Senator Sharon Hewitt
The BEC Interview: PART THREE of Three: Covid; Challenges and Solutions in Louisiana; Women Lead; and Running For Governor!
We continued our conversation discussing covid. We asked the Senator, as a state, how did we fare?
Hewitt: I think covid was extremely over-managed and lots and lots of conflicting data on the disease, on the vaccines…. I think it needed to be more personal choice and less mandate.
I’m scared out of my mind about the youngest of our children getting the vaccines; there’s a lot of data out there about how harmful that is. And of course we’re not going to know, until they get older and if we might be seeing probably some awful trends…. I have a two-and-a-half year old granddaughter; I don’t want her to get the vaccine. Of course, that’s not my decision, that’s for her parents to make, but if I have a vote and my council would be not to get it.
The logical part of it: it didn’t stop you from getting covid; it didn’t stop you from giving it to anybody else; it’s actually a shot, not a vaccine; and I don’t think it should be required for kids to go to school. It’s in a completely different category from the polio vaccine, which we know eradicated polio, and that’s very important.
Do I believe kids should be vaccinated with all of those other vaccines that I was vaccinated with, and my kids were, to get in schools, absolutely, because they prevent you from getting the disease and they prevent it from being spread. The covid shot is completely different; it didn’t do any of those things!
And so, I think we tremendously affected the mental health of our citizens by doing what we did.
I think we hurt our economy and our businesses in a devastating way, many of whom will never recover.
It’s like the first time you quarantine the healthy people instead of quarantining the sick people. Nothing about it made sense to me. I knew we were all fearful in the beginning, to figure it all out, but it didn’t take long for you to start reading about some really smart people out there who had very different views from what was being published by Fauci and the others. And the fact that we’re still beating the drum, still asking for covid money from the federal government, and still writing articles in the newspaper about ‘covid’s coming again and this winter, it’s coming!’ and the charts in the newspaper on how many sicknesses and deaths, I mean, come on…. let’s get over it… it’s done.
What we did in the legislature that I was really very proud of in 2020, we were in session about three days when we got word from the governor that the state had its first covid case. As a legislature, we didn’t technically adjourn, but we left. Everybody went home when we were trying to follow the governor’s lead and all that, and be back in our districts.
We knew that at some point we were going to be back and things were going to open up… and the ‘14 days or Fauci’s slow the whatever’ and we figured we’d be a few weeks, that turned into a couple of months. It was March when we left, and May when we came back into session. The governor didn’t want us to do that, and we were pretty animate that we had to get back and get to the people’s business.
What we worked on those two months out of the capitol was working with all the various leaders of the various industries anticipating the impact, the negative impact, on their businesses. And what were we going to do legislatively to help them, to protect them from liability and things like that. So we went back in with tremendous legislation that we passed in May that most states didn’t do. One of those was how, like… remember the distilleries that were making hand sanitizer? People were great about pivoting and doing PPE and other things that were shortfalls that the state needed, and the fear, though, was that if they were creating hand sanitizer and someone broke out into a rash, they were going to get sued; they’d have been held liable though they were trying to be a Good Samaritan. And so we passed legislation that would protect companies that did that, for example.
States tried to do that much later, and there was so much negative energy about things that they couldn’t get it passed. We were one of the few states that did that.
We did a number of things to help… like, the restaurant industry. It was obvious they were going to be hurt very badly and we helped with funding and different opportunities; I’m really proud of that. We were thinking ‘what we were going to do to get the economy back.’
We tried a number of times to wrestle from the governor the emergency power to unilaterally declare an emergency declaration that went on for years. When the intent always was like a hurricane - where the declaration was for a month, not years. We had many pieces of legislation to try to pull some of that authority from him, to require concurrence from the legislature. So the legislature had a seat at the table. We were never able to pass anything like that, nor were any other states, by the way. I was checking with others from the states, and nobody, whether you took your governor to court…? It’s unprecedented power that we gave to the governor, and to the president. To do those kinds of things. It was a bit of a wake-up call, because if you can do it for that you can do it for anything.
There’s a real fear that they’ll use it for the climate emergency. You’ve got a president saying, ‘This is the single biggest issue of our lifetime,’ and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Really?? What are you thinking?? It is not an emergency.’
BEC: What do you see as Louisiana’s biggest problems, and a follow-up with what you see as Louisiana’s best solutions?
Hewitt: There are several things, but I’ll tell you what keeps me up at night a little bit is crime. Because it affects everybody and it’s scary. When you’ve got car jacking and shooting. It’s very random. It’s not just bad guys shooting the bad guys anymore; it’s a little more randomized and that scares everybody.
