Louisiana Voice

A member of the Retired State Employees Association (RSEA), recently received an interesting letter from U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise that served as a bitter reminder of how Congress continues to give lip service to working on behalf of constituents while in truth, they have no interest in certain programs that could benefit thousands of voters back home. The Scalise letter was forwarded to Frank Jobert of the Office of Group Benefits specialist for RSEA and LouisianaVoice eventually obtained a copy.

The Scalise letter was in response to RSEA member’s own letter to Scalise regarding something called the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), programs that affect retired government employees of Louisiana and 25 other states. More about those programs in a bit.

Scalise’s letter opens with the pseudo-solicitous – and unimaginative – acknowledgement common to most elected officials: “It is an honor to represent the First Congressional District of Louisiana and your thoughts and concerns are important to me.” What a crock.

He then goes immediately into explaining WEP and GPO. WEP, he said, “reduces the earned Social Security benefits of an individual who also receives a public pension from a job not covered under Social Security.”

He’s correct about that, all right. If an individual – like yours truly, for example – works for several years in the private sector before taking a state job in a civil service capacity, his Social Security benefits are offset, or reduced, because he’s drawing a state retirement that does not contribute to the Social Security program.

That is patently unfair because the individual did, in fact, pay into Social Security during all those years in the private sector. It was his investment in the program that guaranteed him a retirement income but now he is not entitled to draw his full benefits he would otherwise be entitled to. In my particular case, the offset is (fortunately for me) minimal because I worked for so many years in the private sector that I had nearly all the quarters (three-month sectors of a working year) to qualify for full benefits. But for many, that offset can be a tough pill to swallow because the retiree will realize only a small fraction of what he should be entitled to receive, based on his contributions during his private sector working years.

Scalise continued: “This provision lowers the amount that a retiree receives through Social Security.” Yep, that’s what I just explained.

But then Scalise goes into the GPO, which he said “also affects those government employees with spouses who work in the private sector and pay into the Social Security system.”

This, perhaps, is the most unfair provision of all – and it’s a damned sneaky one. A teacher whose spouse earns a six-figure income is impacted by this provision in a most negative manner. That spouse will have paid a hefty amount into Social Security by his/her retirement age – likely well into six figures (and double that when allowing for the employer’s equal contribution). But guess what? Should that spouse die, the surviving school teacher will receive not a single dime of the spouse’s contributions. Nothing. Nil. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

Only because the surviving spouse is a public school teacher who is a member of a teacher retirement system that does not participate in Social Security. Never mind that the dead spouse may have paid tens of thousands of dollars into Social Security. No survivor benefits for you, no sir, no ma’am.

There are 15 states, Louisiana included, that are impacted by this ridiculous GPO provision.

So, what happens to the contributions of the spouse and his/her employer all those years? The guvmint just keeps it. To reiterate, because the deceased worker’s spouse was a public school teacher, that teacher is not entitled to a cent of the spouse’s survivor benefits.

That is patently unfair and it’s something Congress should have fixed years ago.

Scalise said in his letter to Jobert that he’s trying. Yeah, right. “I completely agree with you that the WEP and GPO are unfair and should be repealed,” he sniffed. “As a Member of the Louisiana State Legislature, I co-authored a resolution calling on Congress to address these issues that affect so many Louisiana families.” Of course, a legislative “resolution” carries no weight of law and besides, state legislators are pretty impotent when it comes to telling Congress what to do, so Scalise’s “resolution” was a fairly weak attempt at a solution.

But wait. “In Congress, I have continued to support measures that address these concerns,” he wrote. “You will be pleased to know that I am cosponsor of HR. 82, the Social Security Fairness Act of 2021, introduced by Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Illinois). This legislation would repeal both the WEP and GPO. Please know I will continue to advocate for repealing unfair provisions like the WEP and GPO while serving in Congress.”

Well, that’s a relief. At last, they’re doing something.

But not so fast here. It seems this is a resolution they’ve been kicking around for a number of years up there inside the Beltway – with little to nothing to show for it.

