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Loving Husband, Father, Grandfather, and Great-Grandfather Always in Our Hearts

ABBEVILLE, La. - A home-going celebration of life for Mr. Joseph Louis “Bebo” Pillette, 74, will be held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, August 19, 2023, at True Bibleway Deliverance Church (209 LeBlanc Avenue) with Elder Louis Lollis, officiating.
He will await the resurrection at Saint Paul Cemetery (515 Jacqulyn Street) in Abbeville, LA.
Visitation hours will be observed at True Bibleway Deliverance Church on Saturday, August 19, 2023, beginning at 8:30 a.m. until the time of the service.
"Bebo" as he was affectionately known, was a native and life-long resident of Abbeville, LA. Joseph Louis Pillette was born to, Louise Duhon Demouchet and Randolph Campbell on January 23, 1949.  He was a 1967 graduate of James A. Herod High School and served in the U.S. Air Force as an air traffic controller.  “Bebo” was your neighborhood plumber, electrician, carpenter, and all-around handyman who was able to repair anything broken. The community of Abbeville and surrounding areas appreciated the service of “Joe’s Plumbing and Electric.”  He was never afraid to hold a conversation with anyone who crossed his path. There was always a word of wisdom or knowledge that was received when interacting with him.  An advocate for his community, Joseph served as the President of the NAACP-Vermilion Chapter #6276 for twelve years.  He loved fishing, boxing, and spending time with his children, grandchildren, other family, and dear friends.  Joseph answered his call to glory to be with the Lord on Thursday, August 10, 2023, in the comfort of his home surrounded by his loving family.
He leaves to cherish his memory, a loving, devoted wife: Joyce Bessard Pillette of Abbeville, LA; two sons: Arnold Pillette (Ashley) and Martin Pillette of Abbeville, LA; four daughters: Elizabeth Pillette of New Iberia LA, Joanna Pillette of Abbeville, LA, Delaina Broussard (Joshua) of Abbeville, LA and Angelle Pillette of Beaumont, TX; two brothers: Kibby Pillette (Sharon) of Abbeville, LA and Michael Demouchet (Sherrill) of Lake Charles, LA; two sisters: Mary Louise Goodie of Lafayette, LA and Theresa Boudreaux of Abbeville, LA; thirteen grandchildren, twenty-one great grandchildren, and a host of nephews, nieces, relatives, and friends.
He was preceded in death by his mother: Louise Duhon Demouchet; his father: Randolph Campbell; four brothers: Oris Pillette, Sr., Willis Demouchet, Jr., Albert Campbell, and Sonny Campbell; one sister: Martha Mae Pillette; one grandson: Jamal Pillette; one great-grandson: Dathen Clark; one godchild: Michael Jones.
Active pallbearers are Joshua Broussard, Darrius Pillette, Arnold Pillette, Jr., Donovan Pillette, Thadius Batiste, Sr., and Leonard Marsh.
Honorary pallbearers are Arnold Pillette, Sr., Martin Pillette, Cameron Williams, Jace Williams, Jonah Alexander, Dominic Clark, Morrison Broussard, Sr., Rodney Goodie, Jonathan Goodie, Curtis Tillman, Robert Walker, Darrius Pillette, Jr., and Zy’Myrion Lewis.
The family would like to extend appreciation to the staff of Heart of Hospice, Levy Cancer Foundation, Miles Perret Cancer Services, Lydia Cancer Association, Ochsner Cancer Center of Acadiana at Abbeville General Hospital, Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center, and the Lafayette VA Clinic.
You may sign the guest book and words of condolences may be expressed at www.fletcherfuneralhomes.org
Arrangements are entrusted to Fletcher Funeral Home (337-369-3341) 609 West Admiral Doyle Drive, New Iberia, LA 70560.

Standing up against a government which will crush the dreams of everyday Americans just to assert its power was the inspiration for my coming to Washington, D.C. many years ago.
The idea that an inventor could build a better mousetrap and the mice could hire a lobbying firm to get Congress or a regulator to ban it was abhorrent to this young man fresh on the heels of reading Atlas Shrugged. Yet, that has unfortunately become the norm in an America which is barely recognizable.
A perfect example of this phenomena is contained within the version of the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill passed by the House of Representatives.
