Louisiana Voice

We can always—ALWAYS—count on a few unforeseen surprises when the Louisiana Legislature is in session. That’s a certainty, along with death and taxes.

Throw in a simultaneous congressional race between two legislators, grab some popcorn and sit back to watch the show.

Fifth District Rep. Julia Letlow is seeking a promotion in challenging Sen. Bill Cassidy who is up for reelection this year. Accordingly, that leaves Letlow’s seat up for grabs and three Republican legislators, Rep. Michael Echols of Monroe and Sens. Blake Miguez of New Iberia and Rick Edmonds of Baton Rouge, and state Board of Regents member Misti Cordell, have entered the sweepstakes with nothing really to lose because the unsuccessful candidates will still have a job. Either Letlow or Cassidy, on the other hand, is going to have to seek a different livelihood.

Aye, but here’s the rub, as Billy Wayne Shakespeare once said: One of the candidates for Letlow’s seat, Miguez, has secured the endorsement of Yellow Potato Trump and Echols wants it so badly that he even submitted a bill, HB 221, to name the as-yet unbuilt but proposed new Mississippi River bridge in Baton Rouge after ol’ Cankle Ankles.

Rep. Michael Echols (R-Monroe)

If that doesn’t do the trick, what will?

Two stories that appeared Wednesday in THE GUARDIANand THE ATLANTIC, maybe, both of which revealed that Miguez had been accused of rape nearly 20 years ago.

Sen. Blake Miguez (R-New Iberia)

On the other hand, that could serve to solidify Trump’s endorsement, but that’s another story.

The Guardian received a response from Miguez’s campaign by providing an email dated Feb. 24 in which the accuser’s father proclaimed that his daughter was a “liar and has a drug problem.” Miguez’s campaign said it had the father’s permission to share the email, which was apparently sent some 19 years after the accusation was made against Miguez.

The Guardian story said the rape accusation was reported to local law enforcement the same day of the alleged assault, but never disclosed to the public. That would have been the beleaugured Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department because the New Iberia Police Department was DISBANDED in 2004 for more than a decade and its duties assumed by then-Sheriff Louis Ackal whose department at the time was preoccupied with crackdowns in the black community.

The Atlantic story was a bit more specific. It said the accusations against Miguez were made by his former girlfriend. The police report filed at the time, the woman told police how Miguez had sex with her even though she told him no, and then followed her when she fled the home. She told police that she hid behind a car near a convenience store until a friend arrived and then she called 911She was taken by deputies to a hospital for a rape-kit examination, the report said. Miguez was then 25 years old at the time and was detained and questioned. He was released after the woman, then 22, said she did not want to press charges. “I called 911 ‘cause I honestly was/am scared!” she wrote in a voluntary statement to deputies.

Trump’s people are aware that there was a “massive bomb” about to be released soon after he made his endorsement, though no one was aware just what was coming.

Miguez did not return an email from LouisianaVoice seeking comment but Echols did give us a call.

We asked him if he was aware of the stories in the two publications and “Did you, your campaign or someone on your behalf leak either of these stories?”

“All I know about them is what I read in those liberal papers,” he said. ‘Neither I nor my campaign had anything to do with them going public, although I’d heard about the story earlier.”

He called the story, if true, “damning” to Miguez, adding, “I sincerely hope it’s not true. I don’t want something like this to cloud the race.”

Echols has not been shy about attacking Miguez on another matter, however. “He’s a CARPETBAGGER,” he said of his opponent. “He doesn’t even live in the 5^th District.”

While residency is not a requirement in Louisiana congressional races, it is significant that Miguez is from New Iberia, which is in Louisiana’s 3^rd Congressional District, currently represented by Rep. Clay Higgins. In fact, the 3^rd and 5^th Districts are separated for most of their boundaries by the 4^th District. New Iberia is “about 100 miles from the nearest border with the 5^th District,” Echols said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hogsbreath’s staff took issue with photos taken in a rare briefing last week and decided to shut out press photographers from two subsequent news conferences. (I Betcha it wasn’t the “staff” that got its drawers in a knot.)

Irony wasted no time in rearing its ugly head in the 2026 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature.

Tuesday was only the second day of the current 60-day session and already certain legislators have shown their determination to put their fealty to an accused CHILD SEX PREDATOR on full display.

The House Transportation, Highways and Public Works Committee on Tuesday, by a 12-2 vote, reported favorably HB 221 by State Rep. Michael Echols (R-Monroe) that would name a proposed new Mississippi River bridge to connect LA. 1 and LA. 30 after Cadet Bone Spurs, Donald J. Trump himself.

Rep. Michael Echols

The irony, you ask? Well, if you go to 31:26 of this video of Tuesday’s committee hearing, you will see Echols pitching his bill to the committee as Rep. Kellee Hennessy Dickerson (Inset) hangs eagerly onto every word just before she made the motion to report the bill favorably.

The thing is, Dickerson sent an email last Aug. 4 to a Louisiana citizen who had been swindled by an unscrupulous baby adoption agency in which she said she would be unable “to move forward with a bill [to address the problem of baby-selling] for [the] 2026 session.” Here is that email:

From: Dickerson, Rep. Kellee Hennessy (District Office)
Sent: Monday, August 4, 2025 12:55 PM

Subject: Baby Selling

Unfortunately, after researching the baby selling topic our office will not be able to move forward with a bill for 2026 Session.

