The field is filling up with announced and unannounced candidates to the U.S. Senate seat now held by politically-damaged incumbent Bill Cassidy in next year’s congressional elections.
To date, all the declared candidates are Republicans and each is doing his or her best to out-Trump the others. The only potential Democratic candidate is former Gov. John Bel Edwards who has yet to only rumored to be a possible candidate.
Of the six announced and two unannounced Republicans whose names have cropped up, State Rep. Julie Emerson, born in Homer in Claiborne Parish but reared in Carencro in Lafayette Parish, is hands-down, the most qualified.
First elected to represent House District 39 (Lafayette and St. Landry parishes) in 2015, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Louisiana Lafayette. In her 10 years in the House, she has seen some 30 of her more than 40 bills introduced become law, a high rate of success for any legislator.
But her bills weren’t kneejerk bills; they were proposals of substance and even some of the ones that failed did so because similar bills were introduced and passed by other legislators.
She has scored high marks from right to life and the NRA, two areas in which we differ politically, but some of her bills went against the plaintiffs’ bar by limiting judgments to actual medical damages paid in injury cases. Overall, she has given serious thought to her legislative duties and that’s a big plus.
Her legislative record is rather long to list, but you can see for yourself by going HERE.
Presumed frontrunner State Sen. Blake Miguez of New Iberia, on the other hand, appears to be a one-trick pony. During the same timeframe as Emerson, he has introduced more bills (77) but 20 of those pertained to firearms. He almost appears to be a shill for the industry. Some of those were repeats from unsuccessful efforts in previous years but it reveals his near-obsession with guns.
Granted, several of those dealt with gun safety, which is never a bad thing but there are other issues besides guns facing Louisiana citizens.
Miguez began shooting with his father at a local firing range at an early age and by the time he was 12, he had started competing in the International Practical Shooting Confederation and by age 17, he had become a Grand Master with the Beretta 92F.
State Treasurer and former U.S. Rep. JOHN FLEMING of Minden, also like Cassiday, a doctor, is personally wealthy (somewhere north of $6.3 million), thanks to a string of 30 Subway sandwich shops, UPS franchises and other real estate investments. Yet, back in 2012, he opposed increasing the tax rate for those earning $1 million or more per year because, he said, he could barely scrape by on his net income which he gave at the time as about $600,000 per year. “By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over,” he lamented.
Using his own numbers, it appeared that the majority of his uninsured 500 employees were among America’s working poor.
But no worries. Fleming had that covered with his ownership of FLEMING PAYDAY LOANS, LLC which provides loans at exorbitant interest rates to his employees unable to make it on their salaries. At the time I first wrote about that, he was still in congress and his mouthpiece demanded a retraction but we refused because the records were there in the SECRETARY OF STATE’S RECORDS.
Of course, being a shrewd businessman, Fleming was pretty-well acquainted with tas laws under which the income of corporations is taxed twice—once at the corporate level through the payment of the corporate income tax and again at the individual rate when corporate profits are distributed. Sole proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations and limited liability companies (LLC) are taxed only at the much lower individual owner level.
According to his congressional financial statement, his companies are all set up as LLCs and partnerships which would explain his statement that the $6.3 million flowed through his personal income taxes.
That brings us to Louisiana Public Service Commission member Eric Skrmetta, quite possibly the baddest of the Peck Bad Boys in the race to dislodge Cassidy.
There is so much to report on Skrmetta, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but here goes.
Only months after Texas experienced that horrendous power failure in the middle of winter (the one where Ted Cruz left for vacation in Cancun), we learned that in November 2021, Skrmetta made a motion at a PSC meeting for Louisiana to WITHDRAW from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a nonprofit association that manages the power grid for 15 states and Manitoba Province in Canada, overseeing uninterrupted availability to electric power for 42 million people. Texas had opted out of MISO, which led to its massive outage. Why? Because he objected to the reliance on wind turbines.
Three years later, it was Skrmetta who pushed through a motion to hire his BUSINESS PARTNER and suspended attorney as a consultant to advise the PSC on matters since he couldn’t do so as an attorney. In fact, Scott McQuaig was not only hired at a salary of $128,500, but was scheduled to consider a separate $49,550 per year contract for him to monitor the area of cybersecurity.
Commissioner Craig Greene said (with a straight face), “I do not know the extent of Mr. McQuaig’s relationship with Commissioner Skrmetta,” Greene said, apparently with a straight face, “but it is never surprising for commissioners to know all the consultants who place bids to the commission.” They were business partners, for cryin’ out loud! That’s a breach of ethics if there ever was one.
Skrmetta’s 2019 FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE STATEMENT neglected to mention his income from his involvement with Boomtown Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, or his agreement with Boomtown in Jefferson Parish. Probably an oversight.
In 2014, we learned that Skrmetta OPPOSED a rate reduction for exorbitant telephone rates for prison inmates – even to the point of openly challenging a spokesman for the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, who advocated a reduction. Perhaps the $29,500 in political contributions from companies that provided inmate telephone services fueled Skrmetta’s passion.
Skrmetta was one of the three-member Republican majority who in April 2024, APPROVED a rate hike by Entergy to finance a $1.9 billion project to improve its grid. That approval, voted on four months ahead of schedule, did not come during a meeting in Baton Rouge, but at a remote lakefront resort on Toledo Bend Lake in Many, where most people would be unable to attend. Want to see who has the stroke at these meetings? CHEVRON AND EXXONMOBIL, a couple of major industrial power users, agreed not to oppose Entergy’s plan after all parties reached a deal to shift millions of dollars of construction costs onto residential and commercial ratepayers (that’s you, folks).
In 2020, we ran a story that a Skrmetta business associate was awarded $17 million in PSC energy efficiency contracts. The company, Brilliant Efficiencies, was founded by Jason Hewitt in 2013. Hewitt had no discernable experience in energy efficiency but he did have the all-important connections via his business RELATIONSHIP WITH SKRMETTA.
It was Skrmetta who in 2013, decided that a RE-VOTE was necessary on a previously-approved energy-efficiency program and new member Scott Angelle obediently case the deciding no-vote, killing the program designed to help electricity customers purchase efficient appliances.
And, of course, it was Skrmetta’s re-election in 2014 that spelled the death knell for SOLAR ENERGY in Louisiana.
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