WHERE I STAND

I’ve made government deliver for Louisiana before. After the 2016 flood I went to Washington with the Governor and brought home nearly $3 billion — then spent years putting it to work, elevating houses and putting Fortified roofs on thousands of homes so families could come back after the next storm.

I’m running because your bills keep going up and nobody in Washington will tell you why. So I will. The rules that decide what you pay — at the pump, on the insurance bill, on the electricity that runs your air conditioner — get written by people who never have to pay them. That isn’t a mystery and it isn’t
bad luck. It’s who was in the room.

Bringing your costs down means changing who’s in the room.

Lower the Bills
Everywhere I go, people tell me the same thing: everything costs more than it used to, and it keeps going up. Gas is running about 80 cents a gallon over last year — roughly $12 every time you fill the tank. Home insurance is up nearly 40% in three years. Diesel prices are at an all-time high, which means groceries and everything else that gets here in a truck has been going up, too. That isn’t a statistic. That’s money that used to go somewhere else.

Fight the corruption. Big corporations learned during the shortages exactly how much they could charge and never went back. Their costs came down; your gas, energy and grocery bills didn’t. And Congress isn’t doing anything about it. Congress has a responsibility to hold the big corporations accountable and they’re not doing it. I’ll back real rules against price-fixing and the enforcement to make them stick.
Stop the war. The war with Iran is driving up the price of gas, diesel, and everything that moves on a truck — which is everything. Two out of three Americans want no part of it. Congress is supposed to be a check on the President, not a rubber stamp, and I will lead that charge.
End the tariffs. They are a tax on everything you buy. Tariffs on Canadian lumber add thousands to the price of a house. Tariffs on steel and aluminum add hundreds to the price of a car. The trade war is putting Louisiana farmers out of business. And it isn’t bringing a single job home — we’re losing jobs as materials get scarce and plants slow down. Congress can step in, but they haven’t. That has to change.

Bring the Insurance Bill Down
Louisiana pays some of the highest home insurance rates in the country, up nearly 40% since 2023. There are two reasons for that. Washington talks about neither one.

Cut the risk. We’re the most exposed state in the country, and exposure is the lever. A stronger roof, an elevated house, real drainage — each one lowers what an insurer expects to pay out, and that is the only thing that has ever brought a premium down and kept it down. Under my leadership Louisiana built the state’s first Fortified homes, put Fortified roofs on thousands more, and wrote the Fortified standards for commercial and multi-family buildings. I’ve spent a decade proving it works here.
Then make them show the math. Doing the smart things to reduce your risk only helps you if your insurance bill goes down. When a company files for a rate increase, we ought to see what it collected last year, what it paid out, what it sent to its parent company, and what it assumed about a storm that hasn’t happened yet. Those numbers exist. You’re just not shown them. I’ll push for the disclosure that lets you see whether the risk you paid to reduce ever came off your premium — because if it didn’t, the problem isn’t the weather.

Get Ready for the Next Storm

Ten years ago this month, water came into homes in Livingston, Ascension, and East Baton Rouge that had never flooded in living memory. Most of those families had no flood insurance, because nobody ever told them they needed it.

Since 2005, Louisiana has been hit by 41 presidentially declared disasters. Katrina. Gustav. Isaac. Ida. The 2016 floods. It is not slowing down. The question isn’t whether the next one comes. It’s whether we’re ready when it does.

Invest in what actually reduces the risk. Less flood risk means lower insurance bills. That’s the whole equation. After the 2016 floods I went to Washington with the Governor and we brought home nearly $3 billion — to rebuild, and to build in real protection for next time. Then I led the effort to get parishes working with each other instead of against each other on flood control. I’ve done this work. In Congress I’ll fight for the funding to keep doing it.
Build so you can come home. An elevated house means a lower premium and a family back in their own beds in weeks instead of years. A Fortified roof is the difference between a bad night and a gutted house. This isn’t theory. It’s built, it works, and it brings costs down.

Open the Books on the Megaprojects
Big projects are coming to Louisiana — data centers, and the power plants being built to feed them. They could be good for us. But somebody has to ask who pays for all that, and so far nobody has.

