Louisiana has a new governor and New Orleans has a lame duck mayor, but Jeff Landry and LaToya Cantrell have an important thing in common: They each inhabit an office that comes with a lot of power.
Strong executives are a tradition in both the state and its most iconic city, and one major way these leaders flex their muscle — and extend their political reach — is through wide-ranging appointments. None other than the late four-term Gov. Edwin Edwards said so, back in 1974 in “The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association,” in explaining why Louisiana’s governors play “an unusually dominant position in state politics.”
Apparently not dominant enough for Landry, who is pushing a number of measures to that would give him even more power.
We saw flashes of this desire back during the special legislative session on crime, when the governor convinced lawmakers to give him more authority over the state’s public defenders, although not as much as he’d originally sought.
And it’s all over the docket in the current regular session.
There are bills that would allow the governor to appoint Supreme Court justices, who are currently elected; to appoint chairs of higher education boards, who are now chosen by fellow board members; to directly appoint Civil Service Commission members now screened by university presidents; to appoint chairs of other state boards and commissions; and to give the governor more appointment authority over the Board of Ethics, according to a jaw-dropping list compiled by the Council for a Better Louisiana.
It’s not clear how far these proposals will go in the process, but even some of these changes would amount to a substantial centralization of control in an already powerful office.
In New Orleans, a different dynamic is playing out. While Landry’s still in his honeymoon phase, Cantrell’s long past that, to the point where there’s a widespread sense of disappointment in her ability to run a functional government.
That’s surely why we’re seeing a number of moves to encroach on the mayor’s established role.
One example was the City Council’s push for a charter amendment to give it approval over major mayoral appointees — an idea that clearly drew momentum from scandals involving several department heads.
Other attempts to rein in New Orleans mayors are coming from the Legislature, where there are proposals involving mayoral authority over boards that oversee public housing, regional transit, emergency dispatch and the Downtown Development District. Landry is moving in on city operations as well, most notably policing and the ever-frustrating Sewerage & Water Board.
These two narratives may seem to be diametrically opposed, and there are obviously additional factors at play; race and gender come to mind. But they’ve also got a key element in common: Landry’s attempts to expand his own authority and Cantrell’s critics (both Democratic and Republican) reacting to her perceived weakness — the “blood in the water,” as longtime pollster Silas Lee characterized it — are centered on a person in office and a moment in time.
That’s a concern, good government advocates say, because individuals and times change, and while government structures are not necessarily forever, they’re supposed to be stable from administration to administration.
Rightsizing sometimes may make sense, and good ideas can come out of these discussions. I’d argue, for example, that having the New Orleans City Council approve top mayoral appointees is an improvement, and worked out just fine during its first test, Cantrell’s hiring of Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick.
But making changes based on one person can also be problematic, to put it mildly.
Landry has said he wants to get more of state government on the same page as his administration, for example, but there are good reasons that something like ethics enforcement has some distance. As Steven Procopio, president of the Public Affairs Research Council, put it, giving the governor and lawmakers direct appointing power over those tasked with investigating their behavior is “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
More generally, a sensible rule of thumb, said CABL president Barry Erwin, is to ask “if there were another person in the office, would we regret that we gave that person additional authority or took it away?”
Because if you’re changing the way government works because of one person, then you’re really doing government wrong.