Back in October, we had a story here at The Hayride about a problem that has persisted in the Louisiana legislature for a long time – namely, that it’s an elected body of mostly-conservative Republicans which is staffed overwhelmingly by a cabal of Democrats who tend to stifle reform by insuring that legislation aimed at fixing things never actually does.
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.
We bring this back up because it’s a little like the gift that keeps on giving.
And again and again, what we find is it isn’t just that the staffers are a bunch of Democrats. They’re a bunch of status quo praetorians who go out of their way to protect the old guard and public employees in general.
So for example, WAFB in Baton Rouge ran a report a couple of days ago, and did a follow-up yesterday, on the fairly rich swag that convicted and imprisoned public-sector crooks are still pulling down from state government even while they’re in stir…
Our story revealed taxpayers are footing the bill for bad state actors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Former St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain is serving a life sentence for rape and federal bribery, but taxpayers are compensating him $11,000 a month while he sits in prison. Other cases are similar. Former NOPD Officer Rodney Vicknair was convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Taxpayers paid him nearly $3,000 a month while he sat in prison until his death last year. In Monroe, State Trooper Kory York was initially charged with negligent homicide – a felony – tied to the death of Ronald Greene. He was convicted of eight simple batteries instead. He entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors and collects nearly $7,000 in a public pension. In Shreveport, former police officer Stephen Plunkett earns nearly $5,000 per month even though he was convicted of sexual battery against three women who worked with him. The law that allows these convicts to get compensated is 11:293. It calls for the forfeiture of a public employee’s pension if they were convicted in the scope of their public job, but there’s a catch. That forfeiture law took effect in 2013 but does not apply to public employees who began their state service prior to 2013. It essentially grandfathers them in – even if they were convicted of crimes after the law was passed.
WAFB’s Chris Nakamoto interviewed the Metropolitan Crime Commission’s Rafael Goyeneche, who was one of the people behind getting the bill passed.
Rafael Goyeneche, the President of the Metropolitan Crime Commission was instrumental in getting that law passed back in 2013. ”We started by going to some legislators from New Orleans area and got them to sponsor a bill that would require a corrupt official to forfeit their pension rights under Louisiana law if they were convicted of an offense related to their duties as a public official,” said Goyeneche. “It took us three years to get that law passed.” Goyeneche said his organization has been responsible for the convictions of 100 public employees. To date, not a single one has had to forfeit a pension. ”One of the things that can be done, and it hasn’t been, was available before the law was passed is when a public official commits a crime, the crime requires or allows for substantial fines that can be assessed against the offender,” said Goyeneche. “I don’t see it in the state system imposing substantial fines against officials that have been convicted.”
And the follow-up story is about how Blake Miguez, who for reasons we’ve discussed is going to be all over the news in the next few days, weeks and months, is jumping in and promising to fix this mess.
State Senator Blake Miguez, a republican from New Iberia said the spirit of the existing law is one that is positive in nature but it appears there are holes in it. “This issue will take some extensive research from staff which I’m happy to look into and see if we can find that balance point that we can thread the needle and tighten up the law,” said Miguez. … For Miguez, he promises to ask questions in hopes of bringing forth meaningful change. ”I appreciate you guys bringing this issue to light,” said Miguez. “We want to make sure at the end of the day we hold criminals accountable and that we are the best steward of taxpayer dollars. I think this is a conversation we need to have in the legislature.”
Your instinct, and it isn’t an unreasonable one, is to blame the state legislators for writing a sloppy bill that allows crooks like Jack Strain to keep collecting taxpayer cash even while they’re in jail – one wonders if Strain isn’t sitting in a deluxe prison cell and cooking steaks on a hot plate every night like Paul Sorvino’s character in Goodfellas courtesy of your tax dollars.
But the thing to understand is that those legislators make $16,800 per year plus per diem and expenses. They’re part-timers. They’re essentially the Christmas help. Yes, they bring bills and they vote, but all of them have real jobs which require the bulk of their attention. We want citizen legislators rather than Roman senators, and we’re not wrong to want that.
But there’s only so much you can ask of those citizen legislators.
We appropriate money to have professional staffers whose jobs are to take the public’s preferences, as expressed through those citizen legislators, and convert them into legislation which produces the desired results.
And in this case it’s clear that opening a loophole you could drive a truck through so that the old status quo mob wouldn’t be punished all that badly for their malfeasance in office wasn’t the will of the legislators who passed that bill. If it was, they wouldn’t have passed it in the first place.
No, that bill was written with that loophole in place, and the people paid to advise the legislators about the problems with it were magically quiet about how the Jack Strains of the world would keep getting paid even after their foul deeds put them in the slammer.
This is why there needs to be an overhaul of the legislative staff in Louisiana, which is something the legislative leadership is loath to do for the friction it would cause.
But Louisiana is at the bottom of so many public-policy metrics not because our people are the worst but because our public policy is deficient. What we have on the payroll is not good enough. This kerfuffle over the Jack Strains of the world is just another example of that.
Let’s get some changes made this year.