Tag Archives: republican

Meet the Risky Mortgage Pioneer Trying to Pay His Buddy’s Way Into Congress

by SoilaEllsworth Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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If New Hampshire Republican Dan Innis wins his congressional race, he knows where to send the fruit basket: to the home of mortgage giant Peter T. Paul.

Before running for Congress, Innis served as dean of the University of New Hampshire’s business school, which was renamed for Paul after he donated $25 million. His campaign website touts major building projects he oversaw as dean—projects financed by Paul’s contribution. And Innis’ congressional run is getting a big-time boost from a brand new super-PAC founded and financed by Paul.

“Dan’s a friend,” says Paul, who lives in California. Paul is an alumnus of the University of New Hampshire, and he met Innis through his UNH philanthropy. “He’s the better candidate. He needs to get known.”

Innis, who is one of four candidates running in the Republican primary on September 9 to challenge Democratic Rep. Carol Shea Porter, is socially liberal and favors shrinking the government—exactly the type of politician Paul says he would like to see in Congress. In order to make that happen, Paul created a super-PAC, New Hampshire Priorities PAC, and financed it with $562,000. So far, $376,000 of that has gone into radio and TV ads supporting his friend. Innis himself has raised a little more than $338,000—about $150,000 less than his closest Republican opponent. With Paul in the mix, Innis is head and shoulders over his GOP competitors.

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Meet the Risky Mortgage Pioneer Trying to Pay His Buddy’s Way Into Congress

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Stop Dreaming. Republicans Are Not Going for a Carbon Tax.

by MoniqueFournier Posted on August 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Republicans, as everyone knows, hate taxes and don’t accept, much less care about, climate change. But wonks on both sides of the aisle fantasize that a carbon tax could win bipartisan support as part of a broader tax-reform package. A carbon tax could be revenue neutral, the dreamers point out, and if revenue from the tax is used to cut other taxes, it shouldn’t offend Republicans—in theory.

And so people who want to bring Republicans into the climate movement like to argue that the GOP could come to embrace a carbon tax. We’ve heard it from former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who lost his seat to a Tea Party primary challenger in 2010 after he proposed a revenue-neutral plan to create a carbon tax and cut payroll taxes. We’ve heard it from energy industry bigwigs like Roger Sant, who recently argued the case at the Aspen Ideas Festival. We’ve heard it from GOP think tankers like Eli Lehrer.

It’s the epitome of centrist wishful thinking. It will not happen.

I know because I asked the man most responsible for setting Republican tax policy: Grover Norquist. As head of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist has gotten 218 House Republicans and 39 Senate Republicans to sign his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” never to raise taxes. His group has marshaled the Republican base’s zealous anti-tax activists and successfully primaried politicians who violate the pledge, making Norquist a much-feared and much-obeyed player in D.C. The Boston Globe Magazine went so far as to call him “the most powerful man in America“—at least of the unelected variety.

First off, Norquist has no interest in a carbon tax because, he told me, there has been no global warming for the last 15 years. That right-wing shibboleth is false, but the point is that if you don’t accept climate science, as Norquist and the Republicans don’t, you’ve got no reason to back a carbon tax.

Although Norquist conceded that you could theoretically construct a revenue-neutral carbon tax that does not violate his pledge, he would still oppose it, and he said Republicans generally would too. “I would urge people not to vote for a carbon tax, because the tax burden is a function of how many taxes you have,” Norquist said, noting that higher-tax jurisdictions tend to have more sources of tax revenue. “With one tax, people can see how big it is. Divide it and no one knows.”

“I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes,” he concluded. Neither do I.

It’s useful to look at how Republicans react to other tax-reform ideas: Eliminate the carried-interest loophole that taxes hedge-fund managers at a lower rate than their secretaries? No way! Eliminate deductions for oil and gas companies? Nothing doing.