Let’s take a closer look at the co-sponsors of HR 82. The resolution, authored by a Republican, has 111 CO-SPONSORS to date, including all four Louisiana Republicans – Scalise, Clay Higgins, Garret Graves and Mike Johnson. Among those 111 co-sponsors of the Republican-authored resolution are 77 Democrats, meaning the bill appears to have widespread bipartisan support. The resolution will likely pick up a couple hundred more co-sponsors before the session ends, but don’t look for a vote.

And that’s exactly the way they like it.

This isn’t the resolution’s first rodeo.

It’s reared its head every year since at least 2008 and still it languishes.

Why?

Because Congress has absolutely no intention of passing this resolution, no intention of bringing it to a full House vote.

How do I know that? Simple math. In 2008, HR 82 had an eye-popping 352 CO-SPONSORS out of 435 representatives. That’s 81 percent of the total House membership. It takes a simple majority, or 218 votes, to pass a resolution and 292 (a two-thirds majority) votes to override a possible presidential veto. If every co-sponsor voted in favor of the resolution, it would not only sail through, but would be a veto-proof bill. In fact, with that kind of bipartisan support, no sane president would dare veto it.

That time, the author was a Democrat, Rep. Howard Berman of California, which would indicate the bill had true bipartisan support. Of the 352 co-sponsors back then, 215 were Democrats (just three co-sponsors short of a majority) and 137 were Republicans. Each of Louisiana’s then-eight-member delegation, consisting of five Republicans and three Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors. They were Democrats Charles Melancon, William Jefferson and Donald Cazayoux, and Republicans Scalise, Richard Baker, Bobby Jindal, Rodney Alexander and Charles Boustany.

So, why wasn’t the resolution, with such broad support, obviously enough to get it passed with ease, brought to a vote?

There’s an old joke about bacon and eggs where the punch line has the pig saying to the chicken, “For you, it’s just a contribution, but for me it’s a commitment.” In congressional parlance, a resolution is the egg; bringing it to a vote is a commitment.

In other words, don’t hold your breath for Congress to share the bacon with you.

The sad truth of the matter is the WEP and GPO are nothing less than legislative subterfuge – taxation of working Americans, a tax that Congress has no intention, indeed, has never had any intention, of reforming or repealing.

And this tactic can be blamed exclusively on neither the Republicans nor the Democrats in Congress; it’s just plain old garden-variety, screw-the-taxpayer politics that’s played so well by both parties in D.C. under the guise of representation.

It’s a pretty cruel joke and it’s on us.

And when Scalise, Johnson, Higgins and Graves run for reelection, they’ll likely remind us of how they fought for the repeal of the WEP and GPO provisions of Social Security for the benefit of public employees and teachers.

When we talk about scams, the one most ignored is the one being run up in Washington. It certainly beats those car warranty and student loan reduction calls you keep getting.

Even as a federal appeals court judge is calling for repeal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision, a Louisiana legislator and acknowledged Donald Trump supporter has PRE-FILED HOUSE BILL 23 for the 2021 legislative session that would officially repeal a provision in Louisiana law that allows criminal prosecution for defamation but which was ruled unconstitutional 57 years ago.

Rep. Charles Owen, Ph.D., of DeRidder, told LouisianaVoice that criminal prosecution for defamation had already been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and his bill would simply make that part of the defamation law official.

“I am 100 percent in support of the First Amendment, freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” he said. “My bill does nothing to disturb any other provision of the defamation law, including New York Times v. Sullivan.”

One person who already learned an expensive lesson of the unconstitutionality of criminal punishment for defamation is former Terrebonne Parish Sheriff JERRY LARPENTER. Larpenter got a judge who was obviously oblivious to the law to sign a search warrant that allowed Larpenter to raid the home of a local blogger who had the temerity to criticize the sheriff on his blog. All the blogger’s computers, as well as those of his children, were seized in the raid and the blogger was arrested.

