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Hurry Up And Wait

Sue Lincoln

One week into the special session, here’s where things stand:

“The Senate has taken all the appropriate action that we constitutionally could do,” Senate President John Alario said Wednesday, after that chamber approved two bills; one to tap the Rainy Day Fund and the other to use BP money. Those measures are now awaiting a hearing in House Appropriations.

The full House has approved repealing the SAVE Act.

“The contents of it to me were a fiction,” Hammond Rep. Chris Broadwater said when urging his fellow lawmakers to approve the repeal.

That bill awaits assignment to a Senate committee.

House Ways and Means continues to take testimony on the revenue-raising bills, and worked Sunday afternoon and evening. They intend to hear all the revenue proposals, then evaluate them as as a whole before approving any.  

Governor John Bel Edwards has stated that he believes the House is moving too slowly, considering the magnitude of the fiscal crisis.

I talked with Public Affairs Research Council president Robert Travis Scott about what is – and isn’t-- going on.

Q: It seems that the budget has become a regular minefield. Are lawmakers unwilling to cross it one more time, or are they strategizing a permanent path across?

“I think everybody who’s crafting these does not see these as a long-term strategic plan,” Scott said. “They see these as a way of addressing the emergency situation – and it is a very difficult crisis emergency situation we have for the current fiscal year –and they’re trying to find some quick revenue sources to raise money as fast as they can.”

Q: No real tax reform?

“Tax reform, which a lot of people have talked about, is not really part of the plan that we see right now. They’ll have to come back to tax reform later on,” Scott said

Q: Why aren’t they moving some of these bills, then?”

“What we do know, is that the revenue-raising measures – most of these that they’re doing now – they don’t even intend to keep these, in the long term,” Scott said, adding, “But you know what? Once you pass them, they may get stuck and never go away.”

Perhaps that’s the caution, then.