The arguments Republicans make about this one tax being unfair or that one stifling economic growth are all just arguments of convenience. Republicans are for taxing the things they don’t care about (poor people’s meager earnings) and against taxing the things they do care about (rich people’s unearned income). So Republicans oppose taxing inheritances and capital gains, but seem not to mind flat taxes on income or sales. That’s why the big tax-reform proposals that insurgent Republican candidates have ridden to prominence—Mike Huckabee’s “Fair Tax,” Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan—involve shifting much of the tax burden to a national sales tax: because sales taxes fall disproportionately on poor people. (Poor people have to spend a bigger portion of their income than rich people do just to get by, so sales taxes are regressive.)

And that’s why offering to cut payroll taxes in exchange for creating a carbon tax won’t win a bunch of Republican votes. First of all, Republicans don’t care about the tax burden on poor people, so the payroll tax deduction is not going to entice them. (In fact, they opposed an extension of President Obama’s payroll-tax holiday.) Meanwhile, they don’t share the premise that fuel consumption and carbon pollution are bad, because they don’t accept climate science. And they don’t want to shift the tax burden to fossil fuel companies, which are huge GOP contributors.

It’s worth remembering how a carbon tax became the ostensible bipartisan solution to climate change. Back in 2008, both parties’ presidential candidates backed cap-and-trade plans. Obama won and advanced his plan, so Republicans all opposed it. By default, whatever Obama proposes becomes “partisan” and the alternative becomes supposedly the reasonable, non-ideological idea Republicans would have supported. It’s always a lie.

There are two possible paths to either cap-and-trade or a carbon tax: One, Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and feel more pressure to address climate change than they did in 2010, when they let the opportunity slip away. Or, two, Republicans come to accept climate science and decide they want to save the world from burning. But until Republicans come around to acknowledge the reality of climate change, they’re not going to agree to a carbon tax.

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Stop Dreaming. Republicans Are Not Going for a Carbon Tax.

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

by Cristin7160 Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, we reported on Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Jim Hagedorn’s history of incendiary comments about women, American Indians, gays, people he suspected of being gay, and President Obama’s family. Two days later, Hagedorn took to Facebook to issue an apology…of sorts:

Over the years I have written political satire and commentary, most of which defended conservative ideals and took aim at national politicians I felt were failing the American people and hurting our country.

Even though most of my writings were composed more than 10 years ago, national and DFL liberals are determined to attack me personally, mostly by exhibiting snippets of out-dated, misunderstood or out-of-context material and calling me derogatory names.

In this case, the rather worn and tired Democrat tactic of personal destruction and demonization is designed to deflect attention from the serious problems confronting our nation and the failed big government record of President Barack Obama and devoted liberal followers like incumbent DFL Congressman Tim Walz.

Of course, these same politically correct liberals remain undeterred by the offensive writings authored in the past by Al Franken. In spite of this hypocrisy, I do acknowledge that some of my hard-hitting and tongue-in-cheek commentary was less than artfully constructed or included language that could lead to hurt feelings. I offer a sincere and heartfelt apology.

Rather than dwell in the rigged game of political correctness, my campaign will forge ahead and continue to engage with the people of southern Minnesota and address the issues that will decide our country’s future during these critical times.

A better way to avoid the “rigged game of political correctness,” would be to not disparage all American Indians as “thankless” welfare recipients. You can read more about Hagedorn’s past comments here.

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

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Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

by RosellaHahn Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the last couple days, voter registration booths have been popping up in Ferguson. There was one by the ruined site of the recently burned-down QuikTrip convenience store, which has become a central gathering site of the protests, and another near the site where Michael Brown was shot.

Voter turnout was just 12 percent in Ferguson’s last municipal election, and in a city that’s 60 percent black, virtually all city officials are white. In December, the black superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant school district was fired by the then all-white school board, and the longtime St. Louis county executive, who is black, recently lost his seat to a white opponent in a race seen as “racially charged.” “Five thousand new voters will transform the city from top to bottom,” said Jesse Jackson Sr., who told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday that he was meeting with local clergy to organize a door-to-door voter registration drive.

But the prospect of more registered black voters has greatly perturbed the executive director of Missouri’s Republican Party, Matt Wills, who expressed outrage at the new registration booths to Breitbart News Monday:

“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Wills said. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate…Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace.”

