Louisiana law isn't about Ten Commandments. It's Christian nationalist bait for Supreme Court.

Spend enough time listening to politicians, and eventually, one of them will tell you the truth.

"I can't wait to be sued," Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry declared four days before signing a law last week mandating that all public school classrooms – from kindergarten to college – display a Protestant Christian version of the Ten Commandments.

Landry made that declaration not in his state's Capitol but nearly 600 miles away in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for the Tennessee Republican Party.

Courting his party's Christian nationalists with controversy is an excellent way to boost a fella's national profile. Getting sued and maybe having that case go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a few justices might be willing to toss overboard decades of precedent, is even better.

Landry was so giddy about those prospects that he didn't even notice when a young girl standing behind him during Wednesday's signing ceremony fainted and collapsed to the floor.

"If you want to respect the rule of law, you've got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses," Landry said as others rushed to the girl's aid and an analogy about priorities was born.

What's the takeaway? This has nothing to do with children or education and everything to do with rolling back constitutional protection of and from religion.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry doesn't seem to care about the hypocrisy of his Ten Commandments law

The first 10 words of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights in America's Constitution are about protecting us from the kinds of laws Landry just signed.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," it starts, before adding "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

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The Bill of Rights is a list of priorities. Most people put the most important stuff at the top when drawing up a list.

The Supreme Court since 1947 has held that the First Amendment guaranteeing for freedom from religion and freedom of religion – known as the establishment clause – applies to state governments.

Landry may very well get that lawsuit he's so excited about

Heather Weaver is as eager to sue Landry as he is to be sued. A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, Weaver told me that a lawsuit is coming this week – because this issue was already settled by the Supreme Court 44 years ago when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

The nation's highest court also ruled in 2005 that three Kentucky counties violated the establishment clause by displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses and public schools.

Both cases were 5-4 rulings, with conservative justices on the losing side.

This is a different Supreme Court, with a conservative supermajority stocked with justices – Samuel Alito comes to mind – convinced that Christians in America are somehow under threat. Alito made that claim in a college speech in May and was secretly recorded this month agreeing with an undercover liberal activist who told him that America should return to a "place of godliness."

Richard C. Schragger, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said some justices have been open in recent rulings to personal displays of religiosity in secular public spaces. The court in 2022 sided with a public high school football coach who lost his job for praying on the field after games.

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The Louisiana law could bridge those individual actions to institutional displays because it leans into a legal test favored by some justices about religion reflecting not just faith but history and tradition.

"I think they are leaning in the direction of permitting these kinds of religious practices in school and elsewhere," Schragger told me. "I think that test is designed to be more sympathetic to those kinds of practices."

Would the Supreme Court upend precedents?

Rachel Laser, who leads Americans United for Separation of Church and State, will join the ACLU in the lawsuit. She agrees that Landry is eager to have that fight at the Supreme Court.

"It's no secret that the Supreme Court is sympathetic to the Christian nationalist agenda with the way they've been ruling in many cases," Laser said. "The court's rulings are emboldening Christian nationalists to try to get cases before them that upends long-standing precedents in ways that favor conservative Christianity over America's commitment to religious freedoms for all."

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Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, is also joining the lawsuit and thinks the coalition has a good chance of winning. She noted that the high school football coach case involved players the court saw as voluntarily joining him in prayer. The Louisiana law mandates the Ten Commandments in a "coercive" environment because students have to attend class.

But Gaylor expects more to come. States controlled by conservative Republicans are rushing to push religion into public spaces. A similar proposal in Texas failed to become law last year.

"Christian nationalists have never seen a bad idea they didn't want to replicate," Gaylor told me.

The hope is that the Supreme Court justices will follow the established laws despite their own beliefs

Nelson Tebbe, a professor at Cornell University's Law School, also told me he thinks a majority of the Supreme Court will reject the Louisiana law, even if some justices want to embrace it.

"Under current law and current precedent that's binding on Louisiana and binding on the Supreme Court itself, this Louisiana law is flagrantly unconstitutional," Tebbe said.

I hope he's right. I hope a majority of justices, many of whom claim to value the original intent of the men who wrote the Constitution, stick with the guiding principles in the establishment clause.

That calls for faith in our government, which lately seems more interested in testing that faith than in living up to it.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Louisiana wants Ten Commandments law to reach Supreme Court