Free Republic

Comes today word that John Alario, Louisiana’s Mr. Democrat for decades in the state legislature, says he might want to switch parties and become a Republican. Alario says he’s “pondering” a switch and will make a decision by year’s end. This is terrible news, and it ought to be denounced by the state GOP immediately. Alario has been in the state legislature since 1972. He was in the House of Representatives from 1972-2008, and from 1980-84 and 1992-96 he was Edwin Edwards’ hand-picked House Speaker. Term limits, for which Louisiana owes Sen. David Vitter an eternal debt of gratitude, drove...

BATON ROUGE - State Sen. John Alario, a former two-time House speaker and a fixture in state politics for nearly four decades, is now a Republican. After weeks of saying he was likely to abandon his Democratic allegiance by the end of the year, Alario quietly made it official late last week. "I just casually went in and took care of it," Alario, of Westwego, said. "I had been pondering it for some time and didn't want to make a big deal of it." With Alario's switch -- and the recent defection of Sen. John Smith of Leesville from the...