That is a comprehensive article by Lamar. It doesn't miss a beat. But perhaps its most crucial observation comes here.
Oil and gas industry attorneys weren’t merely “involved;” they wrote the bill. According to those who were there, lobbyists and lawyers for BP seemed to play an outsized role.
Earlier tonight, John Barry, the former chairman of the SLFPA-E and the internationally acclaimed author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, told me, “A lot of people mentioned to me how omnipresent BP lobbyists were, more than the other major oil companies were (though all of them showed plenty of interest), so much more that it got a lot of people wondering, ‘What’s in the bill for them?’ It certainly got us wondering.”
I also spoke with State Representative John Bel Edwards, who echoed Mr. Barry’s concerns. Oil and gas lobbyists already knew Representative Edwards was opposed to the legislation, he said. They didn’t even waste their time trying to convince him otherwise. But lobbyists, particularly lobbyists associated with BP, spent a lot of time with some of his colleagues.
When the Attorney General expressed his doubts about the bill earlier this week, the reaction of Jindal's legislative allies who pushed it through appeared to indicate that they had only a vague conception what was in the bill in the first place. Robert Adley and Bret Allain's comments basically boil down to, "Well why didn't you tell us any of this stuff before?" Now we know why that is. Most of our legislators don't seem to really know or care what they're doing beyond just following orders.
