Category: Congress

#NV04 Gets Interesting

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My friend Niger Innis declared himself a candidate for Congress in Nevada’s 4th District today. Niger faces a GOP primary contest against a good conservative, and I’ve got some issues on his immigration policy, but (a) he’s my friend and (b) his candidacy may raise the profile of this key 2014 House race:

Republican Niger Innis on Wednesday launched his Nevada congressional campaign on a populist note, saying he wants to revive the “American dream” by expanding job opportunities for the poor and middle class and by helping small businesses thrive.
He said Democrats have not done enough to provide equal opportunity for the poor and middle class.
Innis slammed U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., for lamenting the gap between the rich and poor even though Reid has been in the majority power seat for seven years, including periods when Democrats held both houses and the White House and had more ability to make changes.
“They want to run on income inequality? Bring it on!” Innis said.
Innis also said his campaign will unveil a comprehensive immigration reform plan that would provide a pathway to U.S. citizenship for many of the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, although he said he would place a premium on ensuring the security of the U.S. border.
He said he’ll offer a health plan as well as Nevadans and Americans struggle to gain insurance coverage, now required by President Barack Obama’s health insurance law.
“We are a state that is filled with a diverse population of people who are not looking for government to solve their problems, but get out of the way of opportunity,” Innis said.
Innis, a conservative African-American and a member of the small-government Tea Party movement, is running for the 4th Congressional District seat now held by Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., a freshman and Nevada’s first black congressman. Innis also faces a primary against Assemblyman Cresent Hardy, R-Mesquite.
The vast congressional district, created in 2012 after the latest U.S. Census, covers most of northern Clark County, part of Lyon County, and all of Esmeralda, Lincoln, Mineral, Nye and White Pine counties. Still, more than four-fifths of the district’s population lives in Clark County, which is the home base for both Horsford and Innis.

Hey, we need to talk about this “pathway to citizenship” thing, OK? But other than that, good luck.

 

Big Senate, Little House

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by Smitty

A quaint notion I had in my youth was that wisdom and age were proportional. The older you got, the wiser you got, the further up the food chain you got. Thus (I was a young squid at the time) by the time one made Admiral, one must really Know. What’s. Up. The hard reality that I was wrong, and one must trust (but verify) one’s leadership dawned on me in my 20s. And the most ultimately wrong human being in American political history may have been Woodrow Wilson.

A century after that famous knob Woodrow, we have the spectacle of the Senate Majority/Minority leaders wheeling and dealing, passing legislation, and running it through the House in the crap-through-goose fashion (which metaphor holds on multiple levels) in order to prevent “default” and “reopen” government. How is that not a direct refutation of Article I, Section VII? The Senate, directly elected since the 17th Amendment, is a Little House, isn’t it? Continue reading Big Senate, Little House →

‘Cracker!’ Says Mendacious Swindler Charlie Rangel, Who Should Be in Prison

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Behold, the antonym of honesty speaks!

In an interview with the Daily Beast published Friday, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) suggested Tea Partiers are the “same group” who fought for segregation during the Civil Rights movement. “It is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police. They didn’t care about how they looked,” Rangel said.

Every time Charlie Rangel opens his mouth, remember that the only time his name ever appeared in the same sentence with the word “ethics” was when he was censured by the House Ethics Committee:

Rangel was found guilty by the ethics panel of 11 counts of violating ethics rules, including charges that he improperly solicited millions of dollars from corporate officials and lobbyists for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars of income and assets on financial disclosure forms, maintained a rent-stabilized apartment as a campaign office in a Harlem apartment building and failed to pay income taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic.

If he weren’t in Congress, he would be in federal prison, which is basically true of every Democrat, but Charlie Rangel is so crooked, even Democrats can’t deny it (and they lie about everything).

You could call him a “thief,” but that would be an insult to thieves.

 


#SC01 UPDATE: Mark Sanford Cites His Vote for DOMA in Local TV Roundtable

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Campaign signs outside Thursday’s debate venue

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford cited his vote for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) during a TV appearance with Republican rival Curtis Bostic, three days before their runoff in the 1st District special congressional election.

