This year’s state legislative session started on April 14. Legislators prefiled hundreds of bills—some of them good, many of them terrible, and plenty of them just plain ineffective.
Louisiana Republicans have taken this as an opportunity to follow in the national party’s footsteps, hiding extreme, unpopular and even borderline authoritarian policies behind what they frame as “common sense solutions.” Here are a few of the worst bills to keep an eye on this session.
House Bill 421
First up is a bill by Emily Chenevert, R-Baton Rouge. It’s this year’s big culture war bill, in line with recent attacks on “critical race theory” and last year’s restrictions on queer youth. These kinds of bills perform outrage and fire up the most politically ignorant but disproportionately influential parts of the state GOP’s voter base.
If Chenevert’s bill becomes a law, which is likely given the legislature’s Republican supermajorities, all agency heads will be instructed to eliminate DEI programs, offices, positions and “performance requirements.” The bill gives an intentionally broad definition of DEI, allowing the GOP to destroy any attempt to remedy inequality in the state under the thin veil of stopping “differential treatment” and promoting meritocracy.
House Bill B371
Beryl Amedée, R-Gray, is seeking to give a vaguely defined set of “protections of the highest order” to places of worship and religious organizations facing supposed “discrimination.” Christian nationalists like Amedée often pretend Christians are some kind of oppressed group whose religious freedom is threatened. A bill like hers uses this as a pretense to protect Christian-flavored bigotry and conspiracy theories.
Senate Bill 15
A particularly worrying bill is by Jay Morris, R-West Monroe. He’s pushing to expand the crimes of malfeasance in office by a public official and obstruction of justice to include actions that “hinder, delay, prevent, or otherwise interfere” with federal immigration enforcement.
This is in line with the Trump Administration’s efforts to deport a massive number of non-citizens, many of them here legally, ostensibly to quell irrational fears about crime, drugs and ethnic minorities. In a time when the President and his allies are openly suggesting sending U.S. citizens to a prison in El Salvador, this may facilitate disappearing anyone the GOP wants gone.
Senate Bill 74
Alan Seabaugh, R-Many, is obviously trying to circumvent the March 29 landslide loss suffered by Amendment 3, which would have given the legislature authority to determine which crimes minors can be tried as adults for.
Seabaugh’s bill is identical not in text but in outcome. It removes the discretion afforded to district attorneys in determining whether kids are tried under the Children’s Code or the harsher Code of Criminal Procedure. This would mean that more minors, many of them racial minorities, would be charged as adults and forced to suffer harsher sentences. This cruel bill would do nothing to make Louisianians safer and preserve racial and economic inequality.
House Bill 586
Finally, there’s a bill by Dixon McMakin, R-Baton Rouge, which calls for a constitutional convention.
In theory, there is nothing wrong with writing a new state constitution to facilitate “flexibility and innovation in legislative solutions to problems of the present and the future.” But a new constitution is a Trojan horse, much like those four amendments that failed in March and many of the bills discussed here. Conservatives want to bury unpopular changes deep inside a new constitution.
McMakin’s real goal is to give conservative politicians more leeway in advancing their greedy and regressive agenda.
Matthew Pellittieri is a 21-year-old history and political science junior from Ponchatoula, La.
