Mother Jones
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) just wanted to get rid of a program good-government advocates consider corporate welfare. He ended up in the tea party’s crosshairs instead.
Since last week, voters in Kansas’ first congressional district—covering the western part of the state—have been flooded with ads blasting the second-term incumbent for co-sponsoring a bill in April that would eliminate a federal mandate that gasoline include ethanol. “Washington, DC, sure has changed Tim Huelskamp,” Tom Willis, an agribusiness CEO from Liberal, Kansas, says in one ad.
The ad was paid for by Now or Never PAC, a conservative super-PAC that has spent more than $8 million since 2012 in support of tea party candidates. Huelskamp, who once compared the Obamacare rollout to Hurricane Katrina and proposed impeaching Attorney General Eric Holder over his refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, is the kind of candidate Now or Never PAC would traditionally get behind. Instead, in the week leading up to Tuesday’s congressional primary, Now or Never has spent $260,000 hammering Huelskamp—and in the process, propping up his opponent, Alan LaPolice, a little-known Army vet and onetime actor who has lived in the district full-time for only a year.
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