(July 31) The state of Louisiana should not be spending $7 million to bring a LIV Golf tournament to New Orleans. And the state Legislature should not have declined to hold a session to consider overriding Gov. Jeff Landry’s vetoes of important local projects such as safety improvements for roads and bridges.
And yes, there is a connection between those two stories.
Of the $7 million for LIV, $5 million would be a “hosting fee” paid to LIV itself, meaning to LIV’s Saudi backers already basking in arguably ill-gotten wealth. All for a tournament that, as ace sports columnist Jeff Duncan convincingly explained, is not likely to do much good for the city and might even detract from the health of the cherished New Orleans PGA tournament, the Zurich Classic, that next year will celebrate its 80th edition.
The state should not, despite Landry’s request, pay $5 million to a “public investment fund” chaired by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who the U.S. officially concluded has ordered the killing of several innocents. Instead, it should be spending $4.2 million for safer access to Parkway High School in Bossier City, $105,000 to repair a bridge in Metairie’s Lafreniere Park, $685,000 for a sewer project in Minden and $20,000 for a tutoring program in Crowley. (Or at least half of the latter, if you want the arithmetic to work exactly).
Those four projects were among 14 infamously vetoed by Gov. Jeff Landry without even a word of explanation — which is unusual, because all of Landry’s other vetoes include explanatory notes. The lack of explanation is telling: There are virtually no conceivable substantive justifications for those line-item vetoes, which are universally seen as Landry’s method of punishing fellow Republicans for failing to back him on an entirely unrelated bill.
All 14 projects originally were passed unanimously by both the state House and the state Senate. Any decent legislature — any legislature with the slightest appreciation for its own, independent authority as a body of duly elected representatives of distinct constituencies — would feel obliged to stand up for its own members who are unjustly targeted by the governor’s ire.
The state Constitution, after all, gives the Legislature the power to call itself back for a session to consider overriding a governor’s vetoes. In a state that already gives its governor inordinately expansive authorities, the veto-override session is one of the only ways the Legislature can guarantee the proverbial “checks and balances” of power that are the hallmark of American government…. [The full column is at this link.]