Water and sewer issues, that may sound crazy, but we’re just one incident away from being a Flint, Michigan or a Jackson, Mississippi. Think of the New Orleans Water and Sewer Board.
And we have lots and lots of little independent water and sewer systems in Louisiana, and what happens is city governments are not investing over the years, so these systems are aging, they’re all 50 years old, or plus…. and they don’t have the money to fix them, so it all comes back on the state. Not that it should, but somebody’s got to do something. And we’re the only ones that have the capacity to do it, and these are all of our citizens, so that is like a ticking time bomb. That’s not something you campaign on and run on necessarily, because it’s not glamorous. But it really is a ticking time bomb and I worry about New Orleans a lot from that perspective.
What businesses will tell you is that their biggest problem is workforce. Nobody can find workers; you can’t find people who want to work or do a job. So we’ve done some things that I’m really excited about, and that is creating curricula at the high school level that they can take and graduate with a high school degree and simultaneously an industry-based certification and a 2 year degree, an apprenticeship where they can go straight into the workforce making sixty-thousand dollars a year, and that is a great thing
We have to pivot from believing the only path is to go to college, but to multiple pathways in the many different industries that have high-paying jobs that are dying to have more workers, and are willing to pay handsomely for that.
If we can get that… because what’s happening is our industries are going out of state to hire talent, and we want to grow talent right here. We want to see Louisiana students moving into Louisiana jobs! Let’s grow it right here. That’s part of our education system and something I’ve legislated on and passionate about and think that we can do so much more in that area.
I’ve also done a lot of work on literacy. That fact that 50% of our kids can’t read is very troubling to me because if you’re not reading, you’re done, you have a lifetime of challenges ahead of you….
We spend $12,000 roughly per student in Louisiana, and it’s just inexcusable. So I passed legislation last year that the superintendent said is the most significant literacy piece of legislation ever, that we passed. We’re beginning to see a little bit of it implemented… these things always take longer than they should
We’re going to be teaching phonics, like you and I learned, we’re going back to phonics! They call it ‘the science of reading’ now but it’s basically phonics.
All of those things will help us: there’s a role for parents, there’s money for interventions, there’s teacher development, there’s teaching teachers in college that want to come out being teachers who know how to teach reading. It’s shocking that teachers have a disconnect… You’d think we wouldn’t be passing kids from grade to grade if they can’t read. We’re going to have to stop that.
So I think if you have a trained work force with many pathways to success…. You have kids who are reading that are off to a great start. You’re going to be building the capacity for Louisiana and people providing for their families.
Ultimately you want people to be self-sustaining, able to provide, who are not dependent on government services that are intended to be a safety net, not a lifetime destination.
About Louisiana Women Lead, whose executive director is Renee Amar, whose purpose is to encourage right-leaning women to do political service. (Link below to our interview with Ms Amar)
Senator Hewitt encourages women to get involved; be an advocate for your community.
Women are underrepresented in government. We have a lot to say, and conversations are better when you have diverse people participating in the conversation.
Working in the oil and gas business as a female was pretty unique. Having an engineering degree from LSU; I think I was the only female in my graduating class. There weren’t women in the oil and gas business back in the day; I spent my first year out on the oil rig and I was the first female that most of them had ever seen offshore. There were lots of ‘firsts’ and challenges and ‘women don’t belong in this industry’ and people trying to make it difficult for me. But I tell a lot of stories… it’s very motivating to the women I speak to generally, and the message is, ‘You can do anything! There are no limits!’ I was fortunate to have support, my father was an engineer and my mother was a math teacher. I was good in math and thought I’d be a teacher, quite honestly, until some point when I realized my dad made more money than my mom! So I decided to be an engineer… I’ve been in a man’s world the whole time. Those rusty ole rig foremen prepared me for a life of politics, because it’s sort of similar in a lot of ways.
There are very few women in the legislature; very few in the history of the state that have ever run for statewide office. So it’s a needle you have to thread as a female leader in those kinds of groups. Not that I’ve figured it all out, but I’ve learned a little bit along the way…. It’s fun to get to share some of that with women, and what’s so heartwarming to me, but, generally there’ll be a group of them who will come up, in tears, and will you meet my daughter? I brought her here so she could hear you speak. It makes you feel like you’re doing something right.
BEC: And you’re running for governor!
Yes!
Clocking longer than 80 minutes, we concluded our conversation on that very fine gubernatorial note! We’ll be speaking again to the Senator as she enters more deeply into her campaign and will bring that to you all….
We are so very grateful to Senator Hewitt.
Visit the Hewitt For Governor website
the bec
Part ONE:
Part TWO:
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