The new club that has formed as a subset of the Bossier City Council, the Oathbreakers, have kept true to their subversive and taxpayer-unfriendly strategy in the hopes for a political payoff – which may be thwarted because what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander (not just in Springfield, OH but everywhere).

The Oathbreakers – or Councilors Republicans David Montgomery, Jeff Free, and Vince Maggio and Democrat Bubba Williams and independent Jeff Darby – resemble the namesake character of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons who break their sacred oaths to pursue some dark ambition, in this instance to satisfy their cravings for power for them and for their allies by violating the city Charter in refusing on multiple occasions to resolve to put on the ballot language from a certified petition as required by the Charter, with the latest example coming last week. If voters approve the measure prior to 2025 city election qualification, this would amend the Charter to impose retroactively limits of three terms on councilors and the mayor that would disqualify all but Maggio from running for reelection.

Getting to this point has been long and convoluted, starting with a petition to accomplish this amending last year eventually invalidated over a legal technicality strictly interpreted but which prompted the first votes to subvert the Charter. That attack in all likelihood represented a chunk of over $480,000 spent on outside legal consulting from Jul. 1, 2023 to Jul. 31, 2024, which in 2024 was budgeted for only $10,000 within an entire Legal Department budget of about $536,000.

That enormous extra taxpayer expense also came about in part because another petition, with airtight legality, using the same language popped up as certified at the end of this period. That led to a two-pronged Oathbreaker campaign, the first of which being lawfare against the petition even thought they know they will lose in the end, and already have lost the first round in the 26^th Judicial District, but they will keep going as they can bill taxpayers further with impunity and therefore appealed this to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and will drag in the Supreme Court if necessary to delay as much as possible.

As well, when the new one started circulating the Oathbreakers tried to counter with another strategic tentacle by creating a Charter Review Commission primarily to prevent a strict term limits amendment. They had the power to have their allies constitute a majority that tried to steer the effort in that direction but the panel came to near implosion, with several member resignations, after the second petition drive succeeded. Eventually, Oathbreakers with their allies on the Commission restarted it and earlier this month it approved a version close to what its members hope to present to the Council that, remember, the Charter says it must pass long.

Apparently, the version will contain three items: a revision, basically minor, of the Charter as a whole, then separate items on the at-large selection of councilors and on a weak term limits passage for three terms but not retroactive. It’s an attempt to take advantage of the Charter provision that if contradictory items on the same subject appear on the same ballot, the one that receives the most votes takes precedence.

Yet there’s a double indemnity involved as a kind of insurance. If the strict version still wins, if the overall revision also succeeds Oathbreakers hope they can get the judiciary to buy a convoluted argument that the vote installed a new charter and the strict term limits amendments addressed the “old” one, thereby mooting them. While the Oathkeepers undoubtedly would prefer that their lawfare strategy delays the inevitable vote on strict limits enough to allow them a shot at reelection, in case the judiciary is uncooperative then they hope to get the Commission’s work on the ballot to join the petition-driven amendments and overcome strict limits by gaining the replacement’s approval.

But in executing this strategy, they may find themselves hoisted on their own petards, by citizens willing to tie up in courts the product of the Commission for a number of reasons, starting with its dubious formation. In a nutshell, the legal path chosen by the Council when it created the Commission allows only for amendments to it, not a replacement. The Commission’s current plan is illegal in this way as well as in that it tries to mix and match replacement and discrete amendments when statute makes clear you can do only one or the other.

Add to this pair of defects is membership questions. After the member resignations, statute gave the remaining members, all Oathbreaker allies, the power to pick new members. A like-minded slate of nominees was conjured and brought on board by secret ballot. However, this violates R.S. 42:14 which states that “Each public body shall be prohibited from utilizing any manner of proxy voting procedure, secret balloting, or any other means to circumvent the intent of this Chapter …. All votes made by members of a public body shall be viva voce and shall be recorded in the minutes, journal, or other official, written proceedings of the body, which shall be a public document.” In practical terms with more nominees than positions, this would mean a series of recorded votes such as with the Caddo School Board, where for its recent superintendent search it polled each member for a rating of 0-6 on each candidate and then it announced publicly how many points each member gave to each candidate.

For any of these reasons if the Council were to pass along the Commission report as intended it could be sued to prevent forwarding this to the SBC. And resolving that would take time and lots of it, defeating the strategy of putting competition on the ballot to the petition language the controversy surrounding which should be resolved far sooner and in its favor.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Which is why the Oathbreakers better hope the wheels of justice turn so slowly that they can delay the judgment against them until the holiday season at year’s end. Otherwise, given term limits’ popularity, most of them will be out of a job at the end of next June regardless of whether they want to run for reelection.