While some on Twitter echoed Wills’ sentiments and painted the voter efforts as Democratic opportunism, other political leaders in Missouri distanced themselves from Wills’ comments. Republican state Sen. Ryan Silvey of Kansas City tweeted, “I have no problem w/ protesters, or anyone, getting registered to vote. How do we keep our gov’t accountable if not by ballot?” And he had more to say later:

In April, an editorial in the Kansas City Star denounced “cheap” tactics by the Missouri GOP to “make voting more difficult for certain citizens, who are most likely to be elderly, low-income, students or minorities. They’re not even subtle about it.” A proposed amendment to the state constitution would require photo ID at the polls, and a proposal to bring early voting to Missouri would disallow it on Sundays—a big day for black voters. The Star pointed out that the photo ID law would cost the state over $6 million next year, “a huge cost, especially because Republicans have been able to produce zero examples of voter identity fraud in Missouri.” In fact, as my colleague Kevin Drum has exhaustively reported, incidents of voter fraud anywhere in the country are microscopically few; the New York Times found just 86 cases from 2002 to 2006, for instance.

“Elected officials don’t have to care about black citizens as long as they don’t fear them at the ballot box,” Dorothy A. Brown, a professor of law at Emory University’s School of Law who’s written a book on race and the law, noted on CNN.com last week. If anything, the Missouri GOP may be on track to increase the number of voters determined to put that notion into practice.

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Voter Registration Drives in Ferguson Are "Disgusting," Says Missouri GOP Leader

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Rick Perry Indictment Highlights the Hack Gap Once Again

by Houston68Q Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Simon Maloy finds five pundits arguing that last week’s indictment of Rick Perry was flimsy and obviously politically motivated:

Who are these five pundits downplaying the case against Texas’ Republican governor? In order: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, MSNBC host Ari Melber, political scientist and American Prospect contributor Scott Lemieux, the Center for American Progress’ Ian Millhiser, and the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis. Five guys who work/write for big-name liberal publications or organizations. This, friends, is the Hack Gap in action.

Ah yes, the hack gap. Where would we be without it? For the most part, it doesn’t show up on the policy side, where liberals and conservatives both feature a range of thinkers who bicker internally over lots of things. It mostly shows up on the process side. Is the legal reasoning on subject X sound? Is it appropriate to attack candidate Y in a particular way? Is program Z working well or poorly? How unanimously should we pretend that a mediocre speech/poll/debate performance is really a world-historical victory for our guy?

Both sides have hacks who are willing to take their party’s side on these things no matter how ridiculous their arguments are. But Republicans sure have a lot more of them. We’ve seen this most recently with Obamacare. Obviously liberals have been more positive in their assessments of how it’s doing, but they’ve also been perfectly willing to acknowledge its problems, ranging from the website rollout debacle to the problems of narrow networks to the reality of rate shock for at least some buyers. Conservatives, conversely, have been all but unanimous in their insistence that every single aspect of the program is a flat-out failure. Even as Obamacare’s initial problems were fixed and it became clear that, in fact, the program was working reasonably well, conservatives never changed their tune. They barely even acknowledged the good news, and when they did it was only to set up lengthy explanations of why it could be safely ignored. To this day, virtually no conservative pundits have made any concessions to reality. Obamacare is a failure on every possible front, and that’s that.

Liberals just don’t have quite this level of hackish discipline. Even on a subject as near and dear to the Democratic heart as Social Security, you could find some liberals who supported a version of privatization back when George Bush was hawking the idea in 2005. It’s pretty hard to imagine any conservatives doing the opposite.

Is this changing? Are liberals starting to close the gap? Possibly. The liberal narrative on events in Ferguson has stayed pretty firm even as bits and pieces of contradictory evidence have surfaced along the way. The fact that Michael Brown had robbed a convenience store; that he wasn’t running away when he was shot; and that a lighter policing touch didn’t stop the looting and violence—none of those things have changed the liberal storyline much. And maybe they shouldn’t, since they don’t really affect the deeper issues. A cop still pumped six rounds into an unarmed teenager; the militarized response to the subsequent protests remains disgraceful; and the obvious fear of Ferguson’s black community toward its white police force is palpable. Maybe it’s best to keep the focus there, where it belongs.

