After two
weeks’ delay, here comes the 2019 Regular Session on the Louisiana Legislature
voting scorecard. With all business disposed of, legislators and the governor
received grades (barring a miraculous veto override session). Twelve bills were
selected and weighed for computation, all but two having been voted upon in
both chambers. These were chosen mainly from the watch list compiled throughout
the session. For a bill’s vote(s) to be selected, in one chamber there had to
be more than one legislator not voting for the winning or losing side.
Being that passage of bills depends upon the
seated membership of a body, not voting is counted as a negative vote. However,
if a legislator had a leave of absence granted for that day, his absent votes
weren’t counted for bills voted on that day and the score adjusted to take that
into account.
Here are
the bills with votes for final passage in every case on which the scorecard was
computed, with the conservative/reform position and the weighing indicated:
