King Tuck: Equal Opportunity Exasperator

When then Governor-elect Bobby Jindal announced his support for Republican Jim Tucker to be Speaker of the House in late 2007 there were guffaws when Jindal said he was doing so as part of his desire to avoid the kind of intense partisanship that had come to plague Washington, D.C., where Jindal had spent a fair amount of time over the previous decade.

Tucker, after all, had been leader of the House Republican Caucus in the previous term where he had a well-earned reputation for ratcheting up partisanship through his opposition to various initiatives of Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco.

That Tucker could somehow shed his partisan skin by ascending to leadership of the full House seemed ludicrous to many.

This week, Tucker proved his doubters wrong as he took up the work of unraveling Jindal’s plan to close budget gaps in the current and next fiscal years with the same enthusiasm and tenacity (obstinacy?) as he did in foiling Blanco’s budget moves four years ago.

Jim Tucker is proving himself to be an equal opportunity disrupter of the well-laid plans of Louisiana governors.

King Tuck Reshapes State Government

In ways unprecedented for a legislative leader, Jim Tucker has had a powerful impact on reshaping state government in Louisiana. In 2009, Tucker led the successful push wrest away control of what will replace ‘Big Charity’ hospital from LSU. He also directed the creation of the Tucker Commission that has proposed a radical reshaping of higher education in the state.

As the recent dustup over the election of a new speaker pro tempore demonstrated, Tucker is perfectly willing to punish anyone who crosses him, regardless of party affiliation.

Tucker won election to the House representing District 86 (a district that includes both the gated community of English Turn and the blue-collar community of Terrytown) in 2001. He is term limited. Tucker is using his stint as speaker to advance some long-standing conservative critiques of Louisiana state government regardless of whose toes get stepped on in the process.

He's had his brush with ethics issues, but that did not stop the "ethics governor" from supporting Tucker's election as speaker.

Tucker and Jindal share a general approach to government — a general dislike of government as a deliverer of services and a strong aversion to tax increases. That shared belief is a significant factor in the state’s current budget crisis. Tucker has repeatedly stated that “the state does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.”

Tucker, even more than Jindal, has had a hand in creating the current crisis, in no small measure thanks to his role as head of the House Republican caucus during Governor Blanco’s tenure. In the final year of Governor Blanco’s term, her push for business tax cuts was at least partially motivated to try to win Republican support (PDF) for increased spending on education, which Republicans (led by Tucker) paid lip service to but generally opposed.

Tucker is not always opposed to increased government spending. In 2008, Tucker supported legislation that would have tripled the pay of legislators. Tucker, who led the fight in the House in support of the pay raise, tried framing the issue in good government terms.

“We want to have good, quality people running for the Legislature, to get a good cross-section of the state," not just the wealthy who can afford to spend time in Baton Rouge for at least one session a year, Tucker said. "I am concerned about the average Joe who can't afford to come here. ... This is not the priesthood where you take a vow of poverty."

No, in Tucker’s view, that vow should be required of public employees. Tucker has led the effort to restructure state employee retirement programs to shift from defined benefit pensions to 401k programs that significantly reduce the state’s liability for those pensions, but also — as has been shown in the private sector — significantly lower the income of those retirees covered.

Calling Jindal’s Bluff

In the current session, Tucker has sought to use his power as Speaker with less hesitancy than in the past, the most public instance being his punishment of those (including Republicans) who voted against Lafayette independent Rep. Joel Robideaux in the election for speaker pro tempore. After a close public vote, Speaker Tucker changed committee assignments for a number of members who he said had not kept their word to him regarding the vote.

The blatant power play sparked alarm from the governor’s office and even among some of Tucker’s most ardent apologists.

If anyone thought the reaction might have tempered Tucker’s approach they were proven wrong this week when Tucker announced that the House would not take up the matter of fixing the $360 million hole in the budget for the current fiscal year until May when there would be only a matter of days left in the fiscal year.

Tucker’s move focused on the element of Jindal’s plan for fixing the hole that appears to have crossed two of the Speaker’s trip wires. The first was taking money set aside to pay a settle a dispute with the federal government over the use of Medicaid funding. The governor may have abandoned his former aversion to using one-time money to fix recurring budget problems, but Tucker has not.

The second trip wire was how Jindal proposed to cover the payment on the settlement, which everyone expects will have to be paid in the state’s 2010-11 fiscal year. Stunningly, Jindal announced that he is counting on President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats being able to win an extension of the economic stimulus program which would mean an additional $300 million or more in federal Medicaid funding for Louisiana. Jindal is not only counting on the money, he declared himself confident that the D.C. Democrats would prevail on the issue.

