Louisiana Voice

Well, he’s an avowed supporter of Yam-Tits Trump and Brain-Worm Kennedy, Jr., so you might expect him to skirt Louisiana’s toothless ethics laws to enrich himself through his position as chairman of the State Senate Health and Welfare Committee.

And he does.

State Sen. Patrick McMath (R-Covington) is owner of Southern Interior Solutions and his store has won bids to provide furnishings for health systems affected-and regulated-by his committee, according to a New Orleans TV station.

Trump has never let ethics—or the courts, for that matter—stand in the way of his making a buck off his presidency, so why should McMath be expected to play by the rules, especially when those rules provide a convenient loophole in the state ethics laws?

No less authority than the LOUISIANA BOARD OF ETHICS itself says in its Summary of the Louisiana Code of Governmental Ethics that “The Ethics Code provides an additional prohibition applicable to legislators, certain executive branch officials, their spouses, or legal entities in which either owns an interest in excess of 5% from entering into a contract with any branch, agency, department, or institution of state government, with a few specific exceptions.

“Example: A Louisiana Senator and his business were prohibited by Section 1113D from bidding on or entering into a contract with the Louisiana Recovery School District, provided the Senator owned an interest greater than 5% in the business. (Advisory Opinion No. 2010-988).”

The Baton Rouge Advocate on Wednesday (sorry, we can’t share it because the publication has a paywall to its online stories, most of which lately have been devoted to LSU football and the transfer portal) pointed out that historically, Louisiana legislators have promoted legislation that benefitted their own personal businesses. “[L]awmakers who own nursing homes have sought to ease their legal liability in cases of understaffing, lawmakers who own gas stations have pushed bills to sideline their competitors, lawmakers who own timber companies have proposed sales tax exemptions for their products,” The Advocate story said.

In addition, legislators who are attorneys representing specific industries, such as insurance or oil and gas, for instance, have shown little hesitancy to pull double duty by jumping into the legislative fray.

But thanks to Govs. Bobby Jindal and Jeff Landry, Louisiana ethics laws have been so watered down as to be virtually meaningless. Oh, elected officials and public employees must still take a so-called “ethics course” yearly but its enforcement powers are a cruel joke to good-government advocates.

That’s precisely why McMath can serve as chairman of a powerful committee and sell furniture to entities regulated by his committee: the law prohibits lawmakers from “contracting” with state government and selling furniture is technically not a “contract.”

The owner of a competing furniture store told WWL-TV that he was told by a person at a local (St. Tammany Parish) health system that they were replacing his company with Southern Interior Solutions because they were “instructed to use SIS.”

So, while the letter of the law does not appear to be violated, there’s no question that the spirit of the law is in open violation despite McMath’s admission that certain boundaries do exist and his assertion that “I take those boundaries serious, and I’ve stayed within them.”

And like Trump, he appears to have been unable resist twisting the knife a bit: “I also understand why competitors who are losing business might be frustrated. But frustration isn’t an ethics standard. We compete on price, service, and performance — and we win on those terms.”

Yep. Republican to the core.