I don’t have any animosity against Rep. Charles Boustany (R-Lafayette), who has a pretty decent voting record in Congress, all things considered. I don’t live in the state’s newly drawn 3rd Congressional District and won’t be able to vote for him or Rep. Jeff Landry (R-New Iberia) in November, either.

As I’ve said for on this website, however, if I were standing in a voting both deciding which man to pull the lever for—as many people reading this will do– it would be an easy choice. Landry, a member of Tea Party Caucus and dyed-in-the-wool conservative, would get my vote for over Boustany for a myriad of reasons.

Problems with Boustany include his tendency to vote from time-to-time for inane leftists legislation such as the Cash for Clunkers debacle and his refusal to stand his ground on fiscal issues, like his multiple votes to raise the national debt ceiling. I also don’t like the fact that he lied about a 2007 vote that raised his Congressional pay.  If Boustany has a plausible explanation why he said he didn’t vote to block the automatic pay increase, I haven’t heard it. I haven’t heard it, most likely, because he’s ducked my questions on it.

These things aren’t good and here is another thing to be added the Boustany “not good” list:

A couple of days ago, Landry offered an amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives to defund part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that pays for development and implementation of  a national media campaign to decrease oil consumption in the United States up until 2017.

Any move to pull the plug on the government’s green-energy propaganda campaign that works to the detriment of the oil industry is a no-brainer. That should be even more so for a congressman from Louisiana, where the oil industry is so vital to jobs and our economy as a whole, and especially in light of the way the federal government has flushed billions of  tax-payer dollars down the crapper by shoveling money to non-viable green energy companies— over half of billion to Solyndra being the most egregious.

Landry’s amendment passed, but when the votes were tallied Boustany joined just 28 other Republicans who voted with 136 Democrats against the measure. Could it be that he just couldn’t stomach voting in favor of a bill that’s good for Louisiana, as well as the entire country, offered by a political rival in an upcoming election? Who can say with certainty, especially when Boustany has the habit of avoiding hard questions about Congressional votes?

Boustany is either inexplicably misguided or politics are trumping conservative principles once again. Whatever the case, we’ve had too much of both from far too many Republicans in Washington.