The Hayride: “ nobody can rely on (Jeff) Landry’s word”

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Back in April, when a House committee was marking up tort reform bills and also a bill that would give Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple the power, and presumably eventually the responsibility, to cram down insurance rates, Gov. Jeff Landry was testifying in front of the committee.

At the time there was a lot of suspicion, based on a story that Landry had gone on a turkey hunt with a couple of rich plaintiff lawyers and the two legislative leaders, that the governor was going to ultimately scuttle tort reform efforts this year. Landry denied that, and he said this…(Hayride links to an audio where Gov Landry says “Whatever yall put on my desk, I’m gonna sign”),

The importance of this can’t be overstated.

This was a guarantee, in the context that it was made, that Landry was not going to stand in the way of tort reform. But more than that, while he was standing behind a package of bills that fit into that category, he was also signaling that he was letting the Legislature take the lead in reforming the tort and insurance system in the state.

Yes, that’s basic and obvious, but it matters, because people relied on Landry saying that.

And when SB 111, which is a very in-the-weeds insurance bill that addresses the abuse of insurance policy limits that trial lawyers in the state have managed to worm their way into (it’s complicated, but I discussed it in an X post yesterday to the best of my understanding and you can see that here), was going through the legislative process nobody from the administration was complaining.

So it passed with 26 votes out of 39 in the Senate and 56-44 in the House. The only real opposition to it came from the lobbyist from the trial lawyers’ association.

Then Landry vetoed it.

He said he would sign the tort reform bills, and then he vetoed a tort reform bill.

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The real problem is that Jeff Landry made a concrete representation to the people of Louisiana, on the record in an official proceeding, that he wouldn’t stand in the way of efforts at tort reform that the Louisiana legislature thought would help the situation. And he made it to assuage concerns that he had his thumb on the scale.

And then despite reliance on that representation, he did the opposite of what he said he would do.

Moon Griffon has been castigating Landry as a liar ever since on his show. It’s hard to say Moon is wrong about that. This is about as cut-and-dried a case as there is of that.

But it has to be reiterated that what this means is nobody can rely on Landry’s word.

He says that SB 111 isn’t a tort reform bill at all but rather an anti-consumer bill. The business community and lots of others, particularly among GOP legislators, really don’t agree with that. And the fact that the trial lawyers sent their lobbyist out to fight the bill would indicate that they certainly thought it was a tort reform bill.

But when he said he’d sign the bills, what Landry was implying, pretty strongly, was that he was letting the Legislature define what tort reform is and is not. He said if they passed those bills he’d sign them. Then he did the opposite.

So how do you rely on his word going forward?

I don’t know. And because of that I don’t know what the way ahead looks like with Landry’s next two years. Without trust and honesty among the elected officials there is no way to successfully operate a representative democracy, and we now have a wide-open breach of that trust.

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