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 practicing “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would be surprising for most members of Congress. In the case of Higgins, it serves as an excellent introduction.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A charge that Higgins denies.)
The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans continue to slander for sport and potential electoral gain.
The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. There is, however, a lot more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal history has not gotten much attention.
One of Higgins’ first appearances in the public record came in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Brief, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came one year after the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was nearly elected governor of Louisiana.
“Duke won’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” Higgins explained to a reporter while attending a Buchanan rally—correctly sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”
Still, Higgins admitted that he’d recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and picture of Adolf Hitler).
Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote while seeking a protective order against him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She explained that he “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent with her.)
In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man and then lying about it. The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”
Higgins went on to lie about the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman called back the police investigator to admit he was not telling the truth. He claimed his decision for new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded something else: Higgins learned that a third officer, who was on the scene during the incident, had failed to cover for him and Chautin.
Higgins resigned rather than face disciplinary action. And he went on to hire Chautin in his congressional office.
Perhaps there are other incidents which we do not know about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.
“Not only did I do things wrong. You better start early, pack a lunch, and bring batteries for your flashlight if you intend to go back through my history and find everything I’ve done wrong,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need an excavator.”
If you have information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.