A federal judge quickly overturned the search warrant, the raid and the arrest while scolding the local judge about his ignorance of the law and the blogger sued Larpenter, eventually settling for about $250,000.

The same thing occurred later in St. Tammany Parish when Sheriff Randy Smith ARRESTED a former deputy, Jerry Rogers, for criminal defamation for comments he had made in an email to the family of a local murder victim that was critical of the languishing investigation of the sheriff’s office. (that murder remains no nearer to being solved than when it occurred in July 2017, more than three and one-half years ago.)

Louisiana’s Criminal Defamation statute was ruled unconstitutional as it applied to speech concerning public officials more than half-a-century ago by the U.S. Supreme Court, Rogers noted in his subsequent FEDERAL LAWSUIT against Smith that is currently pending in the U.S. District Court’s Eastern District.

Louisiana’s criminal defamation law dates back nearly 200 years, to 1825, when LOUISIANA STATE REP. EDWARD LIVINGSTON (U.S. Secretary of State from 1831-1833, and former law partner of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton while living in New York) included it in his proposed penal code for the State of Louisiana.

But in 1960, the New York Times published a full-page ad by Martin Luther King Jr. supporters that was harshly critical of police in Montgomery, Alabama, for their brutal treatment of civil rights marchers. The ad contained several minor errors and Montgomery Police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued The Times in a local court for defamation. The case made its way all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 1964, ruled that a plaintiff in a libel suit must prove that incorrect statements were made with “actual malice,” meaning that the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether or not it was true.

That is the decision that has come under recent attack from FEDERAL JUDGE LAURENCE SLIBERMAN, a Ronald Reagan appointee. His scathing dissent was contained in a libel in which he said the requirement to show “actual malice” in order to recover damages from a news organization for libel was a “policy-driven” result that justices simply invented out of whole cloth.

His dissent was eerily similar to that of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of two years ago in which he called for the Supreme Court to revisit the 1964 decision.

Silberman, D.C. Senior Judge, described both the New York Times and the Washington Post as “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets, adding that “Nearly all television – network and cable – is a Democratic Party trumpet.”

He somehow managed to ignore Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax, Rush Limbaugh, Info Wars, The American Conservative, Breitbart News, the Epoch Times, the Federalist, WorldNetDaily, and a few dozen other right-wing organizations that offer their own versions of the truth in his diatribe.

The year 1964 was a busy one for liability law for the U.S. Supreme Court. Besides its ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, it also took on a libel case involving flamboyant New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison who would capture international headlines a few years later when he became enmeshed in the infamous Clay Shaw prosecution in connection with the JFK assassination.

But in 1962, Garrison had responded to criticism of a huge backlog of cases in his office by placing the blame on the inefficiency and laziness of eight state judges, adding that the judges were hampering his efforts to enforce vice laws.

The judges had Garrison arrested, charging him under the 140-year-old criminal defamation law that up to then had been largely ignore and seldom invoked. Garrison was convicted under the statute and his case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled in the same year as the more publicized New York Times case that criminal defamation was unconstitutional.

And that’s where things remained until those sheriffs in Terrebonne and St. Tammany got their drawers in a wad over public criticism.

Now Owen, retired from the U.S. Air Force, has returned to Louisiana and gotten himself elected to the legislature. And one of his first acts is HB 23 which seeks to remove the references to criminal defamation from the lawbooks.

It’s a good bill and one that is long overdue and who knows? It might actually curtail foolish attempts by future sheriffs to use the unconstitutional law as a club to beat down criticism, aka freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

That’s the approach of State Rep. Blake Miguez (R-Erath) who has pre-filed House Bill 20 again this year after seeing the bill vetoed by Gov. John Bel Edwards last year

The bill, which passed the legislature in the 2020 special session mostly on a party-line vote, would have blocked millions of dollars in grants to local election officials through a nonprofit supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

A state district court helped keep Attorney Gen. Jeff Landry’s losing streak intact last October with a RULING that likewise thwarted attempts at halting funds from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life which said it was offering the grants to help local leaders conduct elections during the coronavirus pandemic.

