Louisiana Voice

A few notable quotables to start the day:

“Based on the sentiment I’ve perceived in the Senate and on the evidence from the House impeachment articles, if we voted on (impeachment) now, it’d be as dead as a fried chicken.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Oct. 18, 2019.

Here’s what Louisiana’s congressmen said about Trump’s impeachment (thenewsstar.com)

“The vote today was nothing more than a proxy vote on President Trump. It was a partisan impeachment in both houses. Our founders did not intend impeachment to be used this way. I believe Speaker Pelosi’s attempt to normalize impeachment and to turn it into a routine political weapon was a mistake. In fact, it was reckless. A country as great as ours deserves better, and so do her people.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Feb. 5, 2020

https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2020/2/sen-kennedy-statement-on-senate-impeachment-vote

“Many Democrats, some Republicans, a lot of members of the media, have their bowels in an uproar because the president refuses to concede and he’s gone to court,” he said. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion. This is America. The president has every right to offer his opinion about the election. Number two, he has every right to go to court and contest the results of the election, and you have every right to disagree. But that doesn’t degrade democracy. It elevates it.”

–Sen. John (Kornpone) Kennedy, Dec. 4, 2020.

Kennedy: Democrats, some Republicans ‘have their bowels in an uproar’ over Trump not conceding | Fox News

Perhaps I appear to be picking on our junior senator in pulling up these three quotes, but they do conjure up fond memories of the time that Earl Long, in his final campaign, said of his opponent, U.S. Rep. Harold McSween way back in 1960, “He’s the only person I know who can talk out of both sides of his mouth and whistle at the same time.”

Kennedy, who seems bent on becoming a hybrid version of folksy Uncle Earl and the Rhodes Scholar that he is, serves as something of an example of how the Republicans in Congress can twist logic completely out of shape to fit their agenda – which seems to be “anything Donald Trump wants.”

But to be fair to Kennedy, here’s another Republican’s quote

“When all is said and done, when the history of this impeachment is written, it will be said that my Washington Democrat friends couldn’t bring themselves to work with Donald Trump, so they consoled themselves instead by silencing the will of those who did, the American people.”

–Then U.S. Rep. (now White House Chief of Staff) Mark Meadows, of North Carolina.

And another:

“They’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we can’t allow that to happen.”

–White House counsel Pat Cipollone, defending Trump in the impeachment trial, Jan. 25, 2020.

https://apnews.com/article/21791704b5434669225117a0638b7a1a

So, just how did we get to such a point in the history of this country? How is it that Republicans in the House and Senate who were so strident in protesting the Trump impeachment, claiming that Democrats wanted to undo the will of the people who elected him? How could they ignore the fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes (so his election wasn’t exactly a mandate of a majority of the people) even though the very procedure of impeachment is designed for just that purpose – overturning bad decisions?

Yet now, four years later, those same Republicans and at least 18 state attorneys general want to overturn the will of the people who defeated trump by 7 million votes. – and by the very same electoral vote that Trump won by four years ago. That could be called a mandate. Kennedy, though, is by no means alone among those Republicans who insist on wearing blinders and ear plugs.

Take, for example Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, the man who probably knows more about losing in a court of law than just about any attorney in the state. He’s neither folksy nor particularly smart; he’s just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill political hack trying to ride the tide of (red state Louisiana) public opinion into the governor’s office.

It’s of little consequence that he can’t win a court case – not even for TONY SPELL, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that appeared to back Landry and Spell on the freedom to attend religious services during a pandemic that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans. (Landry wasn’t the legal counsel for Spell in the controversy over limiting attendance at Spell’s Life Tabernacle Church in Central, but he offered considerable vocal support for the pastor.)

And now, Landry continues tilting at windmills by joining 16 other state attorneys general in supporting the lawsuit of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.

One news outlet, The New York Times, hinted that Paxton has his own legal problems (he is under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations in another case of abusing his office) and may be fishing for a preemptory presidential pardon for himself.

The Quixotic effort by the eight Republican attorneys general would be laughable were the effort not so transparently and blatantly partisan – and ridiculous, prompting a University of Washington law professor to describe Paxton’s brief as “legally incoherent, factually untethered and based on theories of remedy that fundamentally misunderstand the electoral process.”

And it is being litigated by the highest elective legal officers of 18 states, none of which are from the actual states where the results are being challenged – which raises the immediate question of whether they even have standing to bring the suit.

All of which rings rather hollow against earlier claims of “the most massive interference in an election in American history.”

There’s another Earl Long quote about former Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion that could just as easily be said about Landry:

“If you want to hide something from (him), put it in a law book.”