The issue seems trivial, but it is a pure example of the federal government squashing someone, just because they can. The FAA requires tail identification numbers on aircraft at a cost of $10 with about a million separate combinations available.
One entrepreneur figured out that some combinations might be worth more than others. He invested thousands of dollars in purchasing the rights to combinations he believed would be more valuable than the $10 price he paid for them, leaving around half a million combinations with the FAA for those who just wanted a number. He then set-up the apparatus to auction those numbers that he believed would have higher demand to those who were willing to pay for the vanity numbers.
It turned out that the entrepreneur was right, and those who own private jets were willing to pay to get what they considered a more prestigious or personal tail number.
But the inevitable occurred, and the mice decided that the entrepreneur should not be allowed to exist and whined to their trade association and members of Congress.
Even though, the FAA still has an inventory of around half a million unused tail numbers up for grabs for $10 , the House of Representatives acted at the insistence of the mice that they must crush this inventor by making his business illegal.
Of course, the private airplane owners could have simply refused to pay more than $10 for a tail number and destroyed the entrepreneurs business due to lack of interest.
But instead, we now have the House of Representatives on record in favor of squashing the innovator who saw a market, risked his money to see if his idea would work and then implemented a system which uses supply and demand market pricing to determine the true value of any given number.
In a world which is on fire with the Biden administration assaulting freedom from every corner, this one, small current attempt by the ever-expanding administrative state and its congressional allies to crush a few people who are now competing in this market may seem unimportant. I don’t agree.
It is worthwhile to fight for the little guy who faces destruction of his/her dreams and livelihood because the wealthy and powerful mice complained.
When I was a much younger man, Texas Senator Phil Gramm used to refer to Dickie Flatt, a constituent who owned a local printing business as the archetype independent small businessman having to overcome the burdens of taxes and regulations. Gramm used to ask the question, “Is it worth taking it out of Dickie’s pocket” when considering whether a federal government program should be approved.
However, the Senate has the chance to just say no to the idea that Congress should shut down a legitimate business where no one is coerced or compelled to consume the product just because they can.
The Senate should apply this slightly altered Dickie Flatt standard to the FAA Tail Number issue. Is it worth destroying the American dream for someone whose only fault is that he figured out a way to effectively organize and re-sell certain FAA tail numbers just because they can?
Anyone who claims to be a limited government conservative must answer no to this question, and if they don’t, their constituents can rightfully ask, am I next?

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

“It’s Actually Common to Indict Leaders of Democracies.”
That was the headline of a piece from Foreign Policy’s Ashley Ahn and Brawley Benson on July 18, outlining a sort of categorical imperative for democracies to prosecute their former leaders in a bid to preserve the rule of law, often times when the prosecuting force is from the opposing party.
The context of course are three indictments now leveled at former President Donald Trump, one from New York City and two from President Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Special Counsel Jack Smith, over alleged campaign finance violations, receiving classified documents while he was president and retaining them upon leaving office and most recently, using legal means via state and federal courts, Congress and the Vice President to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Now a fourth indictment could be in the offing, this time from the Fulton County, Ga., similarly tied to Trump’s 2020 bid to overturn the result in Georgia, which was awarded to President Joe Biden in the Electoral College.
In it, Ahn and Brawley argue, “the indictment and conviction of former leaders in democratic and semi-democratic countries around the world is, in fact, quite common,” citing 48 heads of state convicted in 32 countries, included in a larger subset of 78 leaders indicted in 53 countries.
In other words, argue Ahn and Benson, it’s normal in democracies to throw your opponents in jail.
But not in the United States, arguably the world’s longest running democracy, or better put, constitutional democratic republic.
In 2020 Paul Musgrave, assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in Foreign Policy complained about that fact in another piece, “America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents”.
In it, Musgrave notes the example of former presidents John Tyler and Richard Nixon, who were never prosecuted or disgraced after leaving office, in Tyler’s case, for participating in the Confederacy (he died before the end of the war), and for Nixon, over the break-in of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. in 1972 and his alleged role in covering it up and obstructing Congress’ investigation of the scandal.