Somehow, in the minds of Miguez, Landry and their ilk, dark money in support of a candidate or party is just fine but non-partisan funding to assist officials in conducting elections somehow throws the entire democratic process into crisis mode.

Zuckerberg funded the grants with a $300 million donation to the nonprofit and followed up with an additional $100 million.

Local officials across the state applied for nearly $8 million in grant money after being informed of the availability of the funds by Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin. Parish clerks and voter registrars said they would use the money for personal protective gear and wages for workers staffing voting sites for longer hours.

As a stark illustration of how Repugnantcans think as a herd as opposed to individually, Ardoin initially encouraged grant applications by local officials but as soon the Repugnantcan Party and Landry voiced opposition, he quickly switched positions.

Landry maintained in his lawsuit that private money going to public entities to run elections would have a “corrosive influence.” The suit named as defendants the Center for Tech and Civic Life and Dawn Cole, a lobbyist who helped connect local officials to the grant money.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life called such lawsuits “frivolous” and attorneys for Cole said the lawsuit’s allegations were “little more than unfounded statements suggesting that the nonprofit corporations are somehow attempting to taint the election process” and that Landry’s claims were “nothing more than a scare tactic aimed at preventing local election officials from gaining additional funding to assist with the workload, increased voter turnout and added burdens posed by COVID-19.”

So now, Miguez is back with HOUSE BILL 20 because Repugnantcans somehow fear that outside help in holding elections might encourage participation by more people, people they can’t control – something the National Repugnantcan Party has openly admitted it dreads more than anything else.

It’s not that the Repugnantcans don’t want outside money going into elections; the dark money that is poured into both parties’ campaigns is ample evidence of that. In fact, I’m still receiving solicitations from the National Repugnantcan Party every single day in my email in-box and for nearly three months after the election, I was getting up to 20 email solicitations per day from the Trump organization (I still don’t know how I, of all people, got on their mailing lists).

So, its evident that the Repugs are not against money in elections; they just don’t want money going to aid in holding election when they can’t control the purse strings.

All you have to do is look at the vote last year on Miguez’s HB51 to see how the vote was split along party lines. The final vote in the Senate was 25-11 in favor with all 25 votes cast by Republicans. Only one Republican, Sen. Rogers Pope of Denham Springs, voted nay. It was the same in the House with only one Democrat, Francis Thompson of Delhi, being among the 66 votes in favor while all 28 negative votes were cast by Democrats.

The bottom line for Miguez and his Repugnantcan cohorts is if private funds are being used for non-partisan purposes, it must be stopped. Only money designated for a particular political party, preferably dark money, is welcome.

Partisan campaign contributions are democracy at work to people like Landry and Miguez. Non-partisan financial support of the electoral process, however, means the sky is falling.

(Of course, Granny was a little more graphic with her language)

Be that as it may, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s attention-starved excuse for an attorney general, is at it again.

Before diving too deeply into this story, it might be fair to ask:

• Has he ever won one of these silly lawsuits?
• Does he think perhaps Louisiana would be better served if he did something like, oh say, rooting out public corruption and human trafficking?

Our publicity hound in residence, while ignoring sexual harassment in his office, obviously has his eye on the 2023 governor’s race and is doing everything in his power to ensure that he is the choice of the State Republican Party to wrest the office from the Democrats.

Landry, who has a QUESTIONABLE PAST as a deputy sheriff in St. Martin Parish is quick with the lawsuit trigger finger but REFUSED to sign onto a letter that dozens of other state attorneys general sent to the U.S. Department of Justice condemning the right-wing insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. His refusal, of course, was because he was INSTRUMENTAL in the attack.

And when it came down to protecting his office from transparency, he was pretty damn quick to file a LAWSUIT against a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate who had committed the mortal sin of submitting a public records request. That lawsuit, like so many others filed by this nitwit, was unsuccessful. There’s yet to be an accounting of how much taxpayer dollars he wasted on that frivolous lawsuit.

