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Gov. Jeff Landry issued 138 executive orders during his first eight months in office, which represents the highest single-year tally of any governor dating back to at least 1975, when the current Louisiana Constitution took effect. That’s quite a feat for an executive branch leader, especially when you consider Landry still has another four months remaining in his own inaugural year.
In a relatively short period of time, Landry’s use of executive orders has become a developing case study of how a governor can use that authority to not only shrink the footprint of state government, but also address the politics of the day and his political enemies of the moment —all without legislative interference.
“He’s a governor who wants to appear to be in charge of everything that matters to him,” says Terry Ryder, who served as executive counsel to three other former Louisiana governors. “Whether he has authority to do that is another question.”
Despite the important role of executive orders in Louisiana government, the current Louisiana Constitution provides no direct guidance on how or when they should be issued. Instead, such language can be found in a guiding state statute that provides the governor with the ability “to see that the laws are faithfully executed.”
Another statute speaks to the power to respond to emergencies or disasters with orders, proclamations and rules. That specific provision details sweeping powers, including suspending statutes, commandeering private property and other precautions, as we all no doubt remember from the COVID-19 era.
Legislators have likewise included executive order privileges in various other statutes over the years, according to Ryder, but they have never publicly been asked to insert this specific function of gubernatorial power into the constitution.
Landry’s drive to centralize control over state government from his desk brings to mind the unitary executive theory, which is a legal thesis that suggests the president has unquestionable authority to create new laws, interfere with agency rulemaking, manage the flow of critical information, reshape government employee pools and much more. The theory rests largely on one sentence from Article II of the U.S. Constitution: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
There’s no similar legal theory that can be applied to governors like Landry, although the Louisiana Constitution does—in language just as brief and just as open to broad interpretation—grant the governor “executive authority” and states the following: “The governor shall be the chief executive officer of the state.”
If there’s a jurisprudential disagreement to be had in Louisiana about Landry’s heightened use of executive orders, it would have to be decided by the courts, which have played host to other executive order challenges in recent years.
We shouldn’t be too surprised that Landry is stretching his executive wings. Governors often use their inaugural year to set up their agendas and define their visions, says Steven Procopio, president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana.
But even by that standard, the sheer number of Landry’s orders is out of the ordinary. Landry’s present total of 138 is almost twice as many as the 75 orders Gov. John Bel Edwards issued in his first year on the Capitol’s fourth floor. (And, again, Landry still has another four months to go to complete his first year.)
Going further back, the first-year executive order totals for Govs. Bobby Jindal, Kathleen Blanco and Mike Foster were 114, 66 and 79, respectively.
Once he was elected and took his oath, Landry wasted little time trying to catch up.
The day after he was sworn into office, on Jan. 8, Landry issued his first executive order to disband a high school graduation appeals process that had only been on the books for a couple of weeks. The move angered some education professionals, but it was an opening salvo of what to expect from Landry in terms of government oversight and rulemaking.
Landry was already on his fifth executive order by the following week. That order sought to identify the “adverse effects of illegal immigration” because the “Biden administration … has failed to prevent the illicit entry of aliens.” It was another kind of opening salvo, only in political terms.
By the time Landry made it to February, he had also signed a set of executive orders directing state departments and agencies to search for significant savings, possible mergers and programmatic efficiencies. Major operational changes connected to these orders are already underway at Louisiana Economic Development and the Department of Natural Resources, to name a few, and there are more coming at bigger outfits like the health and transportation departments.
Asked about the larger strategy at hand and the volume of orders, Kate Kelly, Landry’s communications director, argues that the number may appear hefty due to a number of factors. She says the governor, like Jindal and Blanco before him, declares emergencies by executive order, whereas Edwards used proclamations.
To that end, 73 of Landry’s orders, or more than half, are emergency declarations, Kelly says. Most of the others are simply extensions of emergencies Edwards declared, she adds, which the law requires to be renewed every 30 days. The administration contends that most of Landry’s orders, around 123, are arguably mundane or routine.
Those adjectives, however, weren’t used much two weeks ago when Landry made national headlines with his latest executive order to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in Louisiana public schools. A request to interview Angelique Freel, Landry’s executive counsel, about what the order actually does was not granted for this column.
Pearson Cross, a political science professor who directs the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at UL Monroe, has taken the stance that critical race theory isn’t taught in K-12 schools. Therefore, he says, banning something that isn’t happening is a political statement, not a substantive policy.
Still, the order fits snuggly into Landry’s brand of staunch conservatism and opposition to all things “woke,” so there’s little political downside for him, Cross says.
Such actions serve as a reminder that every now and then executive orders are less about look at that and more about look at me.
“Sometimes a governor might just want to make a big public splash,” Ryder says.
You can view all of Landry’s executive orders that have been filed with the Office of State Register for publication and distribution here.