Musgrave argued in his 2020 Foreign Policy piece, wrongly as it turned out, “an investigation of the Trump administration is unlikely to be politicized in any meaningful sense…” Trump continues to lead all national polls for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 by a lot and remains very competitive against Biden in head-to-head matchups. Democrats use the indictments to attack Trump, Republicans to defend Trump. It’s being politicized.
In Nixon’s case, upon resigning the presidency in Aug. 1974, then-President Gerald Ford promptly pardoned him in Sept. 1974 for any crimes that might have been committed. When he did so, Ford warned of a vicious cycle that would ensue if Nixon were prosecuted after leaving office, calling it “an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
Ford argued it was not possible for a former president to get a fair trial, one way or another, stating, “a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.”
In the case of Trump, it is easy to see how that is already taking shape. While Special Counsel Smith looks to expedite the trials against Trump, and move jurisdiction to Washington, D.C. where jury pools will be heavily Democratic — tying them up on the 2024 presidential campaign that Trump is running in — with Democrats in public opinion polls convinced of his guilt, and Republicans convinced of his innocence.
Ford added, “During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad… [I]t is not the ultimate fate of Richard Nixon that most concerns me, though surely it deeply troubles every decent and every compassionate person. My concern is the immediate future of this great country… As President, my primary concern must always be the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am.”
Ford warned that domestic tranquility was at stake and threatened if America turned to the practice: “My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”
Because, as he stated it would “go on and on and on…” seeing clearly how matters could only escalate in such an environment, at one point saying potential trials “hang like a sword over our former President’s head,” a reference to the ancient Sicilian tale of the Sword of Damocles, popularized by Cicero, wherein Dionysius let Damocles be king for a day, provided that he sit on a throne underneath a sword dangling by a single hair of a horse’s tail, illustrating the fear Dionysius felt every day for his life and why he had to rule so cruelly in order to maintain the throne. In the end, Damocles begs to be allowed to cede the throne.
It is now easy to fast forward from the Trump impeachments of 2019 and 2020 to see how Ford’s warning of a never-ending cycle is true, with House Republicans firing up their own potential impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
Would they be doing that if Trump had never been impeached? It might be a good question, for if not, the implication is that prosecutions, whether in Congress or by the Justice Department, of sitting and former presidents do not necessarily deter, but rather provoke retaliations and escalations as both parties vie for power.
Which is why the Framers ruled out — articulated in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70 — distributing executive power among several officials or the concept of a co-presidency, similar to ancient Rome’s constitution that provided for two consuls to serve to check each other’s power out that, ultimately, led to civil wars and the dissolution of the republic and rise of the emperors.
It is also why the Framers made the threshold for conviction in an impeachment so difficult to attain — two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict a sitting president — to ensure that if something so serious had occurred, it would take a super majority of the several states’ senators, which would include members of the President’s own party, to remove and disqualify the president.
This is the classic problem of republics but also other forms of government, and so the entire constitutional structure was in order cure James Madison called the “mischiefs of faction” in the Federalist No. 10, warning of “the violence of faction,” adding, “The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.” Madison also hypothesized that the U.S. Constitution could prevent such recurring, reciprocal political strife and civil wars that were well documented to have brought down republican forms of government in antiquity. It turned out not to be true, as less than a century later in 1860 the Civil War began.
Meaning, even under the U.S. Constitution, with due process and other protections of the accused explicitly written in, the wider body politic is always at risk of tearing itself asunder, with factions imprisoning one another being an obvious, predictable cause.
In the current case, the essence is in the state of nature, parties might never agree to a social contract exiting the state of nature if there was not an assurance that standing for election in opposition to an incumbent president, or losing an election would not be grounds for imprisonment. If Trump had won in 2020, there would be no indictments.
When it comes to prosecuting political opponents, the problem isn’t that we aren’t doing that enough. It might be that we’re doing it too much. And doing it more might appear to ensure an equal implementation of those prosecutions, but as has already been seen, it does not appear to act as a deterrent as intended. Instead, it appears to lead to further escalations.
Biden as of yet has not issued any pardon of the former president, leaving the matters to state and federal courts to adjudicate, and ultimately, perhaps, the Supreme Court, where Trump’s attorneys will ultimately seek redress on First Amendment and other grounds. Would the Supreme Court take domestic tranquility into account, as Ford did?