Still, a bit of honest acknowledgment that the story has taken a few confusing turns wouldn’t hurt. Just as having a few liberal voices defending Rick Perry doesn’t hurt. Keep it honest, folks.

POSTSCRIPT: And what do I think of the Perry indictment? I’m not sure. When I first saw the headlines on Friday I was shocked, but then I read the stories and realized this was all about something Perry had done very publicly. That seemed like a bit of a yawner, and it was getting late, so I just skipped commenting on it. By Monday, it hardly seemed worth rehashing, especially since I didn’t have a very good sense of the law involved.

So….I still don’t know. The special prosecutor who brought the indictment seems like a fairly straight shooter, so there might be something there. Overall, though, I guess it mostly seems like a pretty political use of prosecutorial power.

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Rick Perry Indictment Highlights the Hack Gap Once Again

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White House Tightens Up Arms Shipments to Israel

by BonitaIliffe Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has tightened up the process for providing arms to Israel:

White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.

Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.

….U.S. officials said Mr. Obama had a particularly combative phone call on Wednesday with Mr. Netanyahu, who they say has pushed the administration aside but wants it to provide Israel with security assurances in exchange for signing onto a long-term deal.

….While Israeli officials have privately told their U.S. counterparts the poor state of relations isn’t in Israel’s interest long term, they also said they believed Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t too worried about the tensions. The reason is that he can rely on the firmness of Israeli support in Congress, even if he doesn’t have the White House’s full approval for his policies. The prime minister thinks he can simply wait out the current administration, they say.

Well, I’d say the prime minister is probably right. It’s not as if Obama has actually done much of substance to put pressure on Israel despite endless provocations from Netanyahu, but it’s a very good bet that the next president will do even less. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is the heavy favorite, and she’s made it crystal clear that her support for Netanyahu is complete and total. On the Republican side, it doesn’t really matter who the nominee is. As long as it’s not Rand Paul, Netanyahu can expect unquestioning fealty.

And in the meantime, he can count on the US Congress not really caring that he publicly treats the US president like an errant child. I keep wondering if one day he’ll go too far even for Congress, but I’ve mostly given up. As near as I can tell, there’s almost literally nothing he could do that would cause so much as a grumble.

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White House Tightens Up Arms Shipments to Israel

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A Republican Lawsuit Against Obama Will Mostly Just Piss Off Democrats

by DelilahRegister Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an interesting tidbit via Greg Sargent. The latest McClatchy poll asked voters what they think of (a) impeaching Obama and (b) suing Obama. A full 45 percent of Republicans favor impeachment and 57 percent favor suing him. But if John Boehner’s lawsuit goes forward, how will that impact voting in November? The answer is not very comforting for Republican strategists:

The lawsuit, it turns out, acts to motivate Democrats considerably more than Republicans. If Boehner & Co. were hoping to use this as a way of motivating their base to turn out in November, it looks an awful lot like it backfired.

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A Republican Lawsuit Against Obama Will Mostly Just Piss Off Democrats

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Is There a Hillary Doctrine?

by UlrikeC65cfdksx Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Hillary Clinton is being taken as an effort by Hillary to distance herself from President Obama. Here’s the most frequently quoted snippet:

HRC: Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.

….JG: What is your organizing principle, then?

HRC: Peace, progress, and prosperity. This worked for a very long time. Take prosperity. That’s a huge domestic challenge for us. If we don’t restore the American dream for Americans, then you can forget about any kind of continuing leadership in the world. Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say, “We’re going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.”

I’ve seen the first part of this excerpt several times, and each time I’ve wondered, “So what’s your organizing principle.” When I finally got around to reading the interview, I discovered that this was Goldberg’s very next question. And guess what? Hillary doesn’t have one.

She’s basically hauling out an old chestnut: We need to be strong at home if we want to be strong overseas. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But it’s not an organizing principle for foreign policy. It’s not even close. At best, it’s a precursor to an organizing principle, and at worst it’s just a plain and simple evasion.

