From the Editor: Edwards death, veto session mark end of an era

A couple of weeks have gone by since former Gov. Edwin Edwards was laid to rest. It’s been a week since Republican legislators used a provision in the Edwards-era state constitution to conduct a veto session.
Taken together, those two events mark a change in the only spectator sport that can compete with Saints and LSU football: Louisiana politics.
Louisiana’s political landscape seems destined to look less and less like a homegrown product and more like just another battlefield in the national clash of ideologies.
Everyone in Louisiana probably has an Edwin Edwards story. Here’s mine, and it may illustrate the point:
It was spring 1991, and I’d only recently moved to Louisiana. Edwards was kicking off his fifth and final campaign for governor. So I was sent to a big barn of a dance club someplace in St. Martin Parish to cover the event.
The Edwards appearance was part of a meeting of evangelical Christians.
Nationally, conservative Christians already were a big Republican constituency by then. Having heard a bit about the Democratic former governor’s love of craps and reputation for womanizing, I thought, “Geez. This crowd will eat him alive.”
But when Edwards took the stage, he didn’t give a speech. He delivered a sermon.
Edwards marched back and forth on the stage and called down the Holy Spirit, and the crowd responded with amens and hallelujahs.
It was the first inkling that the unique nature of Louisiana politics hadn’t died with Huey Long.
Edwards was the fourth former governor to die in two years. The others were Buddy Roemer, Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco..
They represent a time when the governor’s agenda, whoever he or she might be, was the ground on which political battles played out.
It was always a Louisiana agenda, based on some need or idea that arose in Louisiana.
That’s one of those unique features of Louisiana politics. State government wasn’t about Republican vs. Democrat, right vs. left or conservative vs. liberal.
Political leaders were categorized as either for or against the governor, sometimes a governor who was out of power.
Again, Edwards may be the clearest example.
In a long-ago interview, former state Rep. Odon Bacque talked to me about what it was like to serve in the Legislature during his single term 1988-92.
Edwards was out of office, awaiting his comeback. Roemer was on the fourth floor during that time.
But legislators could feel the very real presence of Edwards when they convened each spring, Bacque said.
As Edwards was being eulogized, legislative leaders were preparing to go into the first veto session since the creation of the 1974 Louisiana Constitution that Edwards championed.
Several bills vetoed by current Gov. John Bel Edwards were taken up in the session.
The most contentious items in the days leading to the session were vetoes of bills removing the permit requirement for those who would carry concealed firearms and preventing transgender women from competing in girls and women’s sports.
We can agree or disagree with the legislation or the vetoes. Eventually, all the override attempts failed.
But the permit-less carry and transgender bills were an attempt to bring Louisiana in line with a national conservative agenda.
They didn’t bubble up from within Louisiana the way Edwin Edwards’ tax system changes in the 1970s, Roemer’s restructuring of charity hospital governance in the 1980s or Blanco’s push for school reform in the 2000s did.
Our only living former governor, Republican Bobby Jindal, is arguably the recent governor most closely associated with a national ideology.
That’s not to say the change is bad. Louisiana is a conservative state, and GOP legislators stepped up on behalf of a conservative agenda.
But it’s a different way of doing things. And it’s here.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.