In recent years, watching House debates has been a study in contrasts. With few exceptions, most of the great debaters and speakers are on the Democratic side. The Republicans, for the most part, seem to use their floor time to find new ways to sound as wingnutty as possible. That’s what happens when so much of your caucus represents districts that would vote for a comatose Republican.
One example that stuck out from last night came from Clay Higgins of LA-03, in the heart of Acadiana—Lafayette, New Iberia, Lake Charles, Opelousas, Morgan City. John Breaux once represented this district (when it was the 7th—it became the 3rd after the 2010 census). Unfortunately, it, like the rest of the state, has turned an unrecognizable shade of red. It’s got a PVI of R+23.
Before coming to Congress in 2016, he served as a deputy sheriff in St. Landry Parish, home to Opelousas. He became known for the plain-speaking Crime Stoppers videos he produced while serving as the public information officer for the sheriff’s department, often urging suspects to surrender and calling them out by name. Watch the CBS Evening News profile him in 2015.
For these and other videos, he was often called “the Cajun John Wayne.” Well, it seems that the second-term lawmaker has adopted a different persona, based on his speech from yesterday. Watch it here.
Most of his spiel was typical for what we heard for the most part from the Repubs. He wailed that this impeachment was being ginned up by “the same socialists” who are out to kill babies, gag conservatives, and take our guns. This process, he claimed, was a “horror”—one cooked up by people bound and determined to “overthrow President Trump.”
Higgins claimed that the socialists driving this impeachment are using this to “display a newfound love for the very flag that they trod upon.” He claimed that they were actually afraid—and had a map to prove it. It’s a version of the same county-by-county 2016 electoral map First Daughter-in-Law Lara Trump trotted out when she dared us to “try to impeach this.”
The message was obvious—Higgins was saying impeachment was an attack on what “deep establishment DC” calls “deplorables” in “flyover country.”
Not a single word about Trump’s abuse of power, or the witnesses at the impeachment trial. No, no—all of this is just an attack by a radical socialist mob. And Higgins seems so determined to stand with Trump that he’s willing to ignore it.
More I thought about it, Higgins seems to be taking his cue from Rosco Coltrane, the staggeringly corrupt and incompetent sheriff from “The Dukes of Hazzard” who was Boss Hogg’s right-hand man. Coltrane, you may recall, was willing to indulge in any and all of Boss Hogg’s schemes, no matter how dishonest.
Such seems to be the case with Higgins. He’s all in for Trump, no matter how much evidence exists that the swamp is overflowing. This is how far we’ve fallen, folks—lawmakers who talk tough, but are willing to vote for and act like any schmuck with an R next to it.