Landry's rushed attempt to change the Louisiana constitution is a 'comedy show': Newell

Watching the House and Governmental Affairs Committee discussion on House Bill 8o0 -- Gov. Jeff Landry's effort to change the Louisiana Constitution -- made something clear to WWL's Newell Normand.

Both Republicans and Democrats are having a very difficult time getting their heads around what they're actually doing.

How many committees will actually be voting on this.? How will this be divided up? And why is there not an agenda that's been brought forth to the committees in advance so that they could consume it, gain a better understanding, and really weigh in on the issues?

Why does it seem like such a mess? Jan Moller of Invest in Louisiana joined Newell to discuss, saying the bill has the potential to affect a lot of areas that Invest in Louisiana cares about, including low income families in Louisiana -- and even they're in the dark.

"The governor and his allies still haven't said exactly what they want to change in the Constitution, or why they want to change it," Moller said. "They've given some kind of very vague answers about giving the legislature more flexibility in the Constitution, but they haven't said what they want to change. But we do know that this process is being rushed through on an really unprecedented timeline."

The last time Louisiana convened a constitutional convention was 50 years ago, and it was a three-plus-years process.

The convention itself took a whole year. Before that, there was an election of the delegates to that convention. And before that, there was an election, where Governor Edwards at the time, ran on an explicit platform to have a constitutional convention.

"None of these things happened in this instance," Moller said. "We know that there was a transition team that met before Governor Landry took office. They made some recommendations. The governor hasn't even told us who was on that transition team. And he hasn't released the results of those recommendations yet."

Landry wants this constitutional convention to start about three and a half weeks from right now. And he wants the whole process to take two weeks. He wants this done between May 20th and June 3rd, and then he wants to send that to the ballot. "That is not enough time for anybody to make considerations. And it's not enough public input for something of this magnitude," Moller said.

He added that people need to remember that, you know, that, first of all, nobody would defend every word in the current Constitution. It's been amended 216 times over the last 50 years and the reason these amendments got on the bill into the Constitution is because the legislature and more important, the people of Louisiana, wanted to protect the people of Louisiana from the Louisiana legislature.

"That's why these amendments got into the Constitution in the first place, because at some point, two thirds of the legislature and a majority of the voters in this state said, you know, there's something here that's so important that we need to protect it, whether it's the sales tax exemption on food and drugs and residential utilities or it's the homestead exemption or, the minimum foundation program that funds public schools, there are a lot of important protections in there. Funding for hospitals and nursing homes. Funding for first responders. And the governor said this morning he doesn't think that they want to touch supplemental pay, but that was the only detail we've gotten," Moller said.

Nine Republicans voted in favor of moving that the bill to the House despite the lack of clarity.

"You could this is a comedy show. You couldn't make this up," Newell said.

Also, it's 'preposterous' to think that they don't actually know what they want to change even if they haven't said it, Moller said. "And it's equally preposterous to say that, you know, because the first argument we heard was that we don't want to we're not really rewriting the Constitution. We're just taking some. We're making it skinnier. You know, we're going to change the Constitution. We're going to take things out of the Constitution and put it into statute. But don't worry, we're not changing anything you care about. And now the latest buzzword is this. It's about flexibility.

"But it's but they're doing this, you know, they're not going to go through this process just because they want to move things from column A over to column B. They're doing this because there are things that they want to cut that they can't cut right now, or taxes they want to raise that they can't raise without a vote of the people. And so, if you're going to be honest with the voters, you need to come out and say, this is what we want to change, and this is why we want to change it. "