Our Absentee Governor is Still in Complete Control

At the close of this year’s legislative session one can only conclude that our legislators really do love being marionettes controlled by their puppet master, Governor Bobby Jindal.   The Louisiana House voted 81 to 20 in favor of House Bill 2, the capital outlay plan, for the new fiscal year which starts July 1^st.  They overshot the allotted funding by $388 million and the Senate also approved.

This money is used for construction projects throughout our state, and there isn’t anywhere near the amount of funds needed to fund all the projects included in this bill, so Bobby gets to decide which ones will get completed.

This explains why our legislators, with the exception of Common Core,  didn’t challenge Bobby’s wishes on any other major issue.

Every legislator has pet projects that they want funded for their district, and by intentionally over loading projects into the capital outlay budget, if they kiss the puppet master’s ring enough, they might just get him to decide to fund theirs.

So no matter how harsh the P. R. of some of our legislators might have sounded at the beginning of this year’s legislative session in their criticism of Bobby’s use of one time monies to balance this year’s budget, his refusal to accept expanded Medicaid funding for the working poor, his refusal to accept more over site regarding his office and the privatization of the LSU hospital system, and his refusal to permit a lawsuit to proceed against the oil companies for costal damage, our legislators clearly realized that, as the legislative session continued to progress, they best not aggravate Geppetto, because they wanted his blessings further down the road. 

Talk is cheap and our legislators are the masters of bargain shopping.

They can deny all they want, but at the end of the day it was their decision to make themselves beholding to King Bobby and it was premeditated all the way.

Bobby Jindal may be a ‘lame duck’ governor, and mostly absent from the state capital building, but it is quite obvious that the majority of our legislators are still afraid to stand up to him and do what’s best for their constituents.

It’s all a game, called politics.