Candidate Profiles: Jon Larson
By Laura Edelen
Jon Larson is ready to debate issues anytime, anywhere — especially in the House of Representatives.
Larson, the Republican candidate for Kentucky’s 6th District, which represents UK, said he has been a lawyer for 35 years and was the first full-time public defender in Lexington.
“Being a lawyer, I debate issues all the time,” Larson said. “I deal with these issues.”
Larson said he decided to run against U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, who has served in Washington D.C. since 2004, because he feels he can be a champion for central Kentuckians.
“I’m running to give people a chance to vote for someone with political courage, and someone who is not in the pocket of rich friends and special interest groups,” Larson said. “People in central Kentucky deserve better.”
Larson said he is not soliciting campaign money at this point, saying that “spending millions of dollars on campaigning is absurd.”
Among Larson’s top issues is immigration. Larson said he believes the only answer to the immigration issue is to allow immigrants to pay taxes and pay insurance to ensure they are contributing monetarily to American society.
“Congress should make plans to simulate them into our economy, or at least give them reasonable transportation that is safe and they can stay in contact with their families,” Larson said.
Larson also criticized the recent Congressional decision to pass an $800 billion financial bailout. He said the protecting the nation’s economy could have been solved with different solutions.
He said he supports putting drug addicts into treatment programs and looking at who goes in jails. As a lawyer, Larson said he represented the interest of poor people and prisoners.
“Our jails are overcrowded with the wrong people, including people who are mentally ill, and too many drug addicts,” he said.
One of the issues Larson said he feels passionately about is earmarks, congressional provisions that move funds to be spent on specific projects or allow for specific exemptions from taxes or other fees.
He said earmarks are generally trade-offs, meaning members of Congress vote for each other’s bills at the detriment of voters. Overall, he believes earmarks corrupt the system.
“They are disgraceful attempts at avoiding public scrutiny,” Larson said.
Larson criticized Chandler’s taxpayer-funded trip to the Galápagos Islands this summer. The trip was a fact-finding mission which led to Chandler inserting a measure to address environmental problems in the region into a congressional spending bill, said Chandler spokeswoman Jennifer Krimm in a statement published last week in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
There was no adequate reason the scientific knowledge was not presented closer to Washington D.C., Larson said in a statement to the Kernel.
“I doubt Mr. Chandler’s snorkeling gave him a better understanding of global warming,” Larson said.