Appearing in a televised half-hour debate Saturday morning on Charleston NBC affiliate WCBD-TV’s “Beyond the Headlines” program, both Bostic and Sanford expressed their opposition to same-sex marriage. Sanford, who represented the 1st District for three terms beginning in 1995, referred to his own 1996 vote for DOMA, which President Clinton signed into law.

“I think that ultimately, you know, marriage is a sacrament and, you know, it is something that is ultimately in the purview of faith rather than civil authority,” said Sanford, whose 2009 sex scandal resulted in his own divorce, as well as a censure by the state legislature and a $74,000 ethics fine. “I voted, when  I was in the United States Congress, for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. It is not say, tragically, that every marriage makes it, but that this is the ideal we ought to be aiming for.”

DOMA was the subject of a Supreme Court hearing Wednesday, with several justices voicing skepticism about its constitutionality. In Saturday’s TV forum, Bostic called for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman under federal law.

 


 

PREVIOUSLY:

#TrustCurtis @Bostic4Congress Campaign Has Eight Days to Stop Sanford in S.C.

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The South Carolina runoff is a week from Tuesday and time is of the essence:

If South Carolina Republicans nominate disgraced former Gov. Mark Sanford in the First District special election, it would be “an off-year election gift” to “the late-night comedians and political press,” Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics wrote Friday. And given that the Democrats have nominated Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert, the campaign to fill the congressional seat vacated by the appointment of Tim Scott to the Senate is sure to attract national attention.
The only hope for the GOP to keep the scandal-stained Sanford from becoming the “face” of the party leading up to the May 7 election lies with Curtis Bostic, the former Charleston city councilman who placed second in the March 19 primary and will meet Sanford in the April 2 runoff. . . .

Read the whole thing at ViralRead. You should also read Matt Vespa’s Red State article comparing Curtis Bostic to Ted Cruz and Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post item explaining that Republicans “are absolutely in danger of losing the seat” if they nominate Sanford.

To show your support on Twitter, use the #Trust Curtis hashtag and please help promote the campaign’s emergency appeal at TrustCurtis.com. This might be a good time for a road trip . . .

 

S.C. Primary: Will Tea Party Rally Behind Curtis Bostic Against Mark Sanford?

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Family values: Curtis Bostic with his wife and five children

Dana Loesch this morning expressed disappointment that disgraced former Gov. Mark Sanford finished first in the South Carolina GOP congressional special-election primary. But it’s a runoff state, and Sanford only got 37 percent of the vote, while former Charleston City Councilman Curtis Bostic was second with 13 percent in the 16-candidate field. There are only two weeks until the April 1 runoff and, as National Review‘s Jim Geraghty notes, the Republican establishment seems to be lining up behind Sanford, so . . .

What about Curtis Bostic? His campaign page is StopSpending.com — a basic Tea Party theme — and it seems entirely possible that the grassroots, tired of the corrupt GOP establishment’s old-boy style of politics, could rally behind Bostic.

Reading his biography page, he’s a Marine veteran of Operation Desert Storm and the father of five home-schooled children. So there’s your pro-military and pro-family “street cred.”

Two weeks isn’t a lot of time. This is a very safe Republican district — Stephen Colbert’s sister won the Democrat primary, but she’ll get stomped in the May 7 special election to fill the seat vacated by Tim Scott’s promotion to the Senate. It’s a free shot, in other words: Torpedo the establishment pick — the guy who claimed he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” while cavorting in Buenos Aires with his Argentine mistress — and elect a strong (but unknown) conservative candidate.

Here’s the link to contribute to Curtis Bostic’s campaign. How many small donations — $25, $50, $100 — will Curtis Bostic get this week?

The RNC ignores blogs, but I see here an opportunity to remind them that the Army of Davids can still make a difference. What do you say?

