Political Horizons for May 17, 2009

• By MARK BALLARD
• Capitol news bureau
• Published: May 17, 2009

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All across Baton Rouge over the past few days, families and friends have gathered at area colleges, universities and high schools to honor one of the monumental accomplishments in a person’s life: graduation.

It’s kind of a collective fist bump that congratulates a young person’s years of focus and struggle to stand independently.

Maybe all these celebrations of sweat, toil and courage will inspire Louisiana’s legislators. Other than a brief insurrection Friday when their votes stalled a bill to authorize borrowing for construction projects, the goal of the Legislature, so far this session, appears to be just showing up and rubber-stamping whatever Gov. Bobby Jindal wants.

For instance, key lawmakers have gone along with preserving the executive’s power to hide from the public his documents and records — even how he generally spends his day — power they themselves do not possess.

On the budget, there has been much whining and legislators have found a few dollars here and there. But when it comes to a vote, legislators have been willing to provide Jindal political cover by accepting the governor’s huge cuts to education and to services for the poor and needy.

House Speaker Jim Tucker, R-Terrytown, says that now that state representatives are grasping the severity of the state’s fiscal struggles, this week should prove a good time for legislators to assert their own views. The issue he wants lawmakers to weigh is the tobacco tax, which would increase the price of a pack of cigarettes by 50 cents and would add about $100 million to a state treasury staring at a $1.3 billion decrease in revenue in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Jindal, however, is working hard behind the scenes to avoid a public confrontation on the issue.

Supporting the tax would allow future presidential opponents to portray Jindal absurdly out of context — as GOP primary candidates often do —  as a tax-and-spend liberal. On the other hand, bravely protecting the price of cigarettes while slashing away the poor’s social safety net paints him as a “let-them-smoke-cigarettes” Marie Antoinette politician.

So last week, showing much more subtlety than the Jindal team exhibited last year, enough members were summoned to the fourth-floor governor’s suite to keep the House Ways and Means committee from forming the quorum necessary to vote on the 50-cent tobacco tax.

And legislators played along.

It would be unfair to say that state Rep. Steve Carter threw his first legislative package under the bus simply to please Jindal.

But when summoned, the Baton Rouge Republican member of Ways and Means raced to the fourth floor, even though his bills to revamp the state’s school boards were ready to be heard in the House Education Committee.

A former tennis coach, Carter voted for an earlier tobacco tax proposal that would have added $1 to the price of a pack of cigarettes. That measure was voted down during the first week of the session.