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Rep. Clay Higgins in Washington, DC, in 2022. (Tom Williams/Getty)
On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted a mocking, racist tweet about “wild” Haitians practising “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest nation within the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric can be stunning for many members of Congress. Within the case of Higgins, it serves as a wonderful introduction.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A cost that Higgins denies.)
The publish from Higgins, which he quickly deleted, targeted on the authorized Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans proceed to slander for sport and potential electoral achieve.
The tweet is racist. There’s not way more to say about it. There’s, nonetheless, much more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing private historical past has not gotten a lot consideration.
One in all Higgins’ first appearances within the public file got here in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Transient, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which got here one 12 months after the previous Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was practically elected governor of Louisiana.
“Duke gained’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents a lot of the identical positions,” Higgins defined to a reporter whereas attending a Buchanan rally—appropriately sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “No matter the truth that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s an actual drawback.”
Nonetheless, Higgins admitted that he’d just lately voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a person who as soon as adorned his faculty dorm room with a Nazi flag and movie of Adolf Hitler).
Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been restricted to rhetoric. The primary of his three ex-wives wrote whereas searching for a protecting order towards him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” throughout an argument. She defined that he “threatened that if I ever got here close to the home he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent along with her.)
In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Division in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man after which mendacity about it. The sufferer said that Higgins and one other officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he didn’t consent to a search of his automobile, in keeping with an inside investigation. “[The victim] said whereas on the bottom, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and informed him to go get his lawyer and known as him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] said that he was then kicked whereas nonetheless on the bottom however couldn’t see who kicked him.” The report additionally says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him towards his automobile” and “struck him within the jaw.”
Higgins went on to lie in regards to the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman known as again the police investigator to confess he was not telling the reality. He claimed his resolution for brand new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded one thing else: Higgins discovered {that a} third officer, who was on the scene through the incident, had didn’t cowl for him and Chautin.
Higgins resigned reasonably than face disciplinary motion. And he went on to rent Chautin in his congressional workplace.
Maybe there are different incidents which we have no idea about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.
“Not solely did I do issues flawed. You higher begin early, pack a lunch, and produce batteries in your flashlight in case you intend to return by means of my historical past and discover all the pieces I’ve executed flawed,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Deliver a shovel. You would possibly want an excavator.”
When you have details about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.
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