Louisiana to Pay $92,000 After Game Law Fight

After Louisiana's unsuccessful anti-games legislation bid last year, the judge ordered the state to pay the court costs for the ESA and EMA. This week, Judge Brady ordered the state to shell out some $92,000 to the organizations in compensation for wasted time. "Within the ruling, Judge Brady also said he was "dumbfounded" that the state was in the position of having to shell out taxpayer money over this, noting that the law had to pass through legal review at every step. Given that similar statutes were declared unconstitutional in a number of jurisdictions, "the Court wonders why nobody objected to the enactment of this statute. In this court's view, the taxpayers deserve more from their elected officials.""

Comments

Re:More ducking/shirking/passing the buck

[JordanL]

Well, what else are they going to do? Public servants can only pass the buck to the taxpayer... it's not as if Mr. Governor is gonna whip out his checkbook and cover the cost of such-and-such.

Their responsibility is making less expensive decisions, or less wasteful decisions, not covering their cost. Your responsibility is putting people who will make those decisions into power, and then covering the costs of their actions once they're there.

Re:Why stop there?

[Jtheletter]

[Thompson] should perhaps bear the costs of any lawsuits he was personally involved in, but you can't hold him responsible for the idiocy of elected officials.

In this case Thompson was in fact personally involved as he helped draft the legislation. See the second paragraph of the article here

That's all I've got time to dig up for now but it should give you enough key words to find further details. It's no secret that Thompson has been behind this bill, and he's filed amacus briefs in other lawsuits for laws that were eventually struck down. He doesn't have clean hands in any of this, there is no room for him to say he didn't know. He has a long sordid history of suggesting and defending frothing-at-the-mouth anti-game, anti-free speech policies that have been consistantly found unconstitutional.