Sen. John N. Kennedy is asking you to re-elect him
19th September 2022 · 0 Comments
PART II
Based on his educational accomplishments, it’s fair to say that U.S. Senator John N. Kennedy (R-La.) is a smart guy.
Kennedy was born in Centreville, Mississippi, and raised in Zachary, Louisiana. After graduating from Zachary High School as co-valedictorian in 1969, he entered Vanderbilt University, where his interdepartmental major was in political science, philosophy, and economics. He graduated magna cum laude.
At Vanderbilt, Kennedy was elected president of his senior class and named Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Juris Doctor in 1977 from the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was an executive editor of the Virginia Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. In 1979, he earned a Bachelor of Civil Law degree with first-class honors from Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under Sir Rupert Cross and John H.C. Morris.
Kennedy wrote and published several books, was a partner in the New Orleans law firm Chaffe McCall, and served under Governor Charles “Buddy” Roemer and as Louisiana’s Treasury Secretary. He also served as an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center in Baton Rouge from 2002 to 2016.
Kennedy was a democrat but became a republican to win Louisiana’s predominately Republican gerrymandered districts statewide.
As one of Louisiana’s two senators, he is all in with the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party’s perceived attempts to destroy our Democratic Republic and install a dictatorial system that control’s his constituents’ lives by ceding power to the states.
Kennedy’s support, along with 11 other GOP senators, to set up an electoral commission to monkey with the 2020 Presidential Election, his opposition to Arizona’s electoral certification of President Joe Biden, and his public rhetoric about distrusting state officials’ vote tallies, makes a strong case for believing that he agrees in the political conspiracy that wants to choose who will lead this nation, regardless of who the people want in the Oval Office.
The senators wanted Congress on January 6 (the day Trump insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol) to establish an “Electoral Commission…to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns” in six states that Biden narrowly won,” according to The Advocate.
“Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed,” said Kennedy and the other senators in a statement on Kennedy’s website dated January 2, 2022.
The Republican senators pushed allegations of voter fraud to justify their attempt to overthrow Biden’s win, even though Trump lawyers lost 60 court cases based on allegations they brought without evidence.
The same is true of the pact’s contention in the statement that “Voter fraud has posed a persistent challenge in our elections, although its breadth and scope are disputed. By any measure, the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.”
They cited a “deep distrust of our democratic processes,” as a reason for creating the Commission.
The co-conspirators’ effort to turn back the clock on voting rights is most irritating. Sen. Cruz’s Electoral Commission proposal is based on the 1877 effort by Democrats to thwart the voters’ will in 1877 and elect democrat Tilden instead of Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican.
It’s important to remember that back in those days, the Republican Party, under Lincoln, pushed for an end to slavery and created the original civil rights laws: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Democrats were pro-slavery and forced the Republicans to withdraw federal troops from the South as a compromise over the 1876 election and usher in the Jim Crow (apartheid) Era.
Problems with the electoral certificates arose after the 1876 presidential race between Samuel Tilden, the Democratic Party nominee, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate.
Is it a coincidence that several states tried to seat alternative slates of electors, who would cast votes for Trump, and the effort by southern states in 1876 to turn in multiple election certificates? Or did today’s Republican elected officials use the 1877 effort as a template to force the creation of an Electoral College to delay election certification and swing the election in Trump’s favor?
Citing a precedent for an Electoral College in 2021, Cruz wrote:
“The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states – Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina – were alleged to have been conducted illegally….We should follow that precedent.
“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
What Cruz neglected to mention is the real reason the Electoral Commission was formed in 1877. Four states – Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon – had problems with their slates of electoral votes, which were yet to be included in the results. Louisiana and Florida sent three certificates to Congress.
Congress faced an apparent conflict since it had received multiple slates of electors from each state signed by state officials. Under the Constitution, Congress was obliged to count all the electoral votes, but no mechanism to decide between competing votes sent from states.
According to the Constitution Center, Congress passed on January 29, 1877, and President Grant signed the Electoral Commission Act to break the impasse.
In the end, Hayes was declared the winner.
The bottom line is that Louisiana Senator John N. Kennedy is in bed with fellow congressional Republicans who wanted to overturn the will of the American voters.
Although Kennedy says his priorities include “good-paying jobs, better education for our children, and a little common sense up in Washington,” his votes against everything good for everyday people seem to contradict that.
This article originally published in the September 19, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
