dickerson and her assistant passed out information packets with some of the books found in the childrens’ sections of libraries in Louisiana.  The chairman (Rep. Gadberry, RINO, West Monroe) had the packets picked up because the material was too offensive for the tender eyes of the committee members to look at. But it is apparently just hunky dory for 6th graders.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Oh, and Chairman Gadberry then took a walk and let Rep. Barbara Freiberg (RINO, Baton Rouge) chair the controversial parts of the meeting.

That was a complete circus you might have already gotten a whiff of. You probably saw this “hot mic” moment in which Denise Marcelle, the well-known radical leftist state representative from Baton Rouge, unleashed a profanity-laced rant swearing to kill Dickerson’s bill…

B!+€# 😳 HOT MIC
That moment when Denise Marcelle and @bfreiberg1 decided to break the rules and not allow public comment on HB777, a bill to stop spending taxpayer money on the ALA. #LAFreedomCaucus #lalege #lagov @SpkrDeVillier pic.twitter.com/SEVPoe8s0A

— Louisiana Freedom Caucus (@LAFreedomCaucus) May 1, 2024

It was actually worse in person than the video depicts.

What’s going on in that video is what happened when Rep. Dickerson requested that she be allowed to voluntarily defer her bill given the circus the meeting had become, and also because it appeared she would need to make a few amendments to put it in a better posture. In response, Marcelle is on that hot mic telling Rep. Candace Newell (D-New Orleans) and Rep. Alonzo Knox (D-New Orleans) that she didn’t want the bill to be voluntarily deferred, and repeatedly said that she was going to “kill that bitch.”

You’d assume the “bitch” is the bill and not Rep. Dickerson, but if you’re familiar with Denise Marcelle you do have to pause for a moment on that question.

At the time, Rep. Newell had just reprimanded a citizen who was there to testify in favor of HB777 for not appropriately bowing and scraping to her fellow committee members.  Apparently, only her fellow Municipal Committee members deserve that level of respect since she voiced no objection to Marcelle’s disrespectful remarks about Hennessy-Dickerson.

The vote was held with three of the committee members absent. The House Local and Municipal Affairs Committee has 11 Republicans and eight Democrats on its roster. In the room at the time of the vote there were nine Republicans and seven Democrats. But Frieberg and freshman Vincent Cox (R-Gretna), who obviously didn’t understand what he was voting on given the zoo the hearing had become, voted “yes” on Marcelle’s motion to involuntarily defer the bill before it had even gotten a public hearing. The bill thus died on a 9-7 vote, and your tax dollars will continue to fund Emily Drabinski’s cultural Marxist agenda in libraries you pay for.

This was the worst-run meeting that I can recall watching, and Freiberg’s stewardship of it calls into question her mental competence to serve in the Legislature, much less chair committee hearings.  Parish council meetings I’ve seen typically show off a better grasp of basic parliamentary procedure.  She did, however, manage to do a great job of sounding more leftist than the Democrats on the committee.

If you think I’m lying, watch the full video for yourself. It’s a colossal low point in Louisiana legislative history, which is definitely saying something. You can’t possibly believe Barbara Freiberg belongs in the Louisiana legislature after seeing the tape. At the very least, she can’t continue as Vice-Chair of the House Local and Municipal Affairs Committee. Not after Wednesday.

Speaker of the House Phillip DeVillier is the one who assigns legislators to the committees, and he is the one who assigns the bills to committees. DeVillier has a reputation for being friendly to conservative causes; what happened on Wednesday damages that reputation.

Did DeVillier send the library bills to Local and Municipal to kill them? One would hope not.

There’s an obvious remedy to this.

First, discharge both Galle’s bill and Dickerson’s bill onto the House floor and pass them.

Then, censure Marcelle for that “hot mic” fiasco and her lack of decorum. Strip her of that committee assignment.

Then, remove Freiberg from her position as vice-chair of that committee.

This is a key moment in DeVillier’s speakership. He needs to show that his will be a conservative House, and not the RINO sanctuary that his predecessor Clay Schexnayder ran for the previous four years. What happened in that committee on Wednesday met no reasonable standard conservative, Republican or even moderate voters ought to accept, and there must be consequences for it.

We’re watching. And waiting. We’d like results.