Gov. John Bel Edwards barely won re-election last year. He has to contend with a larger Republican majority now than he did in his first term, and to top it off, he lost Senate President John Alario, his chief legislative ally, to retirement.

Paradoxically, however, Edwards will likely exercise more influence over the new Legislature when it convenes on Monday than he had over the one that was seated four years ago.

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Edwards no longer faces the vexing political problem that he and state lawmakers inherited in 2016, a $2 billion budget deficit. After repeated attempts ended in failure, Edwards and legislators in 2018 secured a two-thirds vote in each chamber to raise enough taxes to close the gap.

While Alario is gone, Edwards is now working with a more amenable House speaker, Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, who won election in January by cutting a deal to secure the support of the 35-member Democratic minority. Schexnayder’s victory divided Republicans, with 23 of them voting for him and 45 voting for state Rep. Sherman Mack, R-Albany. Any lingering enmity between the two GOP factions during the legislative session will work to Edwards’ advantage.

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Schexnayder has said repeatedly since January that he wants to work with Edwards, unlike his predecessor, then-Speaker Taylor Barras, R-New Iberia. Barras sided with conservative House members who sought to undermine the governor at every turn.

With the governor’s re-election, conservatives have less reason to try to obstruct his policy initiatives simply to weaken him politically.

Legislators, “instead of trying to defeat John Bel, since he can’t run again, they have to elect themselves,” said Robert Adley, who was a powerful Republican state senator until he left office in 2016 and then worked for the governor. “I see the opportunity for a lot of compromise on the philosophical issues. That makes John Bel stronger.”

The annual legislative session that begins Monday will end on June 1.

Edwards outlined a limited list of legislative priorities when he spoke to the Press Club of Baton Rouge on March 2.

He wants to provide more money for early childhood education, K-12 schools and universities and colleges.

He also wants to prevent insurance companies from charging higher car insurance rates for certain categories of people – such as widows and veterans – in a battle that will pit him against conservatives and business interests that want instead to limit lawsuits filed by trial lawyers on behalf of injured people. The fight over how best to lower the country’s second-highest insurance rates on average will likely be the most contentious issue of the legislative session.

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Republicans grew their ranks in the Legislature during last year’s elections.

Four years ago, the House had 62 Republicans, 41 Democrats and two independents while the Senate had 25 Republicans and 14 Democrats.

Now the House has 68 Republicans, 35 Democrats and two independents, although that breakdown is about to change slightly. State Rep. Roy Daryl Adams, an independent from Jackson, said in an interview on Friday that he will become a Democrat in the coming week “because they helped me in the election.” That move will leave the House with 36 Democrats.

The Senate has gone from 25 Republicans and 14 Democrats to 27 Republicans and 12 Democrats.

Despite the larger Republican majority, Edwards expects to find success this year, he said in an interview following his talk to the Press Club.

“I’m going to work extremely hard every single day to communicate with them, to compromise and demonstrate that people can still work together despite party differences,” he said. “I know it’s not happening in many places around the country. It certainly doesn’t happen in Washington. But I’m committed to making sure that it happens here in Louisiana.”

To be sure, Edwards will have to overcome stiff conservative headwinds to win two of his major priorities, an increase in the state’s $7.25 per hour minimum wage and legislation to help reduce the big pay gap between men and women for equal work.

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But because they don’t involve tax increases, Edwards won’t need the difficult-to-reach two-thirds majority required for any of his issues. Some lawmakers plan to try and raise gas taxes to repair and build new roads and bridges next year, but Edwards has said he won’t get behind the effort unless legislators show they are close to the needed two-thirds majority.

After his winning election in 2015 with 56% of the vote, Edwards got off to a bad start with the House when he overplayed his hand and tried to install then-state Rep. Walt Leger III, D-New Orleans, as speaker. Republicans rebelled, ending the tradition of lawmakers accepting the governor’s choice to lead the House, and elected one of their own, Barras.

As the first order of business in February 2016, Edwards had to take the lead in resolving the state’s worst budget crisis in at least 30 years. He pushed the Legislature to approve a temporary 1-cent increase in the state sales tax and to temporarily eliminate some individual and corporate tax breaks – all to eliminate the $2 billion budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year.

While Edwards and lawmakers averted the crisis, the maneuvers cost him considerable political capital and emboldened conservatives. From then on, many Republicans attacked the governor as nothing more than a tax-and-spend liberal.

Attempts afterward by Edwards to renew the sales tax increase stalled because of conservative opposition in the House.

Then-state Rep. Kenny Havard, R-St. Francisville, who had played a key role in ushering Barras into the speaker’s office, said his colleagues had lost their way.

“It just boils down to simple politics,” a frustrated Havard said of the tactics. “The Republicans don’t want John Bel to have a win. The real losers are Louisiana citizens. We have to get beyond politics and solve the problems.”

Six months later, during the seventh special session of Edwards’ term, the governor and lawmakers finally came together to approve an increase of 0.45 percentage points in the state sales tax until 2025.

“With that off the table, we can move on to other things,” former state Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, said recently. “The budget was a major problem.”

Indeed, Edwards and lawmakers are now discussing how to spend budget surpluses. The drop in oil prices and the economic disruption caused by the new coronavirus could complicate those discussions, however. Lawmakers may have to agree to spend less than planned under the assumption that state tax receipts will take a hit.

One key development is that, for the first time since 1972, Alario will be on the sidelines this year.

Over the past four years, Edwards – as then-Gov. Bobby Jindal had done during the previous four years – repeatedly counted on Alario to rein in the House and deliver legislation more to the governor’s liking. But term limits forced Alario to retire after 48 years in the Legislature.

His successor is Page Cortez, a third-term Republican senator whose family owns two furniture stores in Lafayette.

Like Schexnayder, Cortez has pledged to seek compromise rather than try to obstruct Edwards.

Both men, said Norby Chabert, R-Houma, who served with them until term limits forced him to retire in January, are “mature enough politically to understand that the state is better off when the governor and the Legislature work together for positive solutions.”

But Chabert said that Cortez and Schexnayder will push a conservative agenda that will put them at odds at times with Edwards.

“They’ll be playing offense,” said Chabert. “But they’ll do it in a less political way than in the recent past.”

One of the subplots this year is whether the unnatural alliance between Schexnayder and House Democrats – which yielded committee chairmanships for five Democrats – will remain intact.

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Chabert believes that Schexnayder, who owns a car repair shop, will inevitably cause headaches for Democrats.

“Clay is not a John Bel ally,” Chabert said. “He put together a coalition to win the speakership.”

Perhaps the biggest wild card during the session will be the 45 newly elected lawmakers in the 105-member House and the 20 newly elected in the 39-member Senate (although 10 of the new senators served last year in the House). The term limits law from the mid-1990s has caused the big turnover.

In the speaker’s race, most of the Republican freshmen in the House voted for Mack. Many of them had won election with the support of the anti-Edwards super PAC, the Louisiana Committee for a Conservative Majority, headed by Attorney General Jeff Landry and U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, both Republicans.

Alario, in an interview, said that group might feel beholden to Landry, Kennedy and the business interests that financed the super PAC during this era of hyper-partisanship and political polarization.

But Alario said the Republican freshmen also might be susceptible to a charm offensive from the governor, especially if they want him to direct state dollars for a local road or bridge that needs repair.

Danny Martiny, another former Republican state senator forced out of office by term limits, said that no matter what Edwards did during the previous four years, “a lot of Republican House members were against him. My understanding is there’s a significant number of new people up there who haven’t bought into the thing that if you’re a Republican you have to be opposed to the governor.”