On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled the sitting U.S. Senator from Louisiana, John N. Kennedy, who was first elected to that office in 2016. Kennedy’s previous political experience was that, in the 1999 election, he was elected to be the Treasurer of Louisiana, and was, at the time, a Democrat. He spent sixteen years in that role, running an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 as a Democrat, and after he switched parties in 2007, ran another failed one in 2008 as a Republican. He finally won in an attempt to get to Washington, D.C. in 2016, where he slid into the seat left by Sen. David Vitter, who somehow remained in office as a U.S. Senator for Louisiana for a decade even after the public learned he allegedly solicited sex workers who would pander to his diaper fetish.
Somehow, we’re left questioning which option for this seat was worse.
John Kennedy’s voting record is, like most Senators these days, sparse. Mitch McConnell barely allowed votes to happen at all while Majority Leader, and even in the minority, he filibusters most measures. Thus, the only noteworthy things we really can say about Kennedy's record as a legislator are, obviously, that he voted for every member of the Trump Cabinet, all but three judges nominated by Trump, and of course voted against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment inquiry over Ukraine so that it was a “trial” in the Senate, that he then voted to acquit Trump in.
In a way that is in no way good for the nation, Kennedy has become a favorite of the DC media for being willing to run onto cable news and embarrass himself and not realize it. Repeatedly, he has gone onto CNN, Fox News, or whatever network will host him to thrust his own foot not just into his mouth, but right down his throat without any thinking. Among his worst public partisan comments:
- January 17th, 2018: John Kennedy says that the modern Senate is “like the Jerry Springer Show”, that “aliens won’t talk to us” because of how our politicians behave, saying that modern members of Congress are “like 13 year olds”.
(Keep that in mind while you read the rest of these incidents.)- July 16th, 2019: Sen. Kennedy goes on Tucker Carlson’s white nationalist power-hour, and refers to Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley as “The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse”.
- September 25th, 2019: Kennedy goes on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, and of all the people to fact-check and push back on someone… Chuck Todd managed to do so against Kennedy! As Kennedy became irate and peddled conspiracy theories about Rudy Giuliani’s propaganda tale of Hunter Biden and “Ukranium One”, Todd blew up every argument he had with ease.
- November 7th, 2019: Donald Trump visits John Kennedy on a trip down to Louisiana, and at one of his MAGA hate rallies, Kennedy says of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “It must suck to be that dumb.”
- November 24th, 2019: During the impeachment hearings over Donald Trump attempting to withhold aid from Ukraine unless they started investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden, the testimony of Fiona Hill helped to debunk the talk of “Ukrainium One”. That didn’t stop Sen. Kennedy from going on Fox News and continuing to beat a dead horse with Chris Wallace.
- November 25th, 2019: Kennedy goes on CNN to be interviewed by Chris Cuomo, and after getting some actual pushback on his conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden in Ukraine and how much they’re bulls***, Kennedy retracts his claims, and admitting he was wrong.
- December 3rd, 2019: A little over a week after retracting his claims about Hunter Biden in Ukraine, John Kennedy is back on CNN and shamelessly insisting that Ukraine actually was the real country meddling in the 2016 election.
- July 14th, 2020: Kennedy is on Fox News being interviewed by Sean Hannity, and says that any opponents of reopening schools because of Covid-19 can “kiss my ass”. How articulate.
- September 9th, 2020: Sen. Kennedy goes on CNN to try and play defense for Donald Trump after audio excerpts of Trump’s interview with Bob Woodward, where he admits he lied to the public about the threat of Coronavirus, by robotically repeating the same nonsensical thing:
Sen. John Kennedy: “These gotcha books don't really interest me that much.”
CNN's Pamela Brown: “He's on the record. He's on the record.”
Kennedy: “These gotcha books don't really interest me that much.”
Brown: “He did 18 interviews with Bob Woodward ... He's recorded”.- January 7th, 2021: After the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, John Kennedy gives a scathing rebuke of the actions of the domestic terrorists who participated in an attempt at overthrowing the legislative branch of the government. Then he voted for the objection to certifying Arizona’s electoral votes, because the man clearly talks out of both sides of his mouth. Big Easy Magazine, based out of New Orleans, calls for him to be expelled from the Senate for failing to address those who willfully took part in sedition.
- August 9th, 2021: Kennedy lashes out against the infrastructure bill, calling it a “infrastructure, Green New Deal, and welfare deal”.
- September 2nd, 2021: Only weeks after decrying funding for an infrastructure bill to repair our country’s damaged roads and bridges, Sen. Kennedy writes a letter to the White House asking for disaster relief funding after Hurricane Ida.
John N. Kennedy has already announced he will run for re-election in 2022, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that Louisiana’s jungle primary proves to be his undoing, and his time in office is limited to one term.