Louisiana Voice

Not content with sabotaging medical benefits for US military veterans suffering from the ill-effects of toxic burning in the Mideast conflict, Sen. John Kennedy also voted last Wednesday to shoot down efforts to put the US on better footing in competing with China in the manufacture of computer chips.

The bill, HR 4346, aka the CHIPS Act, passed the Senate by a 64-33 vote with Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joining 13 other Republicans in voting in favor of the bill, which earlier passed in the House by a 243-187 vote.

True to form, Louisiana’s five Republicans in the House – Steve Scalise, Garret Graves, Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, and Julia Letlow – voted no, pretty much falling in line with Ohio Rep. “Gym” Jordan who recent told POLITICO that Republican senators shouldn’t vote with Democrats to pass bipartisan bills backed by President Joe Biden.

That utter lunacy is also consistent with the stance of Rush Limbaugh who said when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 that he hoped Obama was a complete failure as President.

Rather than pull for the success of whomever occupied the Oval Office because his/her success would necessarily be reflective of the success of the US, people like Limbaugh, Jordan, and McConnell have openly expressed their desire to block any program of any Democrat president.

To me, that exemplifies the Republican philosophy of putting party above country and that somehow just seems wrong to me. And I’ll go on record here and now if the situation is reversed and Democrats united across the board to block all legislation offered up by a Republican president, that would be equally self-serving and certainly unpatriotic.

There is no place – or shouldn’t be – for such mentality in Congress.

Kennedy sniffed that the bill, officially known as the Supreme Court Security Funding Act of 2022, represented corporate welfare at a time when the country needs to “freeze our spending of what’s in the budget and spend extra money only on defense for obvious reasons.” (Emphasis added)

Well, there you have it. The guy who votes for massive corporate tax breaks also advocates that we pour even more money into defense “for obvious reasons,” while not a word is uttered about improving education (not by dictating what can and cannot be taught, but by investing in little ignored things like teacher pay), infrastructure (our interstate system is beginning to crumble, bridges are falling down, and water and sewer lines are corroding), and the environment.

Nope. Don’t need all those things. Instead, we can throw more money at the Pentagon but not for medical care of VETERANS of a frustrating 20-YEAR WAR that has already cost the US $6.4 trillion (with a ‘T’) and more than 10,000 American lives, including military personnel and contractors.

That is John N. Kennedy’s idea of fiscal responsibility, a philosophy shared by Louisiana’s Republican House delegation.

The only members of our state’s delegation to vote in favor of lowering costs to Americans, advancing scientific research, creating jobs, and enhancing national security were Sen. Bill Cassidy and Democratic Rep. Troy Carter.

“A nationwide shortage of semiconductor chips has severely disrupted American manufacturing,” said Carter. Production has allowed, prices have spiked and the US has experienced “increasing dependence on unfriendly foreign nations,” he said. “Only 12 percent of semiconductor chips are currently manufactured domestically – a dramatic drop from 37 percent in the 1990s while foreign competitors are investing heavily to dominate this critical national security issue industry.”

Statistically, by apportioning each state’s population to its voting senators, the vote represented 73 percent of the US population, according to the government tracking service that reports on voting by both chambers.