I don’t know that my phone has ever blown up like it did after this happened yesterday…

BREAKING: @LAGovJeffLandry has vetoed SB 111—a bill that would have brought balance and clarity to Louisiana’s broken insurance laws.
He promised to sign reform. He didn’t.
Louisiana businesses and drivers deserve better.#LaLege #laGov #MakeInsuranceAffordableAgain #LMTA https://t.co/x7xnPseS2X

— LA Motor Transport Assn., Inc. (@TruckinginLA) June 11, 2025

I did an American Spectator column on what happened; feel free to read it here. But here’s the gist of it.

Back in April, when a House committee was marking up tort reform bills and also a bill that would give Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple the power, and presumably eventually the responsibility, to cram down insurance rates, Gov. Jeff Landry was testifying in front of the committee.

At the time there was a lot of suspicion, based on a story that Landry had gone on a turkey hunt with a couple of rich plaintiff lawyers and the two legislative leaders, that the governor was going to ultimately scuttle tort reform efforts this year. Landry denied that, and he said this…

The importance of this can’t be overstated.

This was a guarantee, in the context that it was made, that Landry was not going to stand in the way of tort reform. But more than that, while he was standing behind a package of bills that fit into that category, he was also signaling that he was letting the Legislature take the lead in reforming the tort and insurance system in the state.

Yes, that’s basic and obvious, but it matters, because people relied on Landry saying that.

And when SB 111, which is a very in-the-weeds insurance bill that addresses the abuse of insurance policy limits that trial lawyers in the state have managed to worm their way into (it’s complicated, but I discussed it in an X post yesterday to the best of my understanding and you can see that here), was going through the legislative process nobody from the administration was complaining.

So it passed with 26 votes out of 39 in the Senate and 56-44 in the House. The only real opposition to it came from the lobbyist from the trial lawyers’ association.

Then Landry vetoed it.

He said he would sign the tort reform bills, and then he vetoed a tort reform bill.

At Facebook, the LMTA went a little further in their irritation with the governor…

The Louisiana Motor Transport Association (LMTA) is deeply disappointed that Governor Jeff Landry broke his public promise to sign all legal reform bills sent to his desk. Our legislators listened to the people and did their job by passing Senate Bill 111. By vetoing it, Governor Landry failed to keep his word and delivered a major blow to every business and family paying high insurance premiums.

This veto kills a common-sense solution to lawsuit abuse. Championed by Sen. Alan Seabaugh, SB 111 would have brought much-needed clarity to Louisiana’s vague “bad faith” insurance laws—a favorite loophole for trial lawyers. By clearly defining what constitutes a violation, the bill was designed to stop opportunistic lawsuits over routine delays or legitimate coverage disputes.

The Governor’s rejection of this fair-minded bill protects trial lawyers’ ability to exploit vague language and ensures that job-creating businesses, like truckers, remain a target.

The problem isn’t so much that because SB 111 didn’t become law, insurance rates won’t come down. It wouldn’t appear the veto helped, for sure, but this is only one little piece of a pretty wide-ranging solution. Louisiana has an entire culture of people who think of car wrecks as a jackpot opportunity, and that culture is reinforced practically everywhere you look. It might not even be fixable through legislation alone.

The real problem is that Jeff Landry made a concrete representation to the people of Louisiana, on the record in an official proceeding, that he wouldn’t stand in the way of efforts at tort reform that the Louisiana legislature thought would help the situation. And he made it to assuage concerns that he had his thumb on the scale.

And then despite reliance on that representation, he did the opposite of what he said he would do.

Moon Griffon has been castigating Landry as a liar ever since on his show. It’s hard to say Moon is wrong about that. This is about as cut-and-dried a case as there is of that.

But it has to be reiterated that what this means is nobody can rely on Landry’s word.

He says that SB 111 isn’t a tort reform bill at all but rather an anti-consumer bill. The business community and lots of others, particularly among GOP legislators, really don’t agree with that. And the fact that the trial lawyers sent their lobbyist out to fight the bill would indicate that they certainly thought it was a tort reform bill.

But when he said he’d sign the bills, what Landry was implying, pretty strongly, was that he was letting the Legislature define what tort reform is and is not. He said if they passed those bills he’d sign them. Then he did the opposite.

So how do you rely on his word going forward?

I don’t know. And because of that I don’t know what the way ahead looks like with Landry’s next two years. Without trust and honesty among the elected officials there is no way to successfully operate a representative democracy, and we now have a wide-open breach of that trust.

Not just in my eyes. Everywhere.

And it’s too bad, too, because there were some wins had at the Legislature and on Landry’s desk yesterday and this week. But what happened with that veto makes most of that irrelevant – not as a matter of policy; this is about something more basic than that. How can you support somebody who doesn’t care about his own word?

The thing is, nobody would have even known or cared if Landry’s people had quietly killed SB 111 during the legislative process. There were multiple tort reform bills which died along the way this year, and there wasn’t a big public outcry. Had SB 111 been one of them you wouldn’t have seen anything here at The Hayride about it.

But he vetoed it when he said he wouldn’t. Whether he liked that bill or not, Jeff Landry had obligated himself to sign it when it reached his desk. He didn’t. And now we’ve got a crisis of leadership midway through his term that I don’t know how he’s going to fix.