Mother Jones
The 2016 Iowa caucuses remain more than a year distant, but conservatives are already using former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush‘s potential presidential candidacy to raise cash—not to support a Bush bid, but to thwart one. Over the weekend, an outfit called the Constitutional Rights PAC blasted out an email promoting the website EndJeb2016.com and soliciting donations. Federal filings show that the PAC is connected to a Beltway lawyer who led one of the most significant money-in-politics Supreme Court cases of the past five years, and to a media firm that’s helped to stoke the Benghazi scandal, the Obamacare repeal campaign, and an effort to rename Washington, DC’s football team the “Washington Tea Party.”
The recent EndJeb2016.com email excoriated Bush, the eldest son of George H.W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush, as “a died-in-the-wool establishment Republican and an advocate of big government.” The email asked supporters to sign an online petition calling Bush “anything but a ‘conservative'” and to give between $25 and $5,000 to the PAC. Larry Ward, the PAC’s founder who signed the End Jeb 2016 email solicitation and registered the EndJeb2016.com site, says the group will distribute its petition to members of Congress, the Republican National Committee, and news outlets once it hits 10,000 signatures. (The initial End Jeb blast brought in about 1,500, he says.)
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Conservatives Are Already Raising Money to Derail Jeb Bush’s 2016 Bid
