I actually called Melissa Mackenzie, our lovely, talented, and wise publisher, Wednesday afternoon and asked her to talk me out of writing this column.
That didn’t work. She insisted I write it.
At issue is a very unwelcome development here in Louisiana on Wednesday morning. The state legislature is wrapping up its annual session at the state capitol, and the overwhelming top-priority issue has been doing something about the confiscatory insurance rates for home and auto policies here.
Homeowners’ insurance is a mess in Louisiana for the same reason it’s a mess in lots of places: People live close to the water, and that means hurricanes will eventually come and cause lots of expensive damage for which insurance companies will have to pay out loads of claims, and they’re inevitably going to pass that risk along to the consumers. There are some policy options available to lawmakers to dull that pain, but to an extent this is always going to be a problem.
But car insurance is a disaster for fixable reasons.
Louisianans get in about the same number of car wrecks as people in other states do. What’s different is that in Louisiana, a car wreck results in a bodily injury at unbelievable rates in comparison to every other state in the country, and those injuries result in claims made against insurance companies. The trial lawyers here are rich as hell, and you can see evidence of that in the fact that practically every billboard along every road in the state is festooned with “Let me sue ’em for you!” ads.
We rarely have car wrecks that don’t result in lawsuits at this point, and it seems like it’s usually poor people looking for a payday doing the filing.
Everybody knows it. Including the insurance companies, many of whom have just gotten the hell out of here. For example: Nationwide Insurance? Not really all that nationwide.
And the insurance companies who do write car insurance in Louisiana write it at the highest rates in America.
The state’s politics are affected by this. It’s basically known that if you run for governor, you’d better not run afoul of those billboard lawyers, because they will dump so much PAC money against you, and run so many ads savaging you for whatever personal shortcomings you might be guilty of (in David Vitter’s case in 2015, it was hookers; he thought that was an obsolete scandal until the trial lawyers beat him with a Democrat, John Bel Edwards, who was one of their own and who utterly wrecked the state’s economy), that it’s nearly impossible to win.
In 2023, as a result, Jeff Landry made the decision not to confront the trial lawyers. He didn’t promise to do much of anything about tort reform, and he won a fairly easy race for governor.
But Landry is having a rocky ride in his second year in office, and one very big reason why is that insurance rates are too damn high, and people think he’s in the pocket of the trial bar.
Couple that with some other problems, perhaps the main one being that Landry championed a redistricting plan that took Louisiana from a congressional map that had five Republican districts and one Democrat district to a 4-2 split, presumably to satisfy a federal Obama judge in Baton Rouge who said the former 5-1 map violated the Voting Rights Act, and things have begun to turn sour on Landry.
And sadly, it’s with his own base where the problems have surfaced most.
A package of constitutional amendments, which included some significant tax and judicial reforms, that Landry championed failed horribly in front of the voters this spring, and analysis of the vote showed that Landry’s base didn’t just not turn out but actively voted against him.
And there was a ton of outrage expressed when, just before the start of this legislative session, it was reported that Landry went on a hunting trip with some legislative leaders … and a couple of the state’s biggest plaintiff lawyers.
To combat the grumbling, Landry endorsed a package of tort reform bills, and said, in testimony in front of a House committee, that whatever tort reform bills made it to his desk he’d sign.
Which brings us to Wednesday. Landry vetoed a bill that would reinforce policy limits on insurance coverage, something that has frayed a bit of late thanks to a state supreme court decision several years ago and some creative machinations from the plaintiff bar that have created a situation wherein insurers might write a policy with a set limit of coverage and nonetheless have a judgement larger than that amount imposed by a jury in a personal injury case. SB 111 is a very in-the-weeds bill, but it’s certainly a tort reform bill.
And yet he vetoed it.
Landry claims it isn’t a tort reform bill but rather an anti-consumer bill. That hasn’t persuaded anyone. Syndicated radio host Moon Griffon, whose morning show is on the air in all of Louisiana’s media markets, played the audio of Landry promising to sign all the tort reform bills that reached his desk no less than 10 times on his program Wednesday, pronouncing himself speechless at the veto.
This has put me in a strange position, as my site The Hayride has been unabashedly pro-Landry from 2023 more or less to the present. It’s not like he hasn’t done good things as well along the way.
But how do you defend a betrayal like this? He said he’d sign the tort reform bills that reached his desk, then he vetoes the one the trial lawyers hate the most, and then he claims it’s not a tort reform bill?
What am I supposed to say other than I’m done? Even if I wanted to help him, I can’t, because my credibility would be at the waterbottom like his is if I did.
The more you dig on this, the worse it gets. There was a conversation between Landry and several conservative legislators before the session in which the governor said part of the problem with the system was that insurers weren’t fighting claims in court but instead settling so many of them. So this bill was brought to rein some of that in; because of this new cause of action for “bad faith,” which allows for judgments exceeding policy limits, the trial lawyers are making a practice of issuing demands that insurers pony up at the policy limit, and when those demands were refused, using that as evidence of “bad faith” at trial.
And there was zero opposition by the governor’s office as the bill moved through the Senate and the House on its way to Landry’s desk. The lobbyist for the trial lawyers objected along the way, but that was it. Until Landry’s veto, there was no indication he wouldn’t sign the bill.
As he promised to do.
Things like this are staggeringly common. They’ve been part of the political landscape well before George H. W. Bush’s famous betrayal of his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, and they’re a constant source of blowback for mediocre and failing politicians who lose reelection. Americans absolutely hate to be lied to and betrayed.
Check that: Republicans hate to be lied to and betrayed. Democrats are generally motivated by other things, like how big the government checks or other bennies might be, and a little betrayal with a big buy-off is usually pretty acceptable to them.
Though that might not be so true anymore, if you consider all the problems Chuck Schumer ran into earlier this year when he didn’t pay off a promise to fight on the budget continuing resolution. Schumer didn’t push a filibuster on that CR, and his people, who are used to their congressmen and senators acting like crazed baboons on every semi-controversial measure, all but abandoned him.
But this is mostly a Republican thing, and Stephen Miller indirectly outlined why…
Sometimes issues in life are refined to a point of perfect clarity and utter simplicity.
The future the Democrat Party offers America is to be, in every sense of the term, a third world nation.
All other issues in our national life are derivative of this fact.
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 10, 2025
In a third-world country, the standards are pretty low. But Republicans, or at least Republican voters, have higher standards. We actually want a first-world country to live in. That’s harder, and it requires a lot better leadership than the third world does.
And so when we vote for somebody based on a set of promises they make, or when we rely on them publicly giving their word about something, we recognize that breaking that word really, really doesn’t work.
It’s the worst thing you can do as a Republican politician, lying to your supporters.
Because we know how destructive that is to the entire edifice of representative democracy our republic is based on.
And because we’re highly, highly insulted at the idea we’re being played for chumps.
A very, very large number of people in Louisiana think that’s what Landry has just done. And I’m not sure it’s fixable at this point two years into his term as governor.
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