It wasn’t the first time Landry has RESISTED RELEASING public records – and lost.

Landry also got smacked down in another COURTROOM BATTLE against Gov. John Bel Edwards’s emergency declaration as the COVID-19 pandemic was spiking and before that, he lost a case in St. Martin Parish when he challenged actions by local and state election officials from accepting private, nonprofit funds to help them run elections during the pandemic.

Those last two defeats prompted a New Orleans attorney to observe that Landry “clearly has no grasp of the law” and that me may well “be as dumb as he appears.” And that attorney has no dog in any of those hunts nor does he intend to run for attorney general.

Then there is that MURKY STORY about a firm owned by Landry importing Mexican workers with the assistance of a felon who had broken federal immigration laws. Landry, of course, is quite outspoken in his opposition to illegal immigration.

Landry even went on a TWITTER RANT that was riddled with incorrect information and which generated tons of ridicule for the state’s top lawyer and which earned him the title of “the stupidest lawyer in the United States” – definitely not the kind of publicity a potential candidate for governor should want.

But I digress. Back to his latest quest of tilting at windmills.

He has joined with 20 other Repugnantcan attorneys general in challenging a section of the American Rescue Plan that was designed to discourage states and local governments from using federal stimulus funds to offset local and state tax revenue and reducing taxes accordingly – in other words, using stimulus funding as an excuse to reduce taxes.

That was a favorite trick of the Jindal administration: to use one-time funds to pay for recurring expenses. Jan Moller of The Daily Dime news service explains that the plan includes a clause the provides that “States that cut taxes and try to backfill the lost revenue with stimulus dollars will have to repay part of their federal allotment.”

Moreover, Moller pointed out, the Washington Post pointed out that the funds “drew bipartisan support from mayors, county leaders and governors, even though Republicans in Congress blasted it as wasteful spending — and falsely contended that it only benefited Democratic-led states. But states cannot use the money to address their rising pension costs, nor can they appear to take the dollars and then cut taxes, essentially tapping Washington’s help to make up for any lost revenue either directly or indirectly.”

That stipulation is nothing new, really. Back in the 1970s, there was something called the Public Service Employment Program where the feds funded public service jobs to not only help people getting these jobs, but the governments for which they worked, as well – temporarily. For example, it funded many police officers and other city workers in small towns.

A primary clause in all these contracts with local governments was the Maintenance of Effort clause, according to one of our readers who spent his entire career in the fiscal part of state government. Maintenance of Effort essentially said the feds would provide money to hire additional people. State and local governmental entities were absolutely not to reduce existing funding or replace existing employees with this money or the people hired.

Needless to say, cutting taxes because they were getting this money was a clear violation of the clause. This was a provision even the most fiscally conservative Repugnantcan should have loved because it made perfect sense, particularly since the money was temporary.

Maintenance of Effort is a basic principle that prevents the kind of stunts Jindal (and he was not the first nor the last) repeatedly pulled to “balance” the budget – supplanting general fund for recurring expenses with non-recurring dollars. The repeal of the Stelly Plan simply because we had surpluses (surpluses are not a bad thing unless you are an idiot like Jindal and Landry) is another example of mucking up the works for political reasons by ignoring the consequences any fool could see coming down the road and listening instead to people like Grover Norquist.

Bottom line: Our brilliant Attorney General is again taking action that will work to exactly no one’s advantage. This is not rocket science, but it is just complicated enough that most people won’t bother to try to understand it and will only think he is standing up for some B.S. protection of state sovereignty.

The question is: does he even understand that? Given his past performance, it’s highly doubtful. But just in case, here’s a possible solution: if you don’t like the stipulation put on the federal bucks, you can always just refuse the money. See how the 4 million citizens of Loozianer would like that.

As Louisiana lawmakers prepare to pre-file bills for the upcoming legislative session, we’re certain to see the usual efforts to increase penalties for minor offenses in the guise of getting tough on crime.