CURTIS BOSTIC for CONGRESS

 

The Fight Begins Now: Mid-Term 2014

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
The big headlines out of CPAC this year, as usual, were focused on main-stage speeches by potential Republican presidential candidates for 2016, but that’s still three years away and conservatives cannot afford to look past next year’s mid-term election. So, to me, one of the most important events of this week’s conference was this:

Utah’s 4th District — where Republican Mia Love came within 800 votes of unseating Democrat Rep. Jim Matheson last November — tops the list of more than 40 Democrat-held seats targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in next year’s mid-term elections.
Mattheson held onto his seat last fall despite the fact Romney carried 67 percent of the vote in the 4th District. Love, who is mayor of Saratoga Springs, raised more than $2 million for her 2012 campaign and is seen as one of the most promising new faces in the conservative movement. Love received an enthusiastic welcome at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
During a briefing for bloggers at CPAC this weekend, NRCC Chairman Greg Walden described the committee’s top list of targeted Democrat-held seats as the “slippery seven,” because they have so often eluded Republicans’ grasp. . . .

Please read the whole thing at Viral Read. The fight by Republicans to recapture the Senate will likely overshadow the GOP’s battle to hold onto — and perhaps expand — their House majority in 2014. Some readers may remember how hard it was to get attention for Republican challengers in 2010, which is why I want to start early trying to focus attention on these key races for next year. The 2016 beauty pageant must be viewed as a dangerous distraction from the real fight at hand.

The NRCC chairman seems like a solid, smart man with a business background who can be counted on to run an effective campaign for 2014. The NRCC’s digital coordinator Nick Martelli was savvy enough to arrange a blogger briefing at CPAC, and Walden said that online messaging will be an “integral” component of their plans for next year’s mid-terms. You can become part of that team by following @RepGregWalden, @NickMarcelli and @NRCC on Twitter.

And, oh, yeah: Mia Love’s already gearing up for 2014.

 


What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make Whose Idea The Sequester Was?

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by Smitty

Oh, the high-minded tones of the apologists, e.g. Mataconis:

Therefore, President Obama is incorrect to attempt to place sole responsibility for the sequester on the Republicans. At the same time, though, it’s true that the negotiations that led to the sequester would not have been necessary if Republicans had not insisted in the summer of 2011 that any deal to raise the debt ceiling including spending cuts. It’s also true that the Budget Control Act passed both the House and the Senate with majority Republican support. Therefore, it’s incorrect for Republicans to claim that the sequester, which they now want to see go through, was the President’s idea entirely. As with most of the bad things that come out of Washington, the sequester is one that both parties are equally responsible for.

I confess I get a kick out of Mataconis on Twitter. Follow the guy. He badly wants to make 10K followers. His tweet stream, which manages to combine a fine abstract libertarianism with a strong devotion to the status quo within the beltway, remain a thing of beauty.

Look, Doug, this is a question of leadership, that commodity in such scarce supply in our age of homo bureaucratus. If President Obama gets the credit for delivering his speeches, or bagging Osama, then the flip side is that he owns the sequester. I realize that, as a lawyer, attempts at blame spreading are what you do on defense. Conservatives do it, too, pointing out that the Democrats retook Congress in 2006, in an attempt to mitigate Bush’s folly, as spoofed immortally in this (NSFW) SNL bit from 2006:

Don’t laugh. If the GOP keeps tubing it, the Congressional S&M dungeon could make a comeback.

Back on topic, though, sequestration is an important part of the demolition of our constitutional order. Rather than lead any sort of sober reform, the Obama Administration continues to place legislative Improvised ‘Explosive’ Devices (IEDs) along the road, with the apparent goal of eliminating the opposition. Moving the foe off the map is a strategy for unifying the remainder, I suppose.

And, sure, we can criticize the GOP for failing to come up with anything bolder than Ryan’s budget, which basically pets the malignant tumor of entitlements as though they were a cat. And then there is the Senate, which hasn’t passed new budget legislation in four years. Elections have consequences, as we have learned. The GOP wants to hold the Progressive course, and expects that trotting out the patriot drum for elections is going to help Republicans re-take the helm. Maybe, maybe not. Progress is dying, and Obama is the captain, and he receives all the blame/credit that implies.