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It looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA train will make a stop in Capitoland.
President Donald Trump’s health secretary is expected to visit Baton Rouge to promote Senate Bill 14, a bill inspired by Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
While the date and circumstances are TBD, state Sen. Patrick McMath and Gov. Jeff Landry’s office confirmed that a visit is expected. Landry also plans to endorse the bill in Monday’s session-opening State of the State speech.
It’s not surprising that policies aligned with a Republican president’s administration would be popular among Republicans at the state level, especially in a largely conservative state like Louisiana. McMath’s bill is far from the only one pending for the session that dovetails with the administration, including at least one instrument filed by a Democrat.
But it’s still noteworthy that new regulations on businesses, promoted by a lifelong liberal Democrat in Kennedy, have become so popular so quickly with generally conservative, pro-business Republicans.
McMath says he has been meeting with groups around the state who are interested in supporting his bill.
“MAHA Nation is definitely engaged,” he says.
Dozens of “MAHA” bills have been filed in statehouses across the country. This week, Arizona legislators passed a bill to ban “ultra-processed” foods in school lunches, with Democrats noting that Republicans villainized former first lady Michelle Obama for trying to make school lunches healthier. [The Arizona Capitol Times, which like LaPolitics is part of the State Affairs network, has more.]
In a nutshell, the Louisiana bill seeks to:
— Remove “unnecessary and harmful” food dyes from school lunches, as well as other ingredients that are banned in foreign jurisdictions such as the European Union.
— Require physicians to take nutrition classes as part of their continuing education.
— Require restaurants that use certain seed oils to disclose that fact to their customers.
— Have the Department of Children and Family Services submit a waiver to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to permit Louisiana to prohibit buying soft drinks using SNAP benefits.
— Make food manufacturers label products that contain certain artificial colors, additives, or chemicals.
McMath says his colleagues largely have been supportive so far, adding that the main negotiation points with businesses have been about the timeline. As currently written, the provisions related to continuing education and the SNAP waiver would go into effect with the governor’s signature, while the item dealing with processed food in schools would apply to the 2026-2027 school year and the seed oil disclosure requirement would kick in Jan. 1, 2027.
“We’re looking to make some pretty significant changes to our food structure,” McMath says. “It’s going to take a few years. If we tried to require the schools to do this by the beginning of the next school year, they wouldn’t have any food to serve.”
McMath, a Republican, isn’t fazed by the fact that a Democrat spurred his legislation, noting that Trump was a Democrat for most of his life.
“I don’t know how anyone can sincerely try to make health and nutrition a partisan issue,” he says.
McMath says the Louisiana Senate Health & Welfare Committee will take up the bill on April 30. Also pending in his committee is Sen. Mike Fesi’s SB2, which would ban fluoridation of public water systems.
The bill, which McMath is co-sponsoring, was filed before Kennedy told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending that communities put fluoride in their water, and before Kennedy praised Utah lawmakers for banning fluoride in their systems.
Republicans aren’t the only ones hoping the Trump factor helps to advance their goals. Rep. Alonzo Knox, a New Orleans Democrat, has filed House Bill 198 to exempt tips from state income taxes for individual filers who make $65,000 or less and joint filers with income of $130,000 or less.
For Knox, it’s a chance to give a tax break to more than 218,000 Louisianans who work in hospitality, including 72,000 in New Orleans alone. And he’s well aware that both Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris called for eliminating taxes on tips while on the campaign trail; Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has sponsored a bill to that effect in Congress.
If his Republican colleagues associate his proposal with Trump, that’s fine with him, Knox says. And while he hasn’t heard from the governor’s team about his bill, he doesn’t expect members to stand in the way.
“He is in lockstep with the president,” Knox says of Landry. “My expectation is that he will not oppose it.”
It’s worth noting that it would be a mistake to assume that the Trump administration inspired every Trumpy-seeming bill in Louisiana. One could argue that Trump’s rise to power is a sign of the rest of the country moving toward Louisiana’s politics, not the other way around.
