Louisiana Voice

It’s a rare day indeed when JEFF SADOW and I agree on anything, but apparently pigs do fly and hell has finally frozen over.

Our unexpected meeting of the minds is best explained with one simple question: when are term limits not term limits?

The answer of course is when the term is applied the Good Ol’ Boy Loozeeaner way. You know, three terms in the House and then switch over to the Senate for three terms. Repeat.

But apparently, even that shell game isn’t enough for the professional politicians.

Sadow, a presumed associate professor of political science at LSU-Shreveport (though I’m told on pretty good authority that there are no political science students at that particular university), has noted that Rep. Stuart Bishop (R-Lafayette) has filed HB 205 that would increase the allowed number of terms served from three to four.

Like that makes a real difference to the chamber-hopping legislators.

Sadow, with all the skepticism he can muster, said that Bishop “trots out the old and tired argument that a lot of ‘institutional knowledge’ is lost as his justification for the increase.

And while he doesn’t come right out and say that that same “institutional knowledge” may well be the very thing that encourages political corruption, he does brush up against it by saying that same sage wisdom hasn’t seemed to help and all that ingrained grasp of the art of insider politics “assumes the experienced better resist manipulation without acknowledging that equally as likely, if not more so, the experienced become locked into alliances with those very outsiders that lead them to promote more often special interests rather than the people’s agenda.”

For my part, I take the position that if you can’t accomplish anything in three four-year terms, then we aren’t likely to see any marked improvement in four terms – or multiples of three terms via flip-flopping from one side of the Capitol to the other.

The sad truth is this state has rocked along content to lag behind the rest of the nation, save our neighbor to the immediate east of us. It’s no wonder that our unofficial state motto is “Thank God We’re Not Mississippi.”

We are dragging at or perilously close to the bottom in poverty, education, health care, obesity, illiteracy, teacher pay, education, unemployment, environmental quality, infant mortality, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and infrastructure. But not to worry: we’re at the top in prison population and festivals.

Meanwhile, Bishop wants to give legislators four more years of accepting dark money from PACs. If ever there was a clear illustration of redundancy, it’s passing a law saying legislators may enjoy another term in Baton Rouge.

It’s really difficult to see why four more years need to be made official when there are legislators who seem to have been receiving lobbyist largesse since Moby Dick was a guppy.