Blanco continued to press President Bush and Congress for additional recovery funds for Louisiana, pointing out the disparity in assistance received by Louisiana compared to neighboring Mississippi.
Early in 2006, Blanco was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.
On June 19, 2006, Blanco announced that she would send the National Guard to patrol the streets of New Orleans after five teenagers were killed, in an effort to combat a greatly increased rate of violent crime.
Also on June 19, 2006, Blanco signed into law a ban on most forms of abortion (unless the life of the mother was in danger or her health would be permanently damaged) once it passed the state legislature.
Although she felt exclusions for rape or incest would have “been reasonable,” she felt she should not veto based on those reasons. The bill would only go into effect if the United States Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
In August 2006, Blanco filed a lawsuit and formally objected to the federal Gulf of Mexico lease sale “to force the federal government to spend part of its oil and gas income from the Outer Continental Shelf to help shore up Louisiana’s coastline”.
In December 2006, Blanco called a special session of the Louisiana State Legislature which she intended to use to dispense $2.1 billion worth of tax cuts, teacher raises, road projects and other spending programs.
Legislators allied with Blanco attempted to lift a spending cap imposed by the Constitution of Louisiana, but Republican lawmakers rejected the governor’s spending measure. The high-profile defeat further eroded Blanco’s political reputation.
By late 2006 and early 2007, Blanco was facing increasingly heated accusations of delays in administering the Road Home Program, a state-run program that Blanco and the Louisiana Recovery Authority had set up following Katrina in order to distribute federal aid money to Katrina victims for damage to their homes.
By January 2007, fewer than 250 of an estimated 100,000 applicants had received payments from the program, and many of the payments were apparently based on assessments that grossly undervalued the cost of damage to homes.
Facing an upcoming re-election campaign with greatly reduced popularity, Blanco made repeated public criticisms of the administration of President Bush in January 2007.
Noting that Bush neglected to mention Gulf Coast reconstruction in his 2007 State of the Union Address, Blanco called for a bipartisan Congressional investigation into the conduct of the Bush administration following Katrina, to determine whether partisan politics played a role in the slow response to the storm.
This call followed comments by former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, who claimed that the White House offer to federalize the National Guard in the days following the storm was part of a plan to upstage Blanco.
Blanco has also publicly stated that Mississippi received preferential treatment because its governor, Haley Barbour, is Republican.
Blanco announced on March 20, 2007, that she would not seek re-election. On January 14, 2008, Bobby Jindal succeeded her as governor.
