We’re going to find out soon whether it’ll actually happen, but the debate is cranking up about whether to spend the last couple of weeks of the current legislative session – or perhaps come back later in the year for a special session – in order to rewrite the Louisiana constitution.

This post won’t go too heavily into the weeds on what changes would take place were a constitutional convention to succeed. It’s probably too early to discuss that very intelligently anyway. We’ll just start with this…

Our State Constitution is defective and doesn't do enough to protect Healthcare & Higher Ed.

…which is exactly why the Legislature and Governor Landry want to refresh it. #lalege pic.twitter.com/WzScUynta5

— Phillip DeVillier (@SpkrDeVillier) May 6, 2024

House Speaker Phillip DeVillier is a lot more enthusiastic about the “con-con” than Senate President Cameron Henry is so far, which is not to say that Henry won’t ultimately relent on holding a convention. So far the major objection, and it might be that Henry is taking arrows from his members on this, is that the senators don’t like the idea of working some late evenings to get all the bills out of the current session two weeks early.

You can call that laziness if you want. On the other hand, if somebody is paying you $16,800, plus six grand in expenses and a $143 per diem, and they demand you work 16 hour days for a quarter of the year on that kind of money, the guess here is you might come off as a little bit lazy, too.

And it isn’t even that. A lot of these guys have bills of their own and a truncated schedule for the regular session means it gets harder to push those measures through both houses.

They’re not unreasonable pushing back against the schedule the constitutional convention supporters want.

But they’re not particularly right in resisting it, either.

Is it any secret that Louisiana’s current constitution stinks? No. Everybody knows it stinks and it needs to be replaced. That’s part of why the voters get a bunch of constitutional amendments dumped on them in every election cycle and generally don’t have much of a clue what they mean.

A proper constitution wouldn’t be cluttered with pronouncements on ad valorem taxes or the ability of local governments to take on certain kinds of debt. Those are rightly statutory matters. But an overly detailed state constitution means changing it drags the voters into the equation.

We’ve gone 50 years since Edwin Edwards and his gang wrote that constitution. Jeremy Alford’s book The Last Constitution covers what a chaotic episode that was. And maybe that constitution did fit the times, though any reasonable observer would point out that Louisiana has lost so much ground to its neighbors with respect to population, economic development and lots of other metrics that it’s impossible to call the current constitution a successful document.

The Edwards set had at least a loud say, if not complete control, over how Louisiana would be governed over that 50 year period. Gradually Louisiana was becoming more conservative and certainly more Republican in the last couple of decades. But it really wasn’t until last fall’s elections that the old Edwards Democrat bunch has been completely swept away.

I’m including John Bel Edwards as part of that set. He isn’t related to Edwin Edwards and politically it’s fair to say he’s to the left of Edwin. But as a defender of the capitol status quo that Edwin Edwards created, John Bel Edwards was unparalleled.

And he’s been swept out, too. John Bel Edwards is absolutely bare of influence in how Louisiana will be governed going forward, which is why you hear nary a word from him on public policy matters.

The ground under that capitol has shifted, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like everybody over there quite understands that yet.

But that’s why you write a new constitution. Even if it doesn’t make wholesale changes to how this state is governed, changes we would absolutely love to see, it’s still a signal that this is not the Louisiana of Edwin Edwards, wide-scale corruption, rampant incompetence and ignorant hostility to business and economic development that virtually everybody sees.

And DeVillier is correct that the number one reason for a new constitution is to attack those dedicated funds where so much filthy lucre has been stashed away over the years. There’s some ju-jitsu going on in those arguments, though – the reason why “education and health care” bear the brunt of budget cuts when the state has to make them is that’s where the money is.

You could pay for the elimination not only of John Bel Edwards’ over-the-top sales and business tax hikes, most of which are rolling off the books next year anyway, but also Louisiana’s counterproductive state income tax, by simply scrubbing out the Louisiana Department of Health. That is a bloated, fascistic, incompetent agency which actively promotes waste and fraud – something we saw in spades during the COVID epidemic.

Billions of dollars’ worth of savings could be had simply by attacking the misspent Medicaid dollars in Louisiana, for example.

The problem with doing that all at once, though, is it’s easy to demagogue those cuts as taking health care away from seniors or poor kids or whatever, and that’s unpalatable for lots of the politicians at the legislative level. They’d rather do that work piecemeal, especially when there’s waste elsewhere that can be attacked were a new constitution available to undedicate those squirreled-away funds.

So sure. We should have a new constitution, one which reflects Louisiana’s new conservative majority and facilitates reform of state government into a generally smaller and less intrusive entity which nonetheless has the power and flexibility to fix problems. It seems like there is a majority within the Legislature to embark on writing one, and Gov. Jeff Landry already has his appointees to the convention delegation ready.

It’ll probably happen this year, and it’s entirely likely the new constitution will be on the same ballot this fall as the presidential election will. And assuming the “con-con” does happen and the new constitution passes, we’ll be able to say for sure that a new conservative era in Louisiana has begun.

It’s perfectly understandable that the old Edwards status quo mob and their apologists in the legacy and Soros-funded media will hate that. But their opinions are necessarily irrelevant if we’re to move forward as a state. Here’s hoping enough of the people in charge recognize this.