No matter how just partisans might claim all these prosecutions and investigations are, this is not equal justice under the law, it is mutually assured destruction. Ford warned, “I, not as President but as a humble servant of God, will receive justice without mercy if I fail to show mercy.” He was right. But nobody seems to be listening.

The national unemployment rate dipped to 3.5 percent in July, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, once again hitting more than 50-year lows.
It’s still peak employment as far as the eye can see. Even with the past two years’ high inflation dropping dramatically and disinflation usually correlating with higher unemployment and a recession, that simply has not occurred yet, despite all the warning signs typically associated with an economic slowdown or downturn.
To see why, one must consider the very real labor shortages we have been experiencing.
Job openings measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics remain highly elevated at 9.6 million. Incredibly, that’s down more than 20 percent below the 12 million peak in March 2022. Although a recent addition to the BLS plethora of data, job openings in the past three recessions have tended to dip significantly, as now.
However, the number of Americans retiring has steadily increased over the past decade, and so have the number of job openings. Americans not in the labor force 65 years old and older have increased 3.36 million since Feb. 2020, from 28.3 million to 31.6 million today.
In Jan. 2009, seniors not in the labor force were just 20.1 million. That’s the Baby Boomer retirement wave, coupled with comparatively lower fertility rates as more women have entered the workforce in greater numbers in subsequent generations.
It is a situation similar to Japan’s demographic decline the past few decades when a rapidly aging population followed very low fertility rates. During the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, the unemployment rate only reached 5.7 percent (here it reached 10 percent in Oct. 2009), and just 3.2 percent during the Covid recession.
In other words, Baby Boomers leaving the labor force may be absorbing what otherwise would be a significant increase in joblessness, at least for now. The question for the current cycle has been whether those job openings would be enough to forestall job losses in labor markets indefinitely or at least through a period that would have otherwise resulted in the unemployment rate steadily ticking upward. For now, that appears to be the case.
One item to still keep an eye on is the spread between 10-year treasuries and 2-year treasuries, an inversion of which usually predicts a recession on the horizon as long term growth is perceived to be lower than short term growth. The 10-year, 2-year inverted briefly in March 2022 and then succumbed fully in July 2022, where it has remained. As of now, it remains inverted at -0.72 percent. That’s up significantly from early July, when it was at -1.08 percent.
Usually, as the economy turns into a recession, the yield curve will tend to uninvert itself as the Federal Reserve ramps up purchases of treasuries and drops interest rates. The Fed hasn’t done that yet, after hiking interest rates for the past year, and has stated it will continue to hike interest rates until inflation returns to more normal levels.
Speaking at a press conference following the central bank’s rate hike on July 26, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated, “My colleagues and I are acutely aware that high inflation imposes significant hardship as it erodes purchasing power, especially for those least able to meet the higher costs of essentials like food, housing, and transportation… We have been seeing the effects of our policy tightening on demand in the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy, particularly housing and investment. It will take time, however, for the full effects of our ongoing monetary restraint to be realized, especially on inflation. In addition, the economy is facing headwinds from tighter credit conditions for households and businesses, which are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring, and inflation.”
Powell added a word of warning, “Reducing inflation is likely to require a period of below-trend growth and some softening of labor market conditions.”
That is, either an economic slowdown or even a recession. Unemployment is still near record lows, at 3.5 percent in July and the Federal Reserve in June projected it to rise steadily to 4.1 percent this year and up to 4.5 percent in 2024, an implied 1.3 million jobs losses between then and now, as it sees inflation continuing to cool off from its current levels. And it only sees 1 percent inflation-adjusted economic growth in 2023, 1.1 percent in 2024 and 1.8 percent in 2025.
However, those GDP estimates were from a month ago, and the minutes for the Fed’s July meeting are not yet available. Since then, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported 2.4 percent inflation-adjusted growth in the second quarter, following a 2 percent increase in the first quarter. So, to hit just 1 percent growth for the entire year would require almost no growth or negative growth going forward.
In that case, the question of unemployment rising might simply be one of timing. But with the labor shortages, perhaps it won’t be as bad as it otherwise might have been. As usual, stay tuned.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.