Tucker apparently recoiled at Jindal’s admission of his dependence on national Democrats to bail the state out of its budget crisis.

This week, Tucker called Jindal’s bluff, saying he would delay the House taking up the proposed fix for the current budget for a couple of weeks to see if Jindal’s political prognosticating was worth banking on. Tucker said he would wait to take up the measure to give congressional Democrats the opportunity to advance their Recovery Act extension.

Tucker’s move puts legislators in a precarious position. They are constitutionally mandated to balance the state budget each year. Waiting until mid- to late-May to fill this hole will mean that whatever solution to the shortfall is implemented, will be rushed into place. With Jindal and Tucker both opposed use of the so-called rainy day fund to close this year’s budget gap (they’d rather use that to plug holes in the next fiscal year budget), and with revenue options non-existent within the already compressed window to deal with the problem, the debate between Tucker and Jindal will be over how to make the use of one-time money appear to look like recurring money.

An Equal Opportunity Exasperator

Jindal, like Blanco before him, is learning that it’s no fun to have Tucker working against you. Tucker was a thorn in Blanco’s side, particularly in the final two years of her term, and that was when he merely headed a caucus. Now, as speaker, Tucker is proving that he is committed to using the powers of his office to advance the approach to government that he believes in.

For Jindal, Tucker’s lesson in the art of the bi-partisanship approach to exasperating is coming at an inopportune time.

With the Senate ready to work with Jindal to close the budget gap now, Tucker has emerged as an obstacle to the governor’s budgetary slight of hand. With bigger budgetary holes to fill in the next fiscal year (and potentially still larger ones to fill the following year), Jindal is using every trick he can muster to stave off the kinds of budget cuts in healthcare and higher education that he knows will do serious damage to the thing that matters most to him — his re-election prospects.

Tucker, on the other hand, won’t be speaker after the 2011 election. He is at the peak of his political power now. There are no guarantees that he can win election to higher office. If he is going to make an impact on the shape of state government, now is his time to do it.

The divergence in the scope and timing of Tucker’s ambitions and Jindal’s are stark.

Jindal’s aspirations are not confined to Louisiana, but they rest on he is re-election as governor next year. His chances of doing that are going to rest in large measure on his ability to address the state’s budget challenges without being perceived to be inflicting lasting damage on the state’s future prospects (something already called into question by supporters of higher education and healthcare in the state). Jindal’s national ambitions also rest on his fidelity to the conservative credo against tax increases. As his admission of his dependence on President Obama’s recovery spending makes clear, Jindal has hit an intellectual dead end on that path.

Tucker, on the other hand, would not be particularly bothered by the prospect of having to make the kinds of cuts in state spending that would put Jindal’s re-election in jeopardy. Tucker is as true a believer in the conservative approach to governance as Jindal is an opportunistic one. This is a clash of style as well as substance.

Tucker Controls Jindal’s Fate

There will likely be two ugly fiscal year budget fights between now and the statewide elections next year — the budget for the next fiscal year that will be decided in the current session and the budget that will be decided in next year’s election year Regular Session. Jindal’s political fate, in large measure, is tied to how those budgets address state needs. Tucker will have as much influence on the final shape of those budgets as will Jindal.

Kathleen Blanco was not running for re-election and found dealing with Tucker exasperating. Jindal prizes re-election more than anything. Tucker is in position to set the price of that prize to an unprecedented extent. Not since Willie Rainach rose to prominence as a leader of White Citizen Councils in the late 1950s and early 1960s has a single legislator had so much power to influence the political fate a governor.

The dance between Jindal and Tucker that plays out over the next few weeks will shape the political terrain for next year’s elections. Tucker's tenure as speaker sunsets with that same election that will determine Jindal's future. In the interim, what transpires in Baton Rouge will revolve around Tucker.

Jindal is in a tight spot. He has hitched his political fate to a pair of political polar opposites: Barack Obama and Jim Tucker.

Can he really be the smartest guy in the room?

Jindal & Levine: Ideology and Ambition Are About to Take Louisiana Off a Cliff

We know with certainty that President Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has saved one job in Louisiana: Bobby Jindal's.

While talking the typical Republican anti-stimulus line, Jindal took the money, laundered it through various state departments and agencies, then flew around the state with big images of checks handing the federal money out as if he had printed it himself in Baton Rouge. To top it off, he ordered the Department of Transportation and Development not to identify those projects that were funded with stimulus dollars.

Most importantly, though, the stimulus dollars put off the reckoning where Jindal's national political preening will collide with the state's fiscal reality. Those federal dollars have allowed Jindal to continue his 'no new taxes' happy talk in the face of declining state revenues and growing human need. Those dollars allowed him to put off (for a year, any way) draconian cuts in higher education that alarmed even some of those who once believed he had the smarts and the skills to effectively lead the state through tough budget times.