Don’t put their power bill on your power bill. A data center can use more electricity than a whole town. Somebody has to build the lines and the generation to serve it, and the standard practice is to spread that cost across every ratepayer in the state — which means you help pay to power a building you will never set foot in. That is the clearest example I can give you of what I’m talking about: a deal made in a room you weren’t in, and the bill shows up at your house. If a company needs that much power, it can pay for what delivers it. I’ll fight to make that the rule.
Tell us the terms. What this does to your electric bill. How much water they pull from the aquifer we drink out of. How many permanent jobs — not construction jobs, permanent ones — and what binding guarantee we have that they go to Louisianians. If the deal is good, the numbers will survive daylight.
Start the training now. These jobs take skills, and the training has to start before the ribbon is cut, not after the positions are filled from out of state. Louisiana is full of people who can do this work. Give them the runway.

Protect Your Coverage
Nearly 200,000 Louisianans lost Medicaid coverage in the twelve months ending this June. Tens of thousands more dropped their marketplace plans when Congress let the premium help expire and the bills jumped. These are working people — nurses’ aides, cooks, drivers, folks working two jobs with
benefits at neither one.

Here’s what happens next, and it happens to all of us. People without coverage get sicker. They put things off until it’s an emergency room visit they can’t pay for. That cost doesn’t disappear — it lands on everybody else’s premium. And our hospitals, the rural ones first, start running in the red. Some won’t make it. When the hospital in your parish closes, it doesn’t matter what your insurance card says.

Make coverage affordable again. Restore the premium help that let working families buy a plan, and keep rural hospitals open and serving the communities that have nowhere else to go.
Ask who wrote the rule. Health insurers and drug companies outspend every other industry in the country on lobbying. Then we’re told the price of your prescription is just the market. It isn’t. It’s a rule somebody wrote, and their people were in the room when it got written. Yours weren’t. That’s the part I intend to change.

Clean Out the Self-Dealing
The rules get written for the people who can afford to have rules written. That’s not the country most of us think we live in.

Ban members of Congress from trading stock. They vote on a bill Monday and trade on it Tuesday. They see what’s coming and they buy accordingly. Nine in ten voters want it stopped — which makes it about the least controversial idea in America — and it still hasn’t passed. That by itself tells you who Congress is listening to. I’ll lead that fight, and the ban has to cover spouses, because everybody knows how this works.
Cap what the super PACs can take. A handful of people can now spend without limit to decide who represents you. Cap the checks. If an idea can’t win without a billionaire behind it, it was never a very good idea.
Rewrite the tax code. The current one hands the biggest breaks to the people who need them least, throws crumbs to everybody else, and has run up the largest deficits in American history. Nobody can call that conservative.
Reverse the cuts to Head Start, the ACA, and SNAP. These go to families who are working and still coming up short at the end of the month. A child who eats well and gets to preschool becomes an adult who works and pays taxes. That isn’t charity. It’s arithmetic.

Protect Your Vote
Louisiana didn’t watch this happen to somebody else. It started here.

In April the Supreme Court took a case out of our own map and used it to gut the Voting Rights Act — the law that has been the floor under every American’s vote for sixty years. Five weeks later the Legislature redrew our congressional lines and erased a district that Black Louisianans had spent years in court to win. Nobody moved. Nobody changed their mind. Five of our six seats now lean one way. Only the map changed.

Then came the executive order on mail ballots — the one that lets the Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t do what Washington tells them. The Supreme Court let a piece of it move forward last month. Read that again: the question of whether your ballot gets delivered now runs through the White House.

I’m not going to dress this up as a debate about procedure. When you can’t win the argument, you shrink the electorate. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set the rules for federal elections. Congress has simply declined to use it.

Restore the Voting Rights Act. What the Court left standing is a promise with no enforcement behind it. Congress wrote that law and Congress can write it back — with a standard that holds up, and that doesn’t depend on which nine people are sitting on the bench that year.
Take the map away from the politicians. No one should be able to pick a district that guarantees their own re-election, in either party. Independent commissions draw the lines in a dozen states now, and the sky did not fall in any of them. Voters choose their representatives. It is not supposed to run the other direction.
Make it easier to vote, not harder. Louisiana runs clean elections — our own Secretary of State’s office will tell you so. Every hour cut from early voting, every mail ballot thrown out over a technicality, every new hoop, lands hardest on people working two jobs and folks in a parish with one place to vote. Fixing a problem we don’t have isn’t security. It’s the point.

They are counting on this being the issue nobody has the energy left to fight about. Count again.