Louisiana Voice

Karma really is a bitch.

There’s an interesting backstory to Mississippi’s electing Scott Colom to the U.S. Senate and it’s reminiscent of a similar occurrence in Louisiana a few years back.

On Wednesday, Colom was declared the winner, upsetting incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by a razor-thin majority. The final results gave Colom 474,549 votes to Hyde-Smith’s 469,039, a difference of 5,510 out of ALMOST A MILLION CAST, or a difference of about half a percentage point.

The irony of the entire election is that IN 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a federal judge in north Mississippi.

But here’s the hitch:

Federal judges need more than the president’s pick. Before a district court nominee can get a hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee sends a light blue form, called a blue slip, to both senators from the nominee’s home state. If either senator refuses to send it back, the nomination usually stalls for good. The blue slip is not a law. It is a Senate tradition that gives a single senator the power to quietly kill a judge from their state.

Hyde-Smith said she WOULD NOT RETURN HER BLUE FORM. Colom sent her a letter asking her to reconsider but she refused and the nomination died right there.

On election night, before the results were evident that Colom had won, Hyde-Smith even boasted of her preventing his appointment when she told supporters, “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a U.S. senator.” Except they didn’t, as it turned out.

That’s karma squared any way you look at it. Back in February, she gave a pretty good indication of just how tone-deaf she was about the plight of American families struggling to put food on the table. When asked about the high cost of beef, she responded not with any plan to bring prices down, but with the ADMONISHMENT that Americans “have so many proteins to choose from.”

That prompted Colom to respond, “Mississippi families aren’t choosing between beef and other proteins as a lifestyle preference. They’re stretching every dollar to put food on the table. …and her answer to Mississippians struggling at the grocery store is to just eat something else?”

Of course, Hyde-Smith had a habit of making odd statements

It also brings to mind a similar occurrence in the Louisiana legislature.

At the close of the 2020 legislative session, the Senate took up gubernatorial appointments. Among those was Gov. John Bel Edwards’s nomination to reappoint Ronnie Jones as Chairman of the Louisiana Gambling Board.

Like the nominating process with U.S. senators, Louisiana gives local state senators the opportunity to object to a nomination and if they do object, that nomination, too, is dead in the water.

That’s precisely what happened with Jones when his local State Senator, Karen Carter Peterson, OBJECTED, claiming Jones, a veteran of 40 years with State Police, was too close to the gaming interests, thus ending his career.

Karma also reared its pretty head in that case, too. Carter who had already gutted the State Democratic Party as its state chairman, decided seek the U.S. congressional from Louisiana’s 2^nd District.

It turned out that it was Peterson, not Jones, who had a problem with gaming. She had placed herself on a list of persons prohibited from entering casinos because of her own gambling addiction, had violated her self-imposed ban, lost her election to Troy Carter.

Karma.