skip to main content
Hide All The Ads With a Yearly Membership Subscribe ▶
(About Ads | Hide These Ads)

 
Sen. John Neely Kennedy

Senator for Louisiana

pronounced jon // KEH-nuh-dee

Kennedy is the junior senator from Louisiana and is a Republican. He has served since Jan 3, 2017. Kennedy is next up for reelection in 2028 and serves until Jan 3, 2029. He is 72 years old.

Photo of Sen. John Neely Kennedy [R-LA]
Elections must be decided by counting votes

Our work to hold Congress accountable only matters if elections are decided by counting votes. President Trump, his advisors and associates, and Republican legislators collaborated to have the 2020 presidential election decided by themselves rather than by voters through their attempts to suppress state-certified election results at both the state and national level.

Kennedy was among the Republican legislators who participated in this. In the days leading up to January 6, 2021’s congressional certification of the election by counting electors, Kennedy announced his intent to object to the inclusion of some states in the count based on debunked accusations of mass fraud or a legal theory which was already rejected. On January 6, 2021 in the hours after the violent insurrection at the Capitol, Kennedy voted to omit Arizona and/or Pennsylvania from the counting of presidential electors, which could have altered the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
In 2023, Trump associates and top advisors pleaded guilty to submitting a fraudulent slate of electors to Congress from Georgia, making false statements about purported widespread fraud in the election, and tampering with voting machines after the election, admitted in civil court to posing as fake electors in Wisconsin, and were convicted of contempt of Congress for withholding documents during its investigation and assaulting police officers at the Capitol. Trump associates and top advisors are also facing charges for submitting fraudulent slates of electors to Congress (in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin) and Trump himself faces criminal charges for coordinating the fraudulent slates of electors and other actions. He was also convicted in 2024 of falsifying business records to cover up acts that he believed might have hurt him in the 2016 election. The January 6, 2021 violent insurrection at the Capitol, led on the front lines by militant white supremacy groups one member of which was convicted of sedition, attempted to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from taking office by disrupting Congress’s count of electors.

Analysis

Ideology–Leadership Chart

Kennedy is shown as a purple triangle ▲ in our ideology-leadership chart below. Each dot is a member of the Senate positioned according to our ideology score (left to right) and our leadership score (leaders are toward the top).

The chart is based on the bills Kennedy has sponsored and cosponsored from Jan 3, 2019 to Aug 1, 2024. See full analysis methodology.

Committee Membership

John Neely Kennedy sits on the following committees:

Enacted Legislation

Kennedy was the primary sponsor of 16 bills that were enacted. The most recent include:

View All »

Does 16 not sound like a lot? Very few bills are ever enacted — most legislators sponsor only a handful that are signed into law. But there are other legislative activities that we don’t track that are also important, including offering amendments, committee work and oversight of the other branches, and constituent services.

We consider a bill enacted if one of the following is true: a) it is enacted itself, b) it has a companion bill in the other chamber (as identified by Congress) which was enacted, or c) if at least about half of its provisions were incorporated into bills that were enacted (as determined by an automated text analysis, applicable beginning with bills in the 110th Congress).

Bills Sponsored

Issue Areas

Kennedy sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:

Finance and Financial Sector (26%) Health (18%) Crime and Law Enforcement (14%) International Affairs (10%) Education (10%) Taxation (9%) Immigration (7%) Government Operations and Politics (6%)

Recently Introduced Bills

Kennedy recently introduced the following legislation:

View All » | View Cosponsors »

Most legislation has no activity after being introduced.

(About Ads | Hide These Ads)

Voting Record

Key Votes

Kennedy voted Nay

Veto Overridden 81/13 on Jan 1, 2021.
This was the Senate's vote to override President Trump's veto of H.R. 6395, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which is the …

Kennedy voted Nay

Conference Report Agreed to 84/13 on Dec 11, 2020.

Kennedy voted Yea

Conference Report Agreed to 83/16 on Feb 14, 2019.
This bill, in its final form, funded the parts of the federal government whose funding was to lapse on February 15, 2019. On December 22, …

Kennedy voted Nay

Motion Agreed to 87/12 on Dec 18, 2018.
This bill became the vehicle for passage of the FIRST Step Act, the Senate's criminal justice reform bill. The text of this bill was replaced …

Kennedy voted Nay

Conference Report Agreed to 87/13 on Dec 11, 2018.
See the Congressional Research Service's 122-page summary of the bill. * * * H.R. 2 amends and extends major programs for income support, food and …

Kennedy voted Nay

Motion Agreed to 71/28 on Feb 9, 2018.
This bill became the vehicle for passage of funding for the federal government through March 23, 2018, to avert a government shutdown that would have …

Missed Votes

From Jan 2017 to Aug 2024, Kennedy missed 90 of 2,838 roll call votes, which is 3.2%. This is on par with the median of 3.0% among the lifetime records of senators currently serving. The chart below reports missed votes over time.

We don’t track why legislators miss votes, but it’s often due to medical absenses, major life events, and running for higher office.

Show the numbers...

Primary Sources

The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including: