BATON ROUGE (AP) — After Gov. John Bel Edwards blocked a Republican-crafted elections plan for the coronavirus outbreak, GOP lawmakers are proposing to keep the Louisiana governor from doing that again by changing the rules for future emergencies.
The Senate voted 22-12 Thursday for a proposal from Senate Republican leader Sharon Hewitt, of Slidell, that would remove the governor’s authority to veto an emergency elections plan submitted by Louisiana’s elections chief, the secretary of state.
“I think this definitely does streamline the process,” said Hewitt, who chairs the Senate’s elections oversight committee.
Instead of veto authority over an emergency elections plan, the governor would have one vote on a 10-member commission packed mainly with lawmakers to decide whether to forward the emergency elections plan to the full Legislature for a vote. The House and Senate would retain their current ability to approve or reject the plan, but the governor would no longer have such a decision.
Hewitt’s bill moves next to the House for consideration. Most Republicans in the Senate voted for the measure, while Democrats voted in a bloc against it.
While Republicans say the legislation would improve a clunky process for emergencies, Democrats say the effort simply is aimed to sideline a Democratic governor whose decisions are opposed by the GOP.
“You’re taking the authority of the governor away,” said Sen. Ed Price, a Democrat from Donaldsonville. “I don’t think that’s the way we should be moving if we want coequal branches of government.”
Hewitt said no other state has a similar setup to Louisiana, where the House and Senate and the governor have to sign off on an emergency elections plan proposed by the secretary of state.
Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, proposed an emergency plan for the Nov. 3 and Dec. 5 elections that won support from the majority-GOP House and Senate but that was blocked by Edwards. The governor said the plan didn’t do enough to expand mail-in balloting in response to the pandemic.
A federal judge later agreed with Edwards and required Ardoin to offer more absentee-by-mail balloting options for the two fall elections.
