Mike Scruggs
The ripple effect of questionable campaign tactics used by some of the Republican Establishment supporters of incumbent U.S. Senator Thad Cochran against his challenger, Republican State Senator Chris McDaniel, is beginning to look more like the early stages of a moral hurricane threatening GOP election hopes in 2014 and 2016.
Cochran’s record has been moderately conservative in the past. On the immigration issues, which voters are finally recognizing as having critical importance, his recent rating by NumbersUSA was 83 percent. More recent inquiries, however, indicate that Cochran was weak on verifying immigration status for employment (E-Verify), internal immigration enforcement, eliminating birthright citizenship, assisting local law enforcement, defunding illegal immigration sanctuary cities, and possibly even amnesty and protecting U.S. workers from massive legislated cheap foreign labor importation. He fully supports border enforcement, but border enforcement is ineffective without internal and workplace enforcement. McDaniel is more conservative on immigration. Cochran’s recent Heritage Foundation Action Scorecard was only