So, on Aug. 6, I emailed Dickerson to inform her I was researching the issue of child trafficking for a book I was writing at the time (which should be out within the next week or so) and to pose several questions for her:

Rep. Hennessee:

I have taken the liberty of copying the email below (in red typeface) that your office sent on August 4 to [an individual] who has personally been adversely affected by the lack of regulation of the practice in Louisiana.

My questions are these:

• To what extent did you or your office “research” this issue?
• As a former television news reporter (presumably trained and educated to have an eye for such things), did you not recognize this as a legitimate “hot-button” issue?
• How did you come to the determination that you/your office “will not be able to move forward with a bill for [the] 2026 session”?
• Why do you not think this issue is of sufficient importance to pursue (especially since you were so diligent in the recent session in protecting the interests of elected officials under ethics investigations)?

That prompted yet another email from Hennessee-Dickerson to the victim of the baby-selling scam in which she said she was “going to meet with Senator [Valarie’ Hodges (R-Denham Springs) and Senator [Beth] Mizell (R-Franklinton) on this matter to potentially co-author a bill… on human trafficking.” That email was sent on Jan. 6 of this year but here we are in the session’s second day and there has been nothing pre-filed to address baby-selling or adoption scams.

On the other hand, it was Hennessee-Dickerson who made the motion to report the Echols bill favorably, which means (and there’s really no other way to say it) the legislator who was counted on to address child trafficking in the form of bogus adoption agencies instead chose to endorse an admitted child sex PREDATOR by naming a damned bridge after him. I believe you can fill that under “H” for hypocrisy.

At worst, she and the other 11 who voted for this abomination have to be considered as tacitly supportive–or at least tolerant–of pedophilia. At best, they are focused on trivial matters as opposed to addressing the serious problems of the state.

Two of the four Democrats on the committee—Ed Murray of New Orleans and Joy Walters of Shreveport—voted no on the bill while two other Democrats—Tehmi Jali Chassion of Lafayette and Chasity Martinez of Plaquemine—joined the Republicans to move the bill to the full House for a vote.

Voting in favor of posting tributes to con man/predator Trump, besides Chassion and Martinez, were Republican members committee chair Ryan Bourriaque of Abbeville, vice chair Bryan Fontenot of Thibodaux, Doyle Boudreaux of Carencro, Chad Michael Boyer of Breaux Bridge, Reese Broussard of Jennings, Dickerson, Rodney Schamerhorn of Hornbeck, Annie Spell of Lafayette and Jeffrey Wiley of Maurepas.

Echols, of course, has an ulterior motive for paying homage to Trump. He is a candidate for the 5^th District House seat being vacated by Julia Letlow who is challenging Bill Cassidy and State Treasurer John Fleming for Cassidy’s Senate seat and apparently believes he must pander to a demagogue in order to get elected. It’s sad (and tragic) that any candidate would troll for votes in such a manner while eschewing standing on principle.

Echols’s bill is calling for the placement of commemorative plaques at each end of the proposed bridge but he might do well to remember that a lot of buildings and bridges once bore the name of former Gov. Richard Leche but after Leche was carted off to prison in 1940, all but one of those plaques were promptly removed. That one surviving medallion may be seen on the north exterior end of the east side of Strawberry Stadium on the campus of Southeastern Louisiana University.

Dickerson, meanwhile, should be remembered as one of 58 House members and 35 senators who co-sponsored a bill last year to fight what they called “chemtrails” but which are really contrails left behind by jet airplanes (chemtrails implies chemicals while the more accurate contrails refers to condensation). The upshot of SB 46, which became Act 95 (if you can believe that nonsense) was to ask Louisiana citizens to notify the Department of Environmental Quality when one of them thar poisonous chemtrails were spotted over Louisiana skies. Just what DEQ is supposed to do with those notifications is yet unclear.

When push comes to shove, members of Congress, regardless of party affiliation, can be counted on to put aside their philosophical differences long enough to circle the wagons against the diabolical threats of accountability and transparency.

And that is precisely what 357 members of the House—including every single one of Louisiana’s six members—did last Wednesday when they CAME TOGETHER for the common cause of self-preservation to beat back an effort from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) to make public all reports on file with the House Ethics Committee on investigations into allegations of sexual hanky-panky on the part of members.

The 357-65 vote (with a sole member voting “present,” but casting neither a yea nor nay vote), the House, in a rousing display of bipartisanship certain to bring a tear to the eye of every patriotic American, moved to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, which effectively kills the measure dead in its tracks, thus assuring the preservation of the American Way in the People’s House.

Who says it’s impossible for Republicans and Democrats to work together? This is what the Founded Fathers envisioned: working across the aisle in unison and harmony to display to the world how our leaders protect one another from potential harm.

We should not concern ourselves with charges or sexual harassment by beleaguered staff members or even of sexual relationships with members of their staffs. After all, there is insider trading to be done and wars to be fought.

This, by the way, is the same House membership that voted to release the Epstein files, underscoring once more—in case additional evidence was necessary—the willingness to wax all sanctimonious and indignant with outsiders are targets but much differently when the spotlight is turned inward.

To see a complete vote tally, CLICK HERE.

It was no big surprise that each of the four Republicans—Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise, Clay Higgins and (yes) even pious Mike Johnson—voted to kill the measure. After all, parties are guilty of the occasional dalliance, but if you’re keeping score, the Republicans have a huge lead in hypocrisy. But it was surprising to see the two state Democrats, Troy Carter and Cleo Fields join in sending the measure to purgatory.

But then again, there’s this thing called bipartisanship…