In the first 100 days of the new Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry and the Republican supermajorities in the House and Senate, Louisiana residents are witnessing a political leadership that does not reflect the state we see nor address our challenges. As a result, we have an urgent reminder of why voter registration and voter education are important. Voter turnout changes the status quo in Baton Rouge, so we can finally start making meaningful progress for all Louisiana residents.
As the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy noted in his speech about the educated citizen’s obligations at the 90th anniversary convocation of Vanderbilt University in 1963, “He knows that ‘knowledge is power,’ more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as [Thomas] Jefferson put it, ‘enlighten the people generally… tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of the day.’”
The Landry administration and supermajority are long on rhetoric but short on substances.
Their politics are more about apathy than empathy, about power trumping principles. I truly believe in our country’s founding principles: that all men and women are created equal under God and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
My public service ethos is inspired and instructed by my parents and community in New Orleans. Legislation is the love letter we write to our children. As a result, morality, in many cases, can’t be legislated; it must be empathetically communicated and demonstrated.
Indeed, there was a time when the Republican Party stood for limited government, and the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan argued, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Now, while still claiming to stand for limited government, the Republican Party is practicing just the opposite: government interference across all sectors of life.
Louisiana residents have witnessed an administration and supermajority that turned down the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) assistance program for low-income households. This program seeks to provide $40 in June and July for children who qualify for free school meals in the 36 participating states. Louisiana is one of 14 that are not.
According to numerous reports, the program would have cost the state less than $6 per eligible child to administer. The USDA calculated that about 594,000 Louisiana children would have received a combined $71 million in food aid had it taken part. The federal agency would have covered half of the state’s $7 million cost to run the program, leaving the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to cover the remaining $3.5 million.
Indeed, Republicans and Democrats alike can agree that there is no excuse for hunger in the world’s richest nation.
Moreover, this administration and supermajority have crime bills that expand the legal execution methods, eliminate parole for people convicted after August, publicize some juvenile criminal records, charge 17-year-olds as adults and decriminalize the carrying of concealed handguns. Furthermore, the administration and supermajority are seeking to host a convention to rewrite Louisiana’s constitution. The political leaders want to create a shorter version of the state’s constitution, adopted through a public vote in 1974 but has been amended more than 200 times in the past 50 years. If this type of political leadership continues in Baton Rouge, history will not judge this administration and supermajority kindly. What Louisiana residents need is leadership with first-class intellect and first-class temperament.
“No first-class democracy can treat people like second-class citizens,” late U.S. Senator Bob Dole said.
Through my public service work for the past several years, I have found that the ways of Louisiana leadership must change. In my hometown of New Orleans, with a population of about 360,000, we must continue investing in our youth. Those investments include providing quality education and mental health care, ensuring we have summer jobs and opportunities for our kids to develop, investing in their parents, making sure parents have affordable housing, increasing incomes and jobs and enhancing public safety. Additionally, in New Orleans, a student’s academic career, from kindergarten onward, is being treated like society’s filter. Schools sort, screen and select students in and out of academic opportunities that are inherently their civil rights because of an all-character system implemented over the last several years.
The 4.7 million residents of Louisiana with low or no incomes, the minority, the working class, and others have never expected so much and received so little. Former U.S. President Barack Obama argued the following about the leading objective of government.
“It’s only by coming together to do what people need done that we will, in Lincoln’s words, ‘elevate the conditions of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life,’” Obama said.
In 1991, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton argued in his campaign speech for U.S. President.
“The change we must make isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s both, and it’s different,” Clinton said. “The small towns and main streets of America aren’t like the corridors and backrooms of Washington. People out here don’t care about the idle rhetoric of ‘left’ and ‘right’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ and all the other words that have made our politics a substitute for action. These families are crying out desperately for someone who believes the promise of America is to help them with their struggle to get ahead to offer them a green light instead of a pink slip.”
But let there be no doubt. I believe in democracy and am encouraged by the words of the late Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.
“We have set out on a great experiment—the greatest, I believe, in the history of human society—an experiment to demonstrate that peoples of all races, colors, creeds and cultures can live and work and play together and be welded into a firm unity by the sheer force of a great and compelling ideal—the democratic way of life,” Bunche said.
Indeed, noble leaders don’t govern by the polls; instead, they govern by the principles.