We talked about this subject earlier this spring when Rep. Mike Bayham’s HB 225 first came onto the radar. The bill is due to be heard on the House floor today; we don’t know how it’ll go.

For some reason, the Democrats apparently hate the bill. It’s our guess that they want to run John Bel Edwards against Jeff Landry next year, though it’s highly unlikely that’ll happen – Edwards is very unlikely to get to 50 percent of the vote in a statewide Louisiana election ever again, but more importantly, Edwards has no ability to raise the kind of money Landry is going to have in his war chest. The only way he could get there would be to drum it up from the trial lawyers, but those guys are generally pretty happy with Landry.

We guess the Dems are so desperate that none of these considerations have entered their minds.

Or maybe they just hate Bayham that much.

Anyway, we’re expecting a floor fight on the bill and we don’t know what’s going to happen. What we can say is that this is a no-brainer; it’s ridiculous that we’ve allowed such a huge crack in the door of term limits that somebody can serve for two terms as governor, sit out a term, and then serve two more terms.

You would have thought the Edwin Edwards experience, in which the old crook kept coming back over and over again after he’d served two terms as governor and was a malign, meddling influence in Louisiana politics when he wasn’t in office – which had a big hand in ruining the gubernatorial terms of both Dave Treen and Buddy Roemer, and that set Louisiana back a great deal while neighboring states like Florida, Georgia, Texas and Tennessee profited greatly at our expense – would have convinced our people to follow the old adage that politicians and diapers need to be changed regularly and for the same reason.

Well, now there’s an opportunity to do something concrete about that. We’d like hard term limits put down on all of the statewide offices and the state legislature as well, but this bill is a start.

Why does it need to pass? Well…

1. Corruption, or the (hopeful) lack of it.

The longer you have these people in office, the more they figure out about how to game the system for their own benefit. We don’t pay governors, or other politicians, that much – so the money under the table is always going to be a temptation. And this is Louisiana, so…

2. Fossilized politicians give you fossilized politics.

One of the things about Edwin Edwards was that when he kept reprising his 1970’s Leisure Suit Larry routine, he made it impossible for the state’s politics to move on. If you’ll recall, when Edwards’ political horse finally died in 1995 and Mike Foster came out of nowhere to win, there was such a colossal breath of fresh air all over the state. It’s not like Louisiana had anything like a massive renaissance, but after the 16-year Treen-Edwards-Roemer-Edwards slog from 1980-1996, the Foster years almost made Louisiana feel like a normal American state.

If nothing else, our politics was able to evolve.

And if anybody’s politics need to evolve, it’s Louisiana’s.

3. The Meddling.

As mentioned above, if you give these people an opportunity to go back in, they’ll do their two terms in office and then spend the next four years trying to sabotage the next guy. Either that, or they’ll run a puppet as their  successor and then you get a shadow governor. Neither one of those options is good. Once the eight years are over, they’re out. Period. It’s the only way to keep the blood flowing. What Edwards did to Treen and Roemer cannot be allowed ever again.

Other states know this. Most of them have a hard two term limit. Virginia only allows one term, though that seems a little too chaotic.

It’s not too much to ask that Louisiana close this loophole. Enough  already.