Dan Richey, who earned the enmity of the governor and Louisiana’s two U.S. senators for attacking them relentlessly in the 1970s and 1980s while he was an ultra-conservative member of the state Legislature, died Sunday of complications from surgery. He was 74.
Richey played the role of attack dog against then-Gov. Edwin Edwards after his election to the state House in 1975 from Concordia and Catahoula parishes and his election to the state Senate four years later. Richey also cast U.S. Sens. Russell Long and J. Bennett Johnston as leftist dupes who were threats to free enterprise and freedom.
The dispute wasn’t partisan. Richey and the others were Democrats, as were most elected officials in Louisiana.
Richey just believed that the only legitimate state function was police protection. Private enterprise could build roads, he believed, for example.
At one point, Edwards was sure he found a tax that Richey would support.
“It’s to raise salaries for school teachers, such as your mother,” Edwards told Richey.
“Absolutely not,” Richey replied.
Well, that’s it, Edwards said. “I have no use for anyone who would vote against his mother.”
That anecdote came from “The Last Hayride,” an account of the 1983 governor’s race by the late John Maginnis.
“Dan Richey’s problem is that he is not just a conservative, but an unbending, unrelenting ideological conservative intent of winning at all costs battles he can’t help but lose,” Maginnis wrote, adding that Richey angered “a commanding two-thirds of both houses of the Legislature.”
Richey’s opponents made sure that he lost his 1983 re-election bid.
“Man, did they pull money into that race,” Richey recalled in an interview a month ago. “It was unbelievable.”
Richey remembered with pride how he and former state Rep. Woody Jenkins of Baton Rouge, a friend from high school days when both were officers in the Key Club International, were among the first Louisiana elected officials to put opposition to abortion and a faith in God at the center of their political campaigns.
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