A Conversation with Senator John Kennedy | Moderated by: Walter Isaacson

You know, I honestly, Walter, you know what it's like. You write a book and it's like birthing a child and you never know how people are going to receive it.

We can talk about Zachary, Louisiana.

When I was in Zachary, it was about 2,000, 3,000 people. I would go back to high school in a nanosecond.

My life was simple. I cared about two things. I cared about basketball and I cared about cheerleaders. And I wasn't very good at either one, but I had a lot of fun trying.

You know what, I went to a public school. I got a great foundation, a great education.

And when I went away to college, I talked about this in the book. I went to Vanderbilt, and in Zachary, if you went away to school — James can will know what I'm talking about — in Zachary, small town, when you got sent away to school, it meant you were a badass. You know, you got sent to military school. So, this is how naive it was. I got to Vanderbilt and I kept meeting all these kids that had gone to Woodberry Forest and to Choate and Deerfield. And I asked, honestly, I asked my roommate, I said, 'You know what? What about all these kids? They must have turned their life around.' And he said, 'Kennedy,' he explained to me what a prep school was.

Well, in politics today, and government to some extent today, is about communication. It's all about communication, and we have so many different ways to communicate between and among ourselves. Social media has changed everything. And so when I, for example, do a television interview — I did one last week with Kasie Hunt on CNN. Kasie told me ahead of time the topic she wanted to cover: Iran. No mystery there. But you've got maybe four or five minutes, and my staff knows me. This is how I prepare: about five minutes before I go on, my staff knows to leave me alone, and I try to organize my thoughts and I try to communicate them in an honest way but a memorable way. And some people like it and some people don't. And when I'm asked by my friends, you know, 'How do you sleep at night knowing that there are people that hate you?' I tell them, 'With the fan on.' That's just part of what makes America great.

Well, I'm proud to say that it hasn't happened in the Senate. And let me tell you what I mean by that. I've never served in the House. The House is now, regrettably, the Wild Wild West. Everybody wears their politics on their sleeves. They're always throwing each other off committees. They're always censuring each other. We don't do that in the Senate. There are a hundred of us. We're together a lot. I can honestly say I don't hate anybody. And when I say my prayers every single time, one of the things I ask God is, 'Don't let me hate.' Now, we've got maybe five or six Republicans and five or six Democrats in the Senate, they're usually newer members, that do wear their politics on their sleeve. In other words, if you disagree with them, they think you're not just in error, you're in sin. But the vast majority of senators understand that everybody wants the same thing. They want a better America. They want this country to be as good as it can be. We just disagree sometimes how to get there.

Yeah, I've got a lot of friends. A lot of friends. Chuck Schumer, for example. I mean, I've traveled with Chuck. We fight a lot, but I keep asking Chuck to come duck hunting. I said, 'Come to Louisiana. I'll take you duck hunting.' I'll show him a shotgun, and I'd have to explain to Chuck that the end with the hole in it is the dangerous part. But I'm good friends with Peter Welch, who's a new senator from Vermont. I'm good friends with John Fetterman. Believe it or not, I'm good friends with Elizabeth Warren. We just sponsored a big bill together that I think's going to pass, which is a housing bill. It has to do with using community development block grant money as both a carrot and a stick to encourage our local governments to increase housing starts.

Well, here's our problem. And it's a good bill. It will help increase housing in America. We've passed it through the Senate. Our problem is going to be in the House. You have some House members who don't agree with provisions in it. I had hoped that the president was going to put his muscle behind it, and I'm still hopeful, but he has backed off a little bit in terms of how enthusiastic he is about the bill. And I think that's a mistake. I've told the president that, in my opinion, some guy, I don't remember who it was, said one time, 'It's the economy, stupid.' I don't know who that guy was. But in this election, I'm not an expert at many things, if any, but I know how to read a poll. And in this election, the main issue, including here in Louisiana, is cost of living.

No.

Well, look, I'm very fond of the former secretary. I thanked her in committee for executing the president's policies to secure the southern border, but we were having a lot of management problems in her department. And she took a quarter of a billion — not million, a quarter of a billion dollars, more money than most presidents spend on presidential campaigns — and ran television ads all across America of her on a horse in front of Mount Rushmore that were clearly political ads. She told us in committee that she had bid out the service contract. She did not, and the contract, maybe it was just happenstance, went to some of her friends. And I don't believe she got the names of those people who got the contracts off ZipRecruiter.

And I'm going to call out spending porn every single time. But I had a whole list of — and then she basically blamed it on the White House and the president. And I didn't know how it would be received. That night about 9:30, I got a call from the president. He was mad as a mama wasp. He was pissed. And that's when I was pretty sure that the secretary's time was going to be limited. It was — look, we had to make a change.

Well, everyone has to be — every human being has the right to dignity. Everybody — and I don't care what your color is or your social class or your economic class or what country you're from. To a bear, we all taste like chicken. Okay. And we were having problems with that. I mean, just speaking politically, one of President Trump's platforms and one of his major successes was securing the southern border. Most Americans look at the southern border like they look at their front door at night. Most Americans lock their front door at night. They don't do that because they hate everybody on the outside. They do that because they love the people on the inside and they want to know who's coming in and out of their house. And that's why most Americans support properly vetting people at the border. Now, it's a compliment, I suppose, in a way, that everybody across the world wants to come to America. They do. And we admit a million people to our country every year of our world's neighbors to join us. But everybody wants to come to America. I mean, think about this: when is the last time you heard of somebody trying to sneak into China? No, doesn't happen. But it has to be controlled. And the president did that. But the way the immigration laws have been administered, frankly, under the authority of the secretary, turned one of the strongest issues politically for my party into one of the weakest issues.

Well, so look, I mean, yes, and let me put it this way. Illegal immigration is illegal. Duh. Our immigration statutes are not some second-tier laws that you can break without consequence. And President Obama enforced our immigration laws. President Clinton enforced immigration laws. We should enforce our immigration laws. Now, how you do that matters. You have to do it in accordance with due process, with equal protection. There's a very clear precedent called Terry v. Ohio, Supreme Court precedent, I think it was in the late '60s, which says that in America you have to have reasonable suspicion and an objective standard to stop someone. A cop can't just see somebody driving down the road and say, 'Huh, I think I'm going to pull them over.' You got to have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone has committed or is about to commit a crime, and that's an objective standard. It's not probable cause, but it's law, and all of those things have to be followed. Now, you have the right to protest. You don't have the right to protest violently. In fact, violence — wait, let them finish — but violence, if you think about it, violence undermines the integrity of the cause that you're fighting for. Dr. King understood that. Mandela understood that. Gandhi understood that violence undermines the morality, the integrity of the cause you say you're fighting for. It's also weapons-grade stupid. I mean, somebody's going to get hurt. And my experience is that most, not all, but most cops will leave you alone unless you do illegal stuff. But if you protest violently, it's not going to end well.

Well, and one of the good things about social media and cell phones is that there were videos and people can judge for themselves. That's why we have asked our law enforcement officials, and in some cases mandated, that they wear body cameras.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, we have offered to my Democratic colleagues — we put money in our budget for body cameras for all ICE agents.

Not in the Senate, and here's why. The Senate has a rule. I don't agree with it. If I were king for a day, this is the first rule I would change. But the majority leader, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, totally controls the Senate floor. And if the majority leader doesn't want to bring a bill to the floor, it can't be brought to the floor.