The Jindal reckoning will begin in earnest tomorrow when the Revenue Estimating Conference will produce their official estimate of the size of the hole in the state's current fiscal year budget. The hole has been estimated to be between $200 million and $400 million. Coming this late in the fiscal year, trying to cut his way out of this hole probably is not doable.

Whatever the size of the hole, it will begin to pull apart the budgetary house of cards that Jindal has tried to confect with his 2010-12 budget, which proposes to tap a series of one-time money sources to fix what is a systemic budget problem. Whatever funds he and his legislative allies agree to pull forward into this year to fill this latest hole will create a larger hole in the budget for next year now under consideration.

Things will get really scary after that because those federal stimulus dollars will begin to run out in the next fiscal year, sending Jindal and his allies into next year's election year legislative cycle with a huge projected shortfall and little likelihood of federal stimulus dollars being available to cushion the blow thanks to Jindal's Republican congressional friends.

Louisiana's much talked about fiscal cliff is straight ahead. The effective result of Jindal continuing to rule out revenue increases would be to step on the gas. Judging by the way Jindal and his health secretary are approaching healthcare, early indications are that ideology will trump pragmatism. Louisiana appears headed over the cliff.

Healthcare: Ignoring the New Reality on the Ground

The Jindal administration's immediate responses to the Affordable Care Act becoming law were ideologically driven. Jindal himself pressured Democratic Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to join 13 Republican states attorneys general in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the new law. DHH Secretary Alan Levine said the new law would force the Jindal administration to close most of the LSU Hospital System possibly as soon as next year (as it plans to do any way). Jindal is a little confused about what is actually in the new law.

The Affordable Care Act will provide tax credits to more than 50,000 Louisiana small businesses to provide health insurance to their employees. The Act will provide access to affordable health insurance to hundreds of thousands of working Louisiana adults who cannot afford coverage now by helping to pay for that coverage. By September, it will offer adult Louisiana residents who have been denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions access to affordable care through a high-risk pool that will stay in existence until 2014 when the state insurance exchanges and the ban on insurance companies denying adults coverage due to pre-existing conditions takes effect. The Act already bans insurance companies from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. It will bring affordable coverage to nearly 400,000 low income Louisiana residents through expansion of Medicaid eligibility. And it will require that all health screenings be free to patients regardless of the type of coverage they have — private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid.

The Louisiana Department of Insurance is working to make sure that Louisiana is ready to reap the benefits of the law that Jindal is trying to undermine.

The reason Jindal most likely opposes the Act (other than the fact that it was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Democratic President) is the fact that the state will have to pick up ten percent of the tab for the newly eligible Medicaid patients. Face it, that will require new revenue and Jindal is all about not going that route. His political ambitions are built upon that anti-tax foundation.

Levine, on the other hand, has been chomping at the bit to start closing LSU hospitals since Jindal appointed him in 2004. He scrambled to get a Medicaid waiver approved by the Bush administration just before Christmas of that year. But, the Bushies were too busy trying to find new work to even bother looking at Levine's last ditch effort. It became a dead letter when the Obama administration took over, relying as it did on privatization of services, installation of a private managed care gatekeeper, and turning W.O. Moss Regional Medical Center in Lake Charles into an outpatient clinic.

But, the most transparent display of the administration's intent played out in Baton Rouge and New Orleans and the fate of the two LSU hospitals there. The flooding of New Orleans after the levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina knocked out The Reverend Avery Alexander ('Big Charity') LSU Hospital there. Governor Kathleen Blanco provided funding for the initial work of planning and developing a new hospital there to be built adjacent to a new Veterans Administration hospital. Governor Blanco also managed to get similar planning and development money approved for new LSU hospitals in Baton Rouge and Pineville to replace aging facilities there.

With the arrival of the Jindal administration, the Pineville hospital was dead. The LSU hospital in New Orleans, though, was too big to ignore and played too important a role in healthcare delivery in the Crescent City. Earl K. Long in Baton Rouge was another matter.

Early on, Jindal made it clear that his administration was willing to go ahead with plans for a new teaching hospital in New Orleans but that it would not go along with plans for a new LSU hospital in Baton Rouge. There was a quid pro quo of trading the Jindal administration's backing  new hospital in New Orleans in exchange for LSU not only acquiescing to the closing of Earl K. Long but coming up with some alternate plan to deliver something resembling the services offered at that hospital. It was something along the lines of, "Nice hospital you want there in New Orleans; it would be a shame if anything happened to it, wouldn't it?"

