Ever since the GOP took over a legislative majority in Louisiana I’ve continued to hear the same complaint again and again from conservatives in the House and Senate.
It goes like this: on any bill that involves a policy fight with ideological implications, anybody who wants to bring a conservative bill simply can’t use the legislative staffers whose jobs are to assist them with drafting bills.
Practically everyone on the Right has run into this. Try to bring a bill which, for example, would ban pediatric sex changes, and ask the staff to draft it, and what they’ll give you is something which will have so many deficiencies in its drafting that you can’t even bring it to a committee hearing. That happened to Sen. Mike Fesi a couple of years ago; he was the first who tried to do what Rep. Gabe Firment was able to do last year, and Fesi had to pull the bill because it was so flawed.
That’s why most of the conservatives in Louisiana’s legislature are using model legislation drafted by various conservative groups to bring bills on the more contentious political issues.
On one level, you’d look at this and say “well, they’re government workers, so it isn’t really all that surprising if most of the staffers lean left.”
That’s an assumption you’d make about bureaucrats in the Louisiana Department of Health, let’s say. But if you think about it for a while you realize that the Louisiana legislative staff is a very, very different animal.
There are good staffers at the Louisiana legislature, mind you. Even some of the Democrats are highly professional. That said, it’s been several years since Republicans took over a majority of the seats in the House and Senate, and they’re now considerably more than a supermajority in both bodies. By now you’d expect the legislative staff to look something like a Young Republicans meeting, if not a gathering of the Federalist Society.
It isn’t.
Documents reviewed by The Hayride in concert with conservative legislators and observers of the Legislature with knowledge of its workings indicate that of the 100 or so Senate staffers, more than 35 percent were either known registered Democrats or activist left-wingers. This, more than a decade after both houses of the Legislature flipped to Republican majorities.
And the problem isn’t simply that staffers hang on forever and state civil service protections cement them into their jobs.
Take, for example, the case of Tina Vanichchagorn, whose current title is Special Counsel to the President of the Senate.
Vanichchagorn is new in that job. She was hired off the staff of the governor’s Executive Counsel.
Specifically, John Bel Edwards’ Executive Counsel Matthew Block.
Vanichchagorn isn’t just some faceless bureaucrat. She’s very well known at the Capitol for a host of activities that should have made her positively radioactive for any Republican legislator to hire her in a key position.
Among those where that Vanichchagorn was the chief author of the executive orders Edwards issued which established Louisiana’s COVID lockdown regime which shuttered Mom and Pop businesses like restaurants and retail stores, not to mention churches, but kept open strip bars and casinos.
This is someone whose actions ruined the livelihoods and robbed the freedom of countless Louisianans. It’s utterly unthinkable she would have a government job working for the president of a Senate whose membership is 72 percent (28 of 39) Republican.
That flies in the face of the idea of democracy. Louisiana voters, in electing 28 Republicans in 39 Senate districts, fairly explicitly rejected Edwards’ brand of governance, and yet the author of his COVID lockdowns is now the legal mind of the president of that Senate?
What is Vanichchagorn doing in the Senate?
We’ll have to keep an eye on that. What we know is that Democrats in government govern like Democrats. And there are lots of complaints that the Louisiana Senate has been a major obstacle to conservative reform, most conspicuously this year.
A Republican legislature should have a legislative staff reflective of a Republican, if not openly conservative, mindset. It should mean something that voters speak as decisively as they have in the past election cycle. So far, this has not materialized, and it’s time to ask some rude questions why.
More to come.