As Gov. Jeff Landry continues to fight charges related to ethics violations brought against him in 2023, Louisiana is about to adopt new rules that would make it harder to hold government officials accountable in the future.
The Louisiana Legislature passed House Bill 674 last Wednesday, making it harder to bring ethics charges as well as a slew of other changes, including relaxing limits on elected officials’ and state employees’ state travel. The bill passed with an overwhelming 34-2 in the state Senate and 92-1 in the House. Landry’s current charges – which are related to him failing to disclose flights he took to and from Hawaii on a political donor’s plane – wouldn’t be affected by the new legislation, but obviously served as inspiration for the bill.
In 2021, while serving as Attorney General, Landry used a plane owned by retired oil and gas businessman Gred Mosing to fly to Maui, where he was a featured speaker at the Attorney General Alliance Conference held that year. The Louisiana Ethics Board brought charges against Landry for failing to disclose the flight, saying it violated laws prohibiting state officials from accepting anything of value for performing their public jobs. However, Landry has stated that he believes the charges were politically motivated ahead of the 2023 gubernatorial election. Landry’s private attorney Stephen Gelé, one of the attorneys defending Landry against the charges, helped to draft the new legislation. Last year, Gelé said that the ethics board’s powers were “dangerous, unwarranted, and threaten well-established fundamental constitutional rights.”
HB160, a second ethics-focused measure also nears passage. This bill would require public disclosure of whistleblower identities and restrict the types of evidence the board can consider – preventing them from launching investigations based on media reporting, for example. This bill was sponsored by Republican Rep. Kellee Hennessey Dickerson, who was fined $1,500 for an ethics violation in 2023. Dickerson says that people have turned the ethics board into a political tool, using it to harass political opponents.
“For those of us who have been through it, it helps develop peace of mind, knowing who your accuser is, especially when you are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to try and clear your good name,” Dickerson said.
However, these changes, combined with legislation passed earlier this year giving the governor more control over who is appointed to the ethics board makes it more political, not less. The governor now directly appoints nine of the board’s 15 members, with the Legislature appointing the rest.
“It’s gone from a process that was as much arm’s length away from politics as we could make it, and we had it that way for many years, to a process now that is very much more political than we’ve ever seen it,” said Barry Erwin, president of the Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonpartisan government accountability group. “It’s going to be very difficult for the board to act in a way that guarantees that kind of oversight we want to have.”
