Sen. John Neely Kennedy’s Offers A Master Class To Louisiana GOP On Bringing National Issues Home
Once again, Louisiana’s, favorite U.S. Senator John Neely Kennedy in an Op-Ed to the Shreveport Times has done what so many others in the Republican party have failed to do as we discussed yesterday: he brought the national issues home to Louisiana and framed them in the appropriate context for Louisiana voters.
Kennedy put in very direct terms what the failed policies of the Democrats and the Biden administration are costing Louisianans.
He explained, “According to one estimate, Louisianans pay an additional $4,613 per migrant — a total of $604 million per year — in state taxes because of illegal immigration. At a time when Louisiana families also must spend an additional $765 per month because of inflation, the $604 million taxpayers are investing in noncitizens who bypassed our legal immigration system could provide a lot of relief to Louisiana families.”
Pivoting to the Biden border crisis he added, “Border agents confiscated more than 1,500 pounds of fentanyl in June alone, enough poison to kill the entire country. In Louisiana, we lost 2,352 people to drug overdoses last year. Nearly all of those probably involved fentanyl. In New Orleans, officials found fentanyl in 94 percent of overdose victims. In East Baton Rouge Parish, the drug was present in 88 percent of overdose victims. In St. Tammany Parish, 11 people die from fentanyl overdoses each month.”
He cited the well-publicized travails of leftist radical run ‘Sanctuary-cities’ with New York City telling the flood of illegal immigrants the city has “no more room” and Chicago’s declaration of a state of emergency due to the horrific financial burden of supporting the illegal immigrants.
Kennedy wrote,
“Apparently, the open border advocates in these “sanctuary cities” only like illegal immigration when migrants stay in conservative states near the border — states like Louisiana. The urban and coastal elites might be hypocrites, but they’re not wrong: Ceaseless migration is draining cities and states of the resources they need to care for their own taxpaying citizens. Even worse, it has turned our border into a hotbed of drug trafficking, human smuggling and violent crime.”
Louisiana’s state-level GOP needs to take notes, this is how you campaign on national issues on a state level. You need to bring it HOME to the people, and show the impact these policies are having on the streets of Shreveport and Bossier, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. But most importantly the focus is here, on Louisiana.