You mess with the bull, you get the horns, as politicians in New Orleans may discover when the city comes to a potential reckoning through tough love.

The saga started at the beginning of the month when, out of thin air, a grand jury lodged an indictment against Republican Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill. It charged her with multiple counts of malfeasance and public intimidation, whereupon a special prosecutor was appointed. The basis for that came weeks earlier when the city attempted to contravene a new statute that abolished one clerk of court’s office by merging it into another, but the attempt was shot down by the judiciary. Murrill had warned city officials that those actions violated state law and threatened legal action to remove officials from office if they proceeded.

That indictment was halted almost immediately by the state Supreme Court, which cited perverse legal logic, conflicts of interest, and procedural errors. It said the case essentially was dead in the water on the basis that Murrill’s actions amounted to the legal discharge of her duties.

That in hand, a couple of weeks later the city threw in the towel, asking Democrat Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams to dismiss the case. However, in the interim, the series of events leading up to and after the sham indictment came under question because of allegations of illegal coordination in steering the indictment. As a result, at a news conference on another matter, both Murrill and GOP Gov. Jeff Landry made clear that the matter wasn’t over and that Williams, Democrat Mayor Helena Moreno, and others could face criminal charges.

Supposedly, a criminal complaint had been forwarded to federal authorities. Murrill said it was necessary because of allegations that the jury had been led to produce the fraudulent indictment and that this manipulation of the justice system needed to be discouraged.

None of this had to happen. First, the attempt by Moreno and the City Council to subvert the law was, to any outside observer, completely asinine. But if they had just stopped there, that would have ended matters. Instead, they cheered on Williams as he pursued the indictments.

Their inanity perhaps began to dawn on them when the city, plagued by poor fiscal management and deficit spending that has led it to desperate schemes such as gimmickry to advance rent payments for operation of the Caesars Superdome, sought to to issue revenue bonds to plug gaps in a looming budget deficit, which required State Bond Commission approval. That body, composed entirely of Republican elected officials or their appointees, including representatives of Landry and Murrill, signaled it would reject the request over concerns that revenues to pay off the bonds would come up short. Moreno then withdrew the request and claimed an alternative had been found, begging the question of why the request had been made in the first place. And this came after the city already was on the hook for over a hundred million dollars to the state.

This is punctuated by the fact that the point man on all of this, Williams, already is in a different kind of debt. To help stem the city’s high violent crime rate, the state, using its own resources, has sent in state law enforcement and prosecutors. His role in advancing the indictment, along with allegations that he coached things along to secure the indictments, threatens dissolution of the agreement for extra law enforcement and prosecution aid.

Yet this begs an even larger question: why did all of these elected officials so stupidly bite the hand that feeds them, leading to the poisoning of the well with those to whom they are supplicants? The answer lies in the general invalid moral certitude common to the political left, spurred by one-party rule in the city.

No city office, including seats on the School Board and the offices of constable and judge, is held by anyone who is not a Democrat. In fact, in the most recent elections for each office outside of the Council and mayor, only five non-Democrats even ran. As for those city elections, Democrats either won the general election outright or, in the case of runoffs, two Democrats advanced. Even in the Legislature, there are no Republicans whose districts lie completely within Orleans Parish.

A combination of learned helplessness among voters, leading them to acquiesce in, if not embrace, leftist rule, and GOP malaise has created this situation of a bubble existence that forms politicians who get too big for their britches but are too clueless to understand that their views and agenda are widely rejected outside the swamps of Orleans. They become so used to having their uncontested way in their little pond that they mistake this omnipotence for reality outside of it, and so they think they can get their way regardless of elections and the law.

This mistake has reaped the whirlwind. Landry now threatens a special session that will place even more constraints on the current Orleans government, bring it more into line with other parishes in terms of offices per capita, and perhaps exert more control over city fiscal affairs, which he might not have felt necessary had city officials just taken their medicine and not blown up everything.

Hopefully, a little more essential right-sizing, if not greater state control over a failing city, will come from that. It’s part of the needed tough love to make Orleans officials understand that it’s they who put their city into this predicament and that they must shed ideology in favor of reality to start correcting their misrule.