"The Union must and shall be preserved"

The dream of Wanklandia is now Jeff Arnold's lost cause.

Algiers' push to break away from New Orleans was halted by a Louisiana Senate committee Thursday (June 4). House Bills 235 and 744 were deferred by the Committee on Local and Municipal Affairs

Amusingly, that is exactly how he is treating it.

As the longest-serving House member, he scored the support of his colleagues the second time around in the 2015 session. But on Thursday (June 4), a Senate committee blocked the framework for the West Bank community to incorporate, dealing a fatal blow to the dean of the House in his final term.

"The fact of the matter is we are viewed differently by the general electorate. We have to do things to draw attention to Algiers,'' Arnold said after the vote. "We are not the French Quarter. We are not the lakefront.

"We are a bedroom community, with small businesses, a few medium ones, that wants what everybody else has. We don't garner the attention of the city as the other communities do.''

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the suggestion that the not-so-heavily touristed corners of town get neglected. But it's hard to see how Algiers is any special case in this regard compared to, say, East New Orleans. Heck, even Lakeview feels like they don't get enough attention. They're wrong about that, of course, but at least they don't want to run off and be their own redundant city-within-a-city over some potholes.

Meanwhile. in Baton Rouge.

The anti-St. George group Better Together said Thursday it believes the Registrar of Voters Office was off by as many as 239 signatures in validating the initial 18,000 signatures submitted on a petition to create a new city.

St. George organizers, hoping to secure a vote, turned in their first round of signatures on a petition with the goal of collecting support from 25 percent of registered voters in the proposed city.

The Registrar’s Office announced at the end of March that it had finished validating the more than 18,000 names that were turned in and found that only 15,156 were valid — creating a shortfall of about 2,700 names.

Better Together is suggesting the gap should be larger, closer to 2,900 names, based on its own review of the registrar’s work so far.

What.. is that still going on? St. George is likely to fail just like the City of Algiers did. But it's hard to escape the general atmosphere of devolution all of this evokes. Why not just go the whole nine and scrap the State of Louisiana in favor of 4 million independent sovereign citizens?  Maybe that will allow each of to accept our own Medicaid expansion .