Republicans in the state House proved they can win. Last year, the party used its majority to break precedent, buck the newly elected Democratic governor and install one of its own as House Speaker.
They proved they can obstruct. Gov. John Bel Edwards has seen a number of his major initiatives, including campaign promises he made in his winning 2015 race, die in unfriendly House committees.
The question that remains, though, is whether they can govern.
The answer is likely to come in the upcoming legislative session, when the lower chamber's GOP majority will have a chance to show that it can finally help stabilize the state's tax code and put the budget on surer footing or else confirm critics' complaints that it can't, or simply won't.
House leaders have made the case that the vote to elevate Republican state Rep. Taylor Barras as speaker over Edwards' chosen candidate, Democrat Walt Leger III, amounted to a show of legislative independence. But now that they've won that independence, they need to figure out what to do with it.
This year, that means deciding whether their primary aim is to stymie Edwards, who has introduced a comprehensive and controversial proposal to restructure the tax system, or to push through their own ideas.
Edwards' proposal swaps out some tax breaks for lower overall income tax rates. The governor's also pushing a new tax on commercial activities, a phase-out of the corporate franchise tax and an expansion of sales tax to cover many transactions that are currently exempt. The governors plan seeks at least enough recurring revenue to offset $1.3 billion in expiring temporary taxes, including a one-cent sales tax increase that now gives Louisiana the highest combined state and local sales tax in the country, and to steer the state away from what's become known as the fiscal cliff.
The cliff that lawmakers are staring down is actually there because Republicans in the House insisted on putting it there. Facing a crisis situation last year, they pushed to adopt an added penny of sales tax until 2018, with the aim of forcing the Legislature's hand on broader tax reform. They also supported creating a blue ribbon task force, which has issued a number of recommendations that found their way into Edwards' package. A notable exception is the commercial activities tax, which the administration proposed on its own.
With the task force report out and the penny tax set to expire next year, though, GOP lawmakers as a whole have neither endorsed the group's recommendations nor offered their own.
Barras told The Advocate's Tyler Bridges last week that a number of Republicans plan to offer bills, and that the sum total would constitute something of a plan.
State Rep. John Schroder, a candidate for state treasurer who authored the bill to create the task force, is now focusing more on reducing spending.
So is Lance Harris, the House's Republican Caucus Chair, who said that the GOP would support some bills but that I never said wed release (the party's fiscal plan) to the public. Meanwhile, several people who attended a recent GOP retreat told Bridges that Harris didn't seem to want to produce a comprehensive Republican-backed plan at all.
Edwards calls all of this a cop-out.
"The only thing you hear from them is no, without a plan, the governor said. He's also criticized Republicans for talking up the idea of spending cuts but not offering a plan on that either.
Unless and until the House leadership shows its hand, it'll be hard to argue with Edwards' criticisms.
Conservatives in the state House staged a coup of sorts in January 2016: Dispensing with tra
Their position, in fact, isn't that different from that of Republicans in Washington who now control both Congress and the presidency, and are still struggling to come up with an agenda beyond opposing what former President Barack Obama supported.
One congressman from Florida, Republican Tom Rooney, put it in particularly blunt terms: Ive been in this job eight years, and Im wracking my brain to think of one thing our party has done thats been something positive, thats been something other than stopping something else from happening, he told The Atlantic.
You've got to wonder how many Louisiana lawmakers can relate.
Follow Stephanie Grace on Twitter, @stephgracela.
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Stephanie Grace: Upcoming session will test whether House Republicans can govern - The Advocate