Louisiana is notable for its gumbo, tossing bead necklaces at women with exposed breasts and outrageous failure to adequately fund its defense of the indigent accused. The gumbo is delicious. Its compliance with Gideon is awful, demanding an extreme response. Orleans Public Defender Derwyn Bunton was compelled to refuse to take on more cases.

There is nothing worse than the “nuclear option,” and Derwyn only dropped the bomb when he believed he had no other choice. So it worked?

The bill, which is currently awaiting debate in the Louisiana House, would increase the amount of money allocated to the state’s public defender offices by the Louisiana Public Defender Board, their umbrella organization. The board would be required to set aside 70 percent of its budget for local offices, up from 65 percent. The change would mean a $1.7 million increase in funding for public defenders.

Don’t unfurl the “mission accomplished” banner just yet.

That obviously seems like a win for the lawyers who represent the indigent. But public defenders have been vocal in their opposition to the proposal. Why? It would likely fund the offices by slashing the budget of legal aid organizations like the Innocence Project New Orleans, which works to overturn wrongful convictions, and the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, which provides public defense for juveniles.

“I certainly don’t think it’s the solution,” Derwyn Bunton, chief district defender of Orleans Public Defenders, told Mother Jones.* “It’s going to be inefficient, unfair, and unjust.

It’s a quasi-shrewd move to increase the funding for indigent defense like this. The legislators get a nice headline, which makes them appear to be generally caring individuals, both about the nice people who might potentially vote for them as well as their constitutional right to a defense despite the fact they don’t have a pot to piss in. For most people, that’s good enough for a pat on the back and supportive twit.

But Derwyn has to read the fine print, which isn’t really too fine but requires an attention span greater than eight seconds to see where the small increase in funding comes from. And rather than infuse new money into the indigent defense system, they came up with the cool trick of moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic so that it appears Gideon won’t go down with the ship.

That’s where the bill comes in. Legal groups worry that the proposal, which they say is likely to pass, would simply move money from legal aid groups to the public defenders instead of actually increasing resources for public defense. State Public Defender Jay Dixon, a member of the Public Defender Board, told Mother Jones that to meet the requirement of the bill, funding from legal aid groups will almost certainly be cut.

Emily Maw, director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, told Mother Jones the organization receives $360,000 annually from the Public Defender Board, a little over a third of its total budget. Maw said the organization could be forced to close if the bill passes.

Different organizations perform very different, yet important and necessary, functions within the system. It’s one thing to defend the accused up front, but another to be there when evidence of innocence only arises after the fact. In Louisiana, that seems to happen with alarming regularity, even if Harry Connick Sr. couldn’t bother to teach his minions what Brady meant with any regularity at all.

So why bother engaging in this fiscal charade? Because legislators know that people are too shallow, too lazy, to figure out what they’re doing. Heck, if the unduly passionate are foolish enough to contribute a small fortune to the Andrew McCabe “My Porsche Needs Hi-Test!!!” fund, they’ll believe anything.

In the meantime, taking money from one organization serving the defense to fund another just shifts the lack of adequate funding in a circle. The problem isn’t solved at all, but is it enough to fool the deeply passionate but infinitely clueless to believe?

*Anything that appears at Mother Jones will invariably references Mother Jones over and over, because otherwise who would give a damn about Mother Jones, so it says Mother Jones, Mother Jones, Mother Jones. It doesn’t make the content wrong, but it surely makes it annoying.