It so happens that I think “don’t do stupid stuff” is a pretty good approach to foreign policy at the moment. It’s underrated in most of life, in fact, while “doctrines” are mostly straitjackets that force you to fight the last war over and over and over. The fact that Hillary Clinton (a) brushes this off and (b) declines to say what her foreign policy would be based on—well, it frankly scares me. My read of all this is that Hillary is itching to outline a much more aggressive foreign policy but doesn’t think she can quite get away with it yet. She figures she needs to distance herself from Obama slowly, and she needs to wait for the American public to give her an opportunity. My guess is that any crisis will do that happens to pop up in 2015.

I don’t have any problems with Hillary’s domestic policy. I’ve never believed that she “understood” the Republican party better than Obama and therefore would have gotten more done if she’d won in 2008, but I don’t think she would have gotten any less done either. It’s close to a wash. But in foreign policy, I continually find myself wondering just where she stands. I suspect that she still chafes at being forced to repudiate her vote for the Iraq war—and largely losing to Obama because of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still believes that vote was the right thing to do, nor would I be surprised if her foreign policy turned out to be considerably more interventionist than either Bill’s or Obama’s.

But I don’t know for sure. And I probably never will unless she gets elected in 2016 and we get to find out.

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Is There a Hillary Doctrine?

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Republicans Hate Obama, Therefore Obama Should Avoid Making Them Even Madder

by Georgia3464 Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ron Fournier ponders the wisdom of President Obama issuing executive orders on immigration and tax inversions:

For argument’s sake, let’s say Obama is right on the issue and has legal authority to act. The big question is …

Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster.

Wait a second. If you think Obama is wrong on the merits, then naturally you’ll oppose any new executive action. If you think he’s right, but unfortunately lacks the constitutional authority to do anything about it, you’ll also oppose any new executive action.

But what if he’s both right and has the proper authority? That certainly sounds like the right formula for supporting executive action. But no. Obama still shouldn’t do anything because….wait for it….it would cause more polarization, gridlock, and incivility.

I frankly doubt it, but leave that to one side for the moment. What Fournier is saying is that President Obama shouldn’t do anything that might make Republicans mad. But this means the president is literally helpless: No proposal of his has any chance of securing serious Republican engagement in Congress, but he’s not allowed to take executive action for fear of making them even more intransigent. Obama’s only legitimate option, apparently, is to persuade Republicans to support his proposals, even though it’s no secret that Republicans decided years ago to obstruct everything, sight unseen, that was on Obama’s agenda. So that leaves Obama with no options at all.

And that means the next column will be all about Obama’s lack of leadership. Count on it.

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Republicans Hate Obama, Therefore Obama Should Avoid Making Them Even Madder

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

by KelleyCooley Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The Obama Cousin Who Compared Obama to Hitler Just Lost His Kansas GOP Primary

Fred Blocher/Kansas City Star/ZumaPress.com

Unseating an incumbent senator is always difficult, but Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) presented an enticing challenge. In an interview with the New York Times, Roberts said he sleeps on a friend’s recliner on the rare occasions he returns to Kansas. Later, in a radio interview, he admitted that he tries to return to Kansas “every time I get an opponent.” Roberts might have been in trouble against a serious challenger. Instead he faced political newcomer Milton Wolf, whom he dispatched by seven points on Tuesday.

Wolf’s qualifications as a Kansas tea party activist began with his family tree. He is a second cousin of President Barack Obama—whom he compared to Hitler—and a doctor, qualifications that earned him invitations to appear on cable news and talk radio to critique the Affordable Care Act as an unconstitutional attack on Americans’ liberties. But Wolf’s hopes of becoming the next great conservative insurgent candidate died in February at a Topeka diner, where a reporter from the Topeka Capital-Journal confronted him about images on his Facebook page (deleted before the campaign) of x-rays he’d taken of gunshot victims. Although billed as a tea party vs. establishment showdown, the Roberts-Wolf race was more of a referendum on social media protocol. And in Kansas, the verdict is clear: You shouldn’t post x-rays of gunshot victims on Facebook. —TM

