Every year when the Louisiana legislature convenes at the state capitol for a lawmaking session, a strange phenomenon occurs. The state’s Democrat media will find a bill somebody brings – usually it’s a bill a Republican legislator will author as a means of clarifying some bureaucratic mess or other – and interpret that bill as pushing some nefarious purpose.

And then you’ll see a fairly intense bit of information warfare meant to (1) defame the bill author and those he or she is associated with, and (2) discredit the policy aim behind the bill.

The best example of this in the 2025 session is what the Louisiana Illuminator’s fake-news scribe Julia O’Donoghue is doing with HB 693, which is a bill seeking to rein in the rogue machinations of Louisiana’s State Board of Ethics.

The Ethics Board was stocked with a host of hyper-partisan Democrats in John Bel Edwards’ time in office and it attempted to act as a left-wing star chamber at times. We’ve written about LaKoshia Roberts, the former board chair, and the utter clownshow the Ethics Board turned into back in 2023 when it attempted to influence the gubernatorial election that year. Roberts is still on that board, as are a few other Edwards-era appointees like Bill Grimley, Jacqueline Scott and Camille Bryant. It’s still very much a clownshow, though it is getting better as Gov. Jeff Landry replaces the lefties as their terms expire.

HB 693 does a number of things to codify the Board of Ethics’ activities in law rather than have them exercise “discretion” in what they investigate. That’s necessary, because when sky-screaming leftists put on the Ethics Board as DEI hires or sops to the white leftists with money who donated to JBE’s campaigns get to exercise “discretion,” what results is lawfare.

HB 693 is a campaign finance “reform” bill. It makes little to no change in substantive law. It does nothing to change old law having to do with campaign contribution limits.

It still prohibits the personal use of campaign funds and money from leadership PACs. But what HB 693 does is to take some practices that have existed for decades, and have been codified federally and in other states, and simply codifying them in Louisiana statute.

The bill specifically addresses “personal use” of campaign and leadership PAC funds because the current statute fails to define “personal use.”

Naturally that leads to confusion, and the accountants, lawyers and campaign consultants who handle compliance in the state have been driven bonkers by the vagaries of the Ethics Board. When the rules are unclear and the people enforcing them are unserious, partisan fruitcakes, it’s impossible to be a campaign treasurer and give good advice to a candidate or PAC.

Accordingly, HB693 explicitly adopts the “irrespective test”- whether the “obligation or expense … would exist irrespective of the candidate’s campaign or the holding of office.” This is the test under federal campaign finance law. This test was adopted by the Ethics Board in a previous opinion.

And here we come to O’Donoghue’s Louisiana Illuminator article which alleges that HB 693 would let politicians use PAC or campaign money to pay for gym memberships, country club memberships, mortgage costs, Washington Mardi Gras and payment of spouses’ travel.

So does it do those things? Not really.

Gym memberships and health clubs wouldn’t likely pass the “irrespective test,” though there are other states which do permit health club memberships as acceptable expenses. There is a scenario, of course, where if you’re using campaign funds on a hoity-toity health club where the rich folks who might be donors tend to go, it could be justifiable as an increased cost over the Anytime Fitness down the street based on the contacts the candidate could gain by being a member of the prestigious club. That might rankle a bit, but on the other hand if you think of a political campaign or a leadership PAC as a business venture it’s not all that out of the ordinary. Companies will often allow expense accounts to cover putting their executives and sales people in social situations with potential clients and customers.

What about country club memberships? Guess what: that’s already routinely included in campaign expenditures not just in Louisiana but in lots of other places. But it’s a gray area in law, and that means people like LaKoshia Roberts get to decide whether you as a political candidate get brought up in front of the Ethics Board for it. Think about it this way – in Baton Rouge it’s pretty standard practice that you want to hold your fundraising events at the City Club, and the usual-suspect donors are more likely to show up if you do that. But you don’t get to do events there unless you’re a member. If you’re a state rep from Houma, it makes zero sense to pay for that membership out of pocket; it’s a business expense for your campaign, so you’d do the membership if the campaign could pay for it.

But the way things are now, Democrats are in the clear for putting the City Club membership on their campaign account but Republicans have to sweat the wrath of LaKoshia for doing it. That’s bullshit, so HB 693 seeks to put a rule on paper about it.

Yes, but a mortgage payment can’t be a campaign expense, right? Of course not, but again, there are scenarios which could make for a justification. Let’s say you’re running for state rep and you have a bunch of yard signs that just came in and you need to stash them somewhere before your volunteers can put them up all over the district. And rather than having to rent storage space you take the space in your garage and put them there. If you were running a home office for your business, the IRS would let you deduct the fair market value of the space you’re using for business, and that’s what HB 693 allows campaigns to do. The bill doesn’t let the politicians pay their mortgages out of their campaign funds, despite what Pigpen O’Donoghue would have you believe.

What about Washington Mardi Gras? It’s hard to imagine anybody thinks political campaigns and PAC’s don’t already pay those expenses. That’s been happening for years, because the Ethics Board gets to decide what’s an acceptable “political event” and it’s always said Washington Mardi Gras is one.

That is, until Jeff Landry became governor and the Legislature became more conservative than ever. All of a sudden, because Washington Mardi Gras is now a Republican-dominated event the Ethics Board now says it’s not a “political event.”

O’Donoghue also bitches in her article about campaign funds paying for bodyguards. We would think most people who pay attention to the news don’t find that a major issue. Having your candidate avoiding being slaughtered at a campaign event, like for example what nearly happened to Donald Trump when he ran for president last year or Lee Zeldin when he ran for governor of New York in 2022, or what almost happened to Steve Scalise in 2017, is a pretty negative occurrence for a campaign, you’d think, and hiring security to keep it from happening seems justified.

See how this works?

O’Donoghue ran through a host of things which are pretty standard practice already, are pretty much justified as business expenses in the private sector without a whole lot of controversy, and suddenly began to clutch her pearls over the horrid ethical lapses that Republicans like Jeff Landry and Rep. Mark Wright, who brought this bill, want to codify in law.

When politicians that O’Donoghue likes have been doing them a lot longer than she’s been a reporter. With the full blessing of the Ethics Board.

And it wasn’t the politicians who wanted this bill passed. It was the accountants and consultants. They wanted to clarify the rules so they wouldn’t get yelled at by their clients when the clowns on the Ethics Board decided to selectively investigate some of them.

The partisanship in this is thick enough to see with the naked eye. But they’re doing everything they can to keep people blinded, and outraged. Not because we have a bunch of bribe-taking crooks in office getting greased for club dues and mortgage notes by donors – some of them are getting bribed, but that sure as hell isn’t how it’s done, and the Ethics Board certainly isn’t vigorous enough as currently constituted to chase down the real corruption – but because O’Donoghue and the rest of the Left put to pasture by the state’s voters in the last election can’t stand their current irrelevance.

There is nothing wrong with HB 693. It’s a perfectly good bill. All it does is level the playing field so the Ethics Board can’t weaponize itself against politicians the Democrats on that board don’t like.

As usual, you shouldn’t listen to Pigpen O’Donoghue. She isn’t a truth-teller, and she isn’t a very good liar, either.