LSU Vice President Fred Cerise made this clear in a recent Times-Picayune article in which he said that LSU had entered into a deal with Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center because the Jindal administration had made it clear that it would not build a new LSU hospital in Baton Rouge. Cerise also revealed that, as a result of the deal, the cost of providing care to Medicaid patients in the Baton Rouge area will actually be higher than it was to provide the care at Earl K. Long.

So, here is a specific example of Jindal forcing a privatization deal, ostensibly under the guise of saving the state money (big deficit driven by Medicaid, remember?), yet the bottom line result of the deal will be to increase the cost of the Medicaid program in the very region where the deal will be executed. In short, Jindal's ideological bias against the public sector trumped the fiscal interests of the state by driving up the long-term costs of the Medicaid program.

Jindal opposes the Affordable Care Act, in part, because it will increase state spending on the Medicaid program. Yet, as the LSU deal with Our Lady of the Lake demonstrates, he is perfectly willing to drive up the costs of that program in order to serve his own interests.

Whatever ideological basis Jindal has for wanting to shutter the LSU hospital system, passage of the Affordable Care Act makes it a bad idea. Why? Because of the influx of new healthcare dollars into Louisiana and the expanded access to affordable coverage than nearly 1 million Louisiana citizens will have as a result of the new law. If anything, Louisiana will need more — not less — healthcare delivery capacity — in order to serve these newly insured people. From a practical standpoint, closing the LSU hospitals will swamp existing facilities with patients that they are not prepared to handle.

This has the potential to be a nightmare scenario in Baton Rouge because of the LSU/OLOL deal. Baton Rouge General's Mid City Campus and Lane Memorial Hospital opposed the deal partially out of fear that their facilities are closer to north Baton Rouge would be the most likely destination for Medicaid patients and the uninsured rather than OLOL's campus on the south side of the parish. Those hospitals will not be getting the higher rates of Medicaid reimbursements Levine and DHH have promised OLOL.

That's OK with Jindal and Levine, though, as it let's them advance towards their goal of closing the state's public hospital system. Again, ideology trumping the best interests of the state, the community, even elements of the private sector, and all of this despite a massive influx of new federal healthcare dollars via tax credits and appropriations.

Higher Education: Budget Hole Sets The GRAD Trap

Jindal's objection to revenue increases does not extend to college students and their families. In something of a surprise, in his executive budget for this year, Jindal did not propose to cut funding for higher education. He might have learned something from last year's intervention at the Mansion by four of his predecessors, but the more likely case is that he did not want to risk further embarrassment had he gone ahead with the cuts.

Instead, Jindal offered higher education a deal, telling the colleges that if they raised their graduation rates and he would let them raise tuition up to 10 percent per year without having to seek the approval of the Legislature. Two bills in the Legislature seek to turn the deal into law — HB 1171 and SB 570.

The deal won widespread praise as a sign of Jindal's new-found appreciation for the value of higher education. The goodwill evaporated as soon as the new budget hole surfaced and colleges and universities were ordered to prepare cuts in order to do their part to fill the hole.

Coming this late in the fiscal year, eight figure budget cuts would have a devastating impact on campuses across the state. Some schools would cancel summer classes and order months-long furloughs (that is, no paychecks) for faculty, support staff and administrators.

Jindal has proposed borrowing from his 2010-11 budget house of cards to help fill the new hole, the depth of which we will learn tomorrow.

At best, Jindal's proposed solution to this year's budget problems would be to push back the cuts into the next fiscal year.

The real impact, though, would be to render the GRAD useless. The impetus for the deal was that Louisiana college students take longer to graduate than do students in other states. The GRAD bills would require the schools to work to get students to pick up the pace. One way they might do that is by attending summer classes. That will not be an option of schools have to cancel those classes because of budget cuts.

So, if some version of the GRAD bills becomes law, the state's colleges and universities could have the prospect of the ability to raise their tuition dangled before them, but (because of continuing budget cuts) not have the means to achieve the benchmarks they need in order to actually gain that freedom.

This will all be made worse next year when, in all likelihood, the current round of Recovery Act support for higher education will dry up — unless Jindal's Republican Congressional friends have yet another conversion experience on federal spending.

So, flash forward to 2011. Higher education will continue to be at the mercy of the Legislature for tuition increases, be facing another round of steep budget cuts because Jindal (seeking re-election based on his "Louisiana Way") won't consider taxes or revenue enhancements not called "tuition increases", and a loss of millions of dollars of federal stimulus money.

Driving off that cliff might not inflict the same human toll as driving off the healthcare cliff, but crippling higher education with deeper cuts than have already been inflicted will damage the economic prospects of our young people and our state for decades to come.

All of this because Bobby Jindal wants to be the Republican nominee for president some day. Really, this is not about Louisiana; it's all about him.