Our Legislators fiddle while Louisiana burns

It’s time to call it quits at Baton Rouge.  The legislators simply need to get into their cars and go home.  As a group they have, with the exception of the passage of a bill for the medical use of marihuana, done little to improve the quality of life for the residents of our state.  In fact even one bill that attempted to address a serious social issue, human trafficking by strip clubs, was turned into a joke when an  amendment was proposed on the House floor to add the requirement that all female exotic dancers who perform in the clubs must be between the ages of 21 to 28 and weight no more than 160 lbs.

And let’s not forget the bill to fully fund TOPS while decimating health care funding, the proposal to exempt certain individuals from prosecution under the concealed weapons law, the bill requiring the teaching of cursive writing, and the latest one requiring students to recite a section of the Declaration of Independence at the beginning of each school day.

On the other hand, they saw fit to defeat a bill that would require state wellness exams for children entering school, and reject a proposal that would require facilities that consistently violate state and federal environmental air pollution guidelines to line their fences with air monitors to detect leaked pollutants.  They scrapped a proposal to ban open burning of hazardous waste in Louisiana, rejected a bill intended to shift state-funded health care for the elderly from nursing homes to at-home care, and killed a bill providing equal pay for women. This session our legislators basically refused to pass laws that while beneficial to our citizens might alienate one of the large lobbyist groups soliciting at the Capital.

Just think of the state budget savings if we had put our legislators on ‘leave without pay’ during the current session time frame.

Let’s hope Governor Edwards proceeds with his special session and we get some realistic, long term budget solutions.  Let’s also hope that during that session our legislators will be less influenced by the lobbyists and remember who they truly were elected to represent. But that might take some divine intervention.