There is a bill going through the Louisiana legislature right now which they’re calling, unofficially, the “omnibus elections” bill. The bill number is HB 592, and its author is Rep. Beau Beaulieu.

Most of what’s in there are minor changes to the state election code, the kinds of in-the-weeds things that don’t really amount to public policy but are rules governing how the Secretary of State’s office runs our elections. HB 592 sailed through the House on a 75-16 vote without a whole lot of controversy and it’s moving through the Senate reasonably easily as well.

But something happened three weeks ago when the bill was making its way through the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee which has people concerned in advance of Sunday or Monday when it’s expected to hit the Senate floor.

Here’s the link to the full video of that committee hearing. At around 1:31:45, an amendment was announced by the committee chairman, Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, which was advertised to save the state some $3.2 million every couple of years.

Sounds good, right? Watch to see what this amendment would do…

They want to get rid of the runoff in the closed party primaries just passed last year.

We haven’t even had an election yet with the new system, which only really applies to federal elections and a few state contests. It doesn’t even take effect until the first of next year. And yet here is Kleinpeter bringing a bill to get rid of the runoff.

Beaulieu, as you can see if you watch the video, was taken aback by the amendment and did the best he could to make his objections polite. But he signaled that he was anything but happy about the idea. And Kleinpeter withdrew the amendment upon being presented with the fact that there would be complications around that change.

The talk around the Capitol is there is a floor amendment coming when HB 592 goes up for debate in the full Senate, and they’re going to move to get rid of the runoff.

Two things need to be understood here.

First is that when the committee chairman proposes an amendment to a bill in a committee markup, more often than not that amendment is coming from the leadership of the body. In other words, Kleinpeter in proposing that amendment was speaking for Senate President Cameron Henry.

And second, Henry is an ally of Sen. Bill Cassidy.

This is an attempt to rig next year’s Republican primary so that if Cassidy is up against multiple Republican opponents, like for example John Fleming, Blake Miguez and Eric Skrmetta, the conservatives will all cancel out each other’s votes and Cassidy would go back in with some underwhelming amount of support. Maybe 30 percent or less.

Despite polls which have Cassidy’s approval numbers above 50 percent, not too many insiders will tell you that he could get to 50 percent in a GOP primary runoff next year. Whoever makes the runoff against him, assuming the current system were to actually be implemented for next year’s election cycle, is likely to beat him.

But if you get rid of the runoff so you can win the primary with a plurality, that problem goes away. Cassidy could even generate a straw man or two to feed into the race and diffuse some anti-Cassidy votes among multiple opponents so nobody can consolidate that vote and beat him.

It’s a smart, Machiavellian move if you’re Cassidy.

It’s also old-school, scumbag Louisiana politics.

The point of instituting closed party primaries is that informed and engaged voters in the Republican and Democrat parties would have the ability to hold politicians to account for their campaign promises. Cassidy has a real problem with that because of his idiotic vote to impeach Donald Trump over the “insurrection” of January 6, 2025 – which was more and more obviously a Reichstag Fire moment orchestrated by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, considering we now know there were literally hundreds of federal assets in the crowd which came into the Capitol just before evidence was about to be presented of irregularities in the conduct of the 2020 election.

Louisiana’s Republican voters are very well aware of this and a majority of us are not at all happy about it. There is a great deal of sentiment in favor of imposing some accountability on Cassidy for his taking the side of the Democrats and the Deep State against Trump over what appears to have been a ruse (and a bloody one at that, given that Jan. 6 protester Ashli Babbit was murdered by a Capitol Police officer, for which her family was recently paid a multimillion-dollar settlement).

But whatever the reason, the state GOP, its central committee, conservative activists and lots of others who really ought to have sway over a legislature which has a Republican supermajority in both houses fought very hard to get the closed party primary system we have. And before a single election is held under those rules, Henry has his committee chairmen bringing amendments seeking to tear it down.

This won’t do at all.

Nothing is official yet on any further amendments to the bill. But it needs to be left alone so that we can have a true primary test for Cassidy, rather than some rigged kangaroo election complete with straw-man spoilers and other Good Ole Boy tricks.