In continuing our series on candidate analysis in crucial elections across the state of Louisiana, up next is House District 9, another attempt by the Good Old Boys (GOBs) network – the folks we’re starting to call Bud Light Republicans, seeing as though they’re about as useful to conservatism as the InBev marketing team was to that unfortunate beer brand – to unseat a rock-ribbed conservative legislator.

In this race, the GOBs/Bud Light Republican crowd are trying to unseat a founding member of the LA Freedom Caucus, conservative Rep. Dodie Horton. They’ve recruited Chris Turner, a person who has a very loose relationship with the truth.

Case in point: in his latest mailer, Turner makes the claim that Horton votied against something he calls the “infrastructure spending cap” right on the front of the mailer. Does he know there is no such thing as an infrastructure spending cap? If he does know, he lied. If he doesn’t know, he’s just another Bud Light Republican woefully ignorant of basic budgetary process in a legislature chock full of fake conservatives and used car salesmen who could care less about fiscal responsibility.

What Louisiana does have is a constitutional mandate that caps spending levels when the state reaps a windfall. The specific reason this cap is in the state constitution is so these people addicted to spending your money cannot run state spending up to dangerous or ruinous levels without a two-thirds majority voting to bust that spending limit. Horton was one of the 19 brave individuals who voted against busting the budget this year to spend another nearly $2 billion on pork like new uniforms for Southern University’s band and a bunch of public buildings of dubious need, and not on things like paying down debt and freeing up money for local governments to use.

Which, at one point, was the plan. But for the Bud Light Republicans in the legislature, the surplus could have been spent killing debt and allowing for local school districts – who teachers actually work for – to have the funds available to give permanent pay raises to teachers not dependent on the Louisiana legislature.

And Dodie Horton voted for a budget which included teacher pay raises and all of her district’s vital (and appropriate to be paid for by the state funds) to her district—all while NOT busting the spending cap.

Then the Senate sat on that bill for a month, busted the spending cap, then sent the bill back with hundreds of porked-up amendments. It went directly to conference where even more changes were made. These bills were not given to anyone in the legislature to read until 15 minutes before mandatory adjournment.

You can see and hear all of this in a piece that ran here back in June, 12 days after that massively chaotic day. The Senate had to hold a hearing to find out what was in the bill because they didn’t know. Over $53 billion in spending, the largest budget in the history of Louisiana, and they didn’t know what they spent it on. Let that sink in.

The Bud Light Republican species of politician has been ubiquitous to Louisiana over the years. Your typical Bud Light Republican is an appropriator who thinks the only reason he or she is in the legislature is to pull down as much swag from Baton Rouge as possible. They’ll vote for anything bad and spend your children and great-grandchildren’s futures like there is no tomorrow as long as there’s a check for them that comes with it.

It’s clear Turner is another one of that self-interested ilk who are destroying our beloved Louisiana. And you don’t even have to take our word for that. You can take his word for it starting around the 59:45 mark in this video when Turner is talking about busting the spending caps in this townhall meeting in Bossier. Here’s what he says…

“I think that sometimes you have to compromise without compromising your conservative principles in the least. I think when you look at this spending cap issue, for example, when you know that the vast majority of the legislature about 85% of them voted to raise the spending cap and I know I’m going to lose $150 million in capital outlay projects like a $6 million water project in Haughton is gone, some street repair in Haughton is gone, some money for the sheriff’s office is gone, the back end money on the bridge is gone, about $140 million in that money is gone, I’m going to go back to my constituents and say, look, this is why I did so I can preserve the money for the projects in our district. We gotta be smarter about how we handle our politics. You can still be a conservative Republican and you gotta get down there and work with people from different backgrounds and belief systems and do what’s best for the state as a whole. We gotta put some of this partisan bickering and politics aside and try to do what’s best for the state.”

What a non-answer word salad. And, what, pray tell, are the conservative principles is he talking about that he isn’t compromising, I wonder?

Turner then says in this answer above that knowing you’d lose all of this funding (remember, we showed above that no one knew what was in the bill), he would have to go back to his constituents to explain why he voted to spend money like a drunken sailor, not on infrastructure but on things like $75 million for a cultural center in Lafayette, just to bring home the bacon for his district.

Turner must be the fastest speed reader on the planet because the spending bills that were hundreds of pages long and had hundreds of amendments added to them were given to the members at the same time they were brought to the floor. Speaker Clay Schexnayder sent the bills up for passage just 15 minutes before mandatory adjournment and Dodie Horton and her colleagues had no time to even read them. The final spending bills passed in 8 SECONDS.

Chris Turner is either so ignorant of what happened or he is deliberately smearing a great conservative Christian woman who was in the trenches fighting Bud Light Republicans just like him, who would rather lie to gain power than do the right thing. But he assures you he will go to Baton Rouge and grovel to the RINOs and Democrats to get some of the crumbs they send to north Louisiana.

Has he even signed the pledge stating he wouldn’t vote with Democrats to elect a Speaker, like the Fraud Squad who elected RINO extraordinaire Clay Schexnayder? Dodie Horton has signed that pledge.

What Dodie Horton stands for is kicking these GOB RINOS and Bud Light Republicans out of power and working with the new incoming and likely conservative governor to change the way business is done.

How about keeping more of your tax dollars at home in the first place? That’s what Dodie Horton stands for and has been fighting for—and with the likely new Republican governor who agrees with getting rid of the Huey Long model of politics, the locals win their own money back.

Oddly, in another part of his speech linked above, Turner called the spending cap a constitutionally mandated spending cap. So he did know that calling it an “infrastructure spending cap” was not the truth, as he did in his mailer where he accused Dodie Horton of voting against infrastructure?

The choice in this race couldn’t be clearer. It’s time to reject sleazy GOBs like Turner and re-elect Dodie Horton so she can help bust up the failed system of going begging to Baton Rouge that Turner so obscenely embraces.