Special Session Goes Down in Flames

The December special session of Louisiana's state legislature, called by Governor Kathleen Blanco earlier this month, ended on Friday with little to show for it. Blanco was hoping for a variety of new tax breaks, added spending, and a package of economic incentives to help attract a steel mill to the state. All she got for her troubles was the steel-mill incentives. Tax cuts were part of the debate right up until the end: lawmakers debated cuts that would have been most valuable to low-income families as well as tax cuts reserved for upper-income Louisianans. An ITEP analysis of these tax cuts can be found here.

This story has a lot of interesting facets that are worth exploring: whether the steel-mill incentives have been well designed, and whether the tax cuts being considered were well-designed, to start with. But one interesting development is the allegation, by some observers, that the whole thing was sabotaged in the name of political gamesmanship-- and in a way that was unusually partisan by Louisiana standards.

Folks inside and outside of the legislature are calling the prematurely-ended session a sign that there's now a level of partisanship among lawmakers that didn't exist previously. The Times-Picayune reports the dismay of one lawmaker at the fact that, during a critical point in the session, the two party caucuses met separately to discuss their legislative strategies:

Rep. Troy Hebert, D-Jeanerette, said he could not recall another time when the caucuses broke off from the chamber to discuss legislative strategy.
"That's the saddest day I have seen in this chamber for the 11 years that I have been here," Hebert said as the House was debating for the second time Tuesday whether to raise the cap.
"When Hunt Downer was speaker, there was not an aisle in
this House," Hebert said, referring to Blanco's chief liaison to the Legislature, a Republican who was speaker under Gov. Mike Foster.

From a national perspective, this hardly seems like the end of the world, of course: there's a huge continuum between simply recognizing that parties exist (which I think is what an "aisle" does quite well!) and creating the sort of scorched-earth atmosphere that has pervaded Washington DC for the last decade. But there's no question that Louisiana faces some pretty hefty fiscal policy decisions in the near future: if these decisions are, in fact, being clouded by partisan judgments, that would be a shame.