GOP Rebel Justin Amash Just Beat a Guy Who Called Him “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) AP

The GOP’s business establishment talked openly about making conservative hardliners pay for pushing Washington toward a debt ceiling crisis last fall. But that wave of Chamber of Commerce-funded primary challengers to conservative incumbents never materialized. The Chamber settled on trying to take out Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a second term congressman and Ron Paul disciple famous for voting on no on pretty much everything—even the Paul Ryan budget—and for cobbling together a bipartisan coalition to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. It was the first part that drew the ire of business interests in his district, and the second part that made him the villain in one of the year’s nastiest campaign ads. Amash, challenger Brian Ellis warned, was “Al Qaeda’s best friend” in Congress.

Ellis received a rare primary endorsement from an incumbent member of Amash’s Michigan delegation, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, an NSA defender. But we’re not in 2002 anymore; it turns out Amash’s civil libertarianism plays pretty well in the western Michigan district that gave America Gerald Ford. Boosted by deep-pocketed donors of his own (including the DeVos family), Amash eased past Ellis, making him a sure-thing to win a third term in November. —TM

Michigan GOP Primary Results: “Foreclosure King” Beats Santa Impersonator

Trott for Congress; Kerry Bentivolio/Facebook

The War on Christmas seems to comes earlier every year: Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), a Santa impersonator who was elected to Congress by accident in 2012, was defeated in a 30-point landslide on Tuesday, becoming this year’s first (and probably only) victim of the Republican establishment’s dissatisfaction with congressional tea partiers.

Bentivolio won his party’s nomination two years ago in a fluke after the incumbent, Rep. Thad McCotter, failed to qualify for the ballot and abruptly resigned. (A high school teacher and reindeer rancher, Bentivolio was the only Republican left on the ballot.) Bentivolio never fully sold himself as a serious congressman—he once promised to hold a hearing on chemtrails, the conspiracy theory that airplanes are brainwashing Americans with poison—making him an obvious target, despite winning the backing of Speaker of the House John Boehner.

More interesting than Bentivolio, who always had a placeholder feel to him, is the man who trounced him the primary—David Trott, a high-powered Republican donor whose law firm happens to process most of Michigan’s foreclosures. As one registrar of deeds in southeast Michigan put it in December, Trott & Trott “made a living off of monetizing human misery.” A big donor to the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, and a member of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s Michigan finance committee, Trott is an archetypal establishment Republican.

But he’ll still have his work cut out for him: Romney won the 11th district by just four points in 2012. He’ll take on the winner of the Democratic race between former CIA analyst Bobby McKenzie (backed by national Democrats) and urologist Anil Kumar. —TM

Tea Partier Staves Off Primary Challenge in Koch Country

Todd Tiahrt (left) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (right) at a July debate in Wichita. Mike Hutmacher/AP

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) withstood a challenge from his predecessor, former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, in a battle for the House district that’s home to Charles Koch, the billionaire GOP donor and industrialist, and his company, Koch Industries. Tiahrt was a close ally of Koch Industries during his House tenure in the ’90s and 2000s, taking in more than $329,000 from the company’s PAC and employees over the course of his career. But Pompeo—whom Tiahrt handpicked to replace him when he ran for US Senate (and lost) in 2010—has since become Koch’s favorite son. The company endorsed Pompeo this time around. Koch’s backing boosted the incumbent’s monetary advantage. As of July 16, Pompeo had raised a little over $2 million, while Tiahrt had only drawn $155,000 (with just $65,000 left in the bank).

Pompeo was the incumbent, but his success is actually a win for the tea party. As a congressman, Tiahrt was a founding member of the House tea party caucus. But for his comeback attempt, he ditched his prior conservative persona and ran as a moderate, even populist Republican, arguing for the reinstatement of earmarks and questioning Pompeo’s support for NSA spying. Conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Prosperity lined up to support Pompeo, a tea party favorite since he joined the House in 2011. There won’t be a revival of moderate conservatism in Kochland anytime soon. —PC

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries