Once upon a time being a conservative politician was all a person needed to be. However, these days that simply isn’t good enough. We have the Freedom Caucus in Congress and now there is a branch at the Louisiana Legislature.

The Freedom Caucus in Congress that was founded in 2015 is described as a group of three to four dozen representatives on the rightward flank of the U.S. House Republican conference. We aren’t sure exactly how many Freedom Caucus members there are in the Legislature, but it’s somewhere around a half-dozen or more.

The Advocate in a story about the turmoil that took place near adjournment of the Legislature on June 8 called state Rep. Alan Seabaugh, a Shreveport Republican, chairman of the “uber-conservative House Freedom Caucus.”

That was a new one for me, so I looked up the meaning of “uber.” It means, among other descriptions, extreme, ultra, intense, and super. Seabaugh definitely fits all of those descriptions. Other GOP right flank members include Reps. Danny McCormick of Oil City, Dodie Horton of Haughton, and Larry Frieman of Abita Springs.

These folks are tough talkers. The Advocate said Seabaugh, for example, on a radio show said Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder of Gonzales “is not really, really smart. In fact he’s really, really dumb.” McCormick on Twitter called the speaker “a fake Republican.”

McCormick is sponsor of the legislation allowing the carrying of firearms without a permit that he withdrew when two lawmakers wanted to make state training necessary. Horton is author of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that is on the governor’s desk, probably awaiting a veto.

State Sen. Stewart Cathey, R-Monroe, hasn’t been mentioned as a Freedom Caucus member but he probably qualifies to join the group. Cathey opposes tenure that protects higher education faculty members and sponsored a bill this year that would send 17-year-old violent offenders back to adult prisons.

Criminal justice reform in 2016 took 17-year-olds out of the adult system and moved them into the juvenile justice system. It was a reform adopted by 41 other states.

The juvenile offender bill Cathey sponsored passed the Senate in 2022 but died in the House. His 2023 bill passed both chambers and is awaiting either the governor’s signature or his veto.

A resolution sponsored by Cathey that says Louisiana has a right to nullify what it considers unconstitutional acts of the federal government elicited a strong response from Quin Hillyer, a senior commentary writer and editor for the conservative Washington Examiner.

Conservatives rarely criticize one another, but Hillyer in his column appearing in The Advocate had a strong reaction. Here is how he began his tough critique of Cathey’s resolution:

“Sixty-seven members of the Louisiana House and 27 state senators have embarrassed themselves and the state by adopting a loony-radical resolution saying the state has ‘the sovereign right’ to ‘nullify unconstitutional acts of the federal government.’

“This ‘nullification’ idea is demonstrably, factually wrong — and dangerous. It was already discredited long before the Civil War by none other than ‘Father of the Constitution’ James Madison. And that war itself, at the cost of some 750,000 lives, settled the issue once and for all.”

Hillyer called what the legislators did a “descent into nonsense that is simultaneously arrant, aberrant, and abhorrent.” He said the resolution is full of historical and theoretical errors.

“The resolution is bizarre,” Hillyer said. “It is akin to an eighth grade student council telling a school principal that the council on its own authority can abrogate school rules…”

As Hillyer said, resolutions, unlike laws, are “no more than hot air or a vague threat of future action.” He said the governor should reconvene the Legislature “to nullify its embarrassing handiwork.”

Robert Mann, who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communications at LSU, also commented on Sen. Cathey’s resolution in one of his tweets.

“Really shocking that the GOP senator who wants to abolish tenure is the same guy who wants to take Louisiana back to the days of Willie Rainach and Leander Perez,” Mann said.

Rainach was a segregationist politician who served eight years in the Louisiana House. He advocated disenfranchising African-American voters. Perez was a political boss of Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes who was an ally of outspoken white supremacists like George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

We are definitely living in some turbulent political times. What happened to the statesmanship and decorum that once were commonplace in Congress and in the halls of the Louisiana Legislature?

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