LA Gov Jeff Landry's plan to draft new state constitution

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Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to rewrite the state constitution ran into a buzzsaw of complaints during its first public airing Tuesday, with Democrats and one Republican on a House committee expressing concerns that the governor is moving too fast.

Despite those complaints, state Rep. Beau Beaullieu said that the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs, will approve his bill next Tuesday to convene a special convention of delegates that would redo the constitution.

Landry and Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, the governor’s point person on the effort, want legislators to approve his House Bill 800 within a month to begin the convention on May 20. Delegates would then have two weeks to draft the new document.

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Beaullieu sought to address the concern by saying that the public would ultimately decide whether to adopt the new constitution. That vote would be scheduled for Nov. 5, the same day as the presidential election and congressional primaries in Louisiana.

Three former state representatives who co-chaired Landry’s transition committee on revising the constitution – Loulan Pitre, Jim Tucker and Neil Abramson – also tried to mollify critics by saying that their plan does not call for adding anything new to the existing constitution that voters adopted in 1974.

Instead, the three men said, their plan is to have convention delegates remove a number of unspecified items from the constitution and put them into statute so that legislators could have greater freedom to change laws.

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That’s particularly important, Abramson said, because policymakers are facing a projected $500 million deficit next year and need more flexibility to make budget cuts if they don’t want to approve a tax-raising measure. Under current law, Abramson noted, lawmakers can only make major cuts in spending by slicing higher education and health care for the poor.

“You don’t have the flexibility to make other decisions,” Abramson said.

Abramson didn’t mention it, but one possible change would be to take the protected spending for K-12 public schools out of the constitution and make it available for cuts.

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The plan by Landry and Beaullieu calls for all 105 House members and 39 senators to serve as delegates along with 27 delegates appointed by Landry, or 171 total. They would meet beginning on May 20 during the final two weeks of the regular legislative session, which ends on June 3.

If the House committee approves Beaullieu’s legislation next week, it would then advance to the full House. If approved there, it would go to the Senate, which hasn’t expressed enthusiasm yet for the measure. It would take a two-thirds vote in each chamber to approve HB 800.

Rep. Mike Bayham, R-Chalmette, voiced the fears of senators by saying that spending much of the final two weeks during the regular session on the constitution at the same time could keep lawmakers’ other legislation from getting considered and winning approval.

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The final two weeks of the regular session are typically when lawmakers are trying to pass major pieces of legislation and the annual budget.

Rep. Candace Newell, D-New Orleans, said holding the regular session and the constitutional convention concurrently would give Landry extra influence because he could trade support for proposed constitutional changes for spending projects in members’ districts.

“There should be a separate special session and not something overlapping with this one,” Newell said.

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Under the bill, measures taken out of the constitution could only be restored to it with a two-thirds vote by lawmakers, which would make it harder to add things back to a document that Beaullieu said is the eighth longest in the country.

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