Legislative Career
Jenkins had been a Young Republican in high school. At seventeen, he was a page for State Representatives Morley A. Hudson and Taylor W. O'Hearn, the first Republicans elected to the Louisiana House since Reconstruction. However, in 1971, he switched to the Democratic Party to run for a Baton Rouge-area seat in the state House. Even though Louisiana was becoming increasingly friendly to Republicans nationally, Democrats still fully dominated at the state level. At the time of Jenkins' election to the state House, 104 of 105 members of the chamber and 38 of 39 members of the state Senate, elected in 1968, were Democrats.
Jenkins faced five older opponents in his first race but walked door to door and was elected with 67 percent in the Democratic primary and was unopposed in the general election. (Louisiana's nonpartisan blanket primary was not enacted until 1975.) He was sworn in at the age of twenty-four, just a few days before he graduated from law school.
During his 28-year tenure in the Louisiana House from 1972 to 2000, Jenkins authored more than three hundred major bills that became law, including the Free Enterprise Education Act, which requires all high school students in Louisiana to complete a one-semester course on the free enterprise system; the Private Education Deregulation Act, which deregulated private and Christian schools and legalized home schooling in Louisiana; the Teacher Proficiency Act, which requires all new public school teachers in Louisiana to pass the National Teachers Examination; the TOPS scholarship program, under which more than 100,000 Louisiana students have been granted full college scholarships; the Concealed Carry Act, and the Shoot the Burglar Act.
While in the legislature, Jenkins organized and served as chairman of the Conservative Caucus in the state house, which had begun with only four members in 1972. By 1980, a caucus member, John Hainkel of New Orleans, was elected Speaker. Jenkins served as chairman of the House Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations.
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