Believe me, neither Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise nor white nationalist Mike Johnson is the worst of what Louisiana politics has sent to DC of late. Since 2016, the folks— many of them Cajun— in the southwest part of the state, from the Texas border to the Atchafalaya River, have been sending the worst member of the Louisiana delegation to Congress: Clay Higgins. The biggest cities are Lafayette, New Iberia and Lake Charles and the partisan lean is R+43, slightly redder since the new boundaries were drawn after the 2020 census. Trump won the district 68.0% to 30.3%.
In all there are 9 parishes in the district. Higgins won every one of them— by a lot. He won the primary out-right with 64.3% against 3 other Republicans, 2 Democrats and 2 independents. A college drop-out, he’s a serious insurrectionist, affiliated with the Proud Boys and a member of the Three Perecenters. In Congress he’s also a member of the Freedom Caucus.
He’s been in law enforcement since he was 18, getting in trouble again and again for using too much force against citizens and then lying to investigators. He was forced to resign from several departments for unprofessional conduct, corruption, disrespect towards citizens, overuse of force snd using his position for personal profit. He’s had 4 or 5 different wives, all of whom divorced him except, so far, the latest. He notoriously refuses to pay child support. His posts are regularly removed from Facebook for being incendiary, once of which was a coded call for civil war.
On Wednesday, at a Homeland Security Committee hearing, he accused the FBI of inciting violence at the J-6 insurrection, accusing FBI director Christopher Wray or using “ghost buses” to ship FBI agents to the Capitol dressed as Trump supporters. He threatened Mr. Wray: “You’re day is comin’, Mr. Wray” Yesterday, Gabriella Ferrigine reported That Higgins, sounding increasingly deranged, insisted “I have all this evidence, I’m showing you the tip of this iceberg… these busses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.”