There will also be the familiar bills that seek special consideration for a few individuals – in some cases, only a single person.

And, of course, there will be the never-ending slew of congratulatory resolutions honoring the reigning Queen Pullet from some obscure Chicken Festival somewhere in the state and a host of recipients of other similar awards.

A visitor to the gallery of either chamber will see representatives or senators leaning back in their chairs laughing and talking or checking text messages for dinner appointments or gazing at their computers for online NASCAR standings – anything other than listening to the speaker at the microphone trying to explain his or her bill.

Downstairs, it’s even worse. That’s where the committee rooms are and watching this show can be a real test of endurance – especially if you’re one of the unfortunate ones attempting to speak to a particular committee. You will see committee members drifting in an out of the room or whispering to each other while you are testifying – anything but paying attention to your words. There’s a reason for this: their minds are already made up – or made up for them with campaign cash from special interest groups.

Of course, there are also the crawfish boils, fish fries, parties and dinners that go with any legislative session, hosted by generous lobbyists who are interested in nothing more than assuring that good government prevails in the gret stet of Looziana.

You may even see someone do as the late Rep. Shady Wall of West Monroe was caught doing back in 1981. A reporter casually observing a series of votes by the full House noticed that Wall uncharacteristically voted Yes on every issue. Something of a maverick, he was known for agitating fellow members by challenging legislation on mere technicalities, so it was unusual to see him voting in favor of every measure.

The reporter eased to the back of the chamber until he was even with Wall’s desk. Wall was nowhere to be seen. Assuming his desk mate was voting in his absence, the reporter watched and waited until the next vote. The House tally showed yet another Yes vote for Wall but no one was at his desk, not even his desk mate. A closer look revealed a stack of books and papers on Wall’s desk and wedged between the stack and the “Yes” button on his desk was a yellow pencil, holding the “Yes” button down permanently. Wall had already gone for the day.

When the reporter took a picture of the pencil, it ran on Page One of the Ouachita Citizen, Wall’s home town paper. He did not run for reelection. It’s unclear if that photo had anything to do with his decision not to seek reelection, but I was immensely proud of having taken that photo with my 200mm lens.

But back to the present day. What you most likely won’t see is any serious discussion or any real legislative efforts to address the most serious problems that this state faces: the environment, education, infrastructure, health care, the economy. We are quite likely to see a continuation of the same song and dance we have seen for decades.

Perhaps that is the reason that the latest RANKING OF STATES by US News & World Report puts Louisiana dead last – for at least the fifth year in a row (maybe longer than that but the story linked above only goes back to 2017).

There was a time we enjoyed the joke that said, “At least we’re not Mississippi.” It was a cute way of deflecting attention from the fact that we were near the bottom in all the rankings of good things and close to the top of the lists of bad things.

But now, in Mississippi, they’re saying, “At least we aren’t Louisiana.”

Among a list of eight metrics considered in the ranking process, the highest Louisiana got was number 42 in fiscal stability. Alaska was best in the country in that factor.

Below is the state’s rank in each of the areas considered with the state with the highest ranking in parenthesis:

Louisiana

HEALTH CARE                            46        (Hawaii)

EDUCATION                               48        (New Jersey)

ECONOMY                                  47        (Utah)

INFRASTRUCTURE                    47        (Nevada)

OPPORTUNITY                          48        (Iowa)

FISCAL STABILITY                   42        (Alaska)

CRIME & CORRECTIONS          50        (New Hampshire)

NATURAL ENVIRONMENT        49        (Hawaii)

Here are Mississippi’s rankings in each of the same metrics:

50, 43, 49, 48, 44, 41, 33, 22

Remember this as you watch the progression of this year’s 60-day session which convenes at noon on April 12 and adjourns on June 10 at 6 p.m.

And remember: the Senate normally does not meet on Fridays which, along with Saturdays and Sundays, are all considered part of the entire 60-day session. Legislators receive their $160 per diem payments for each of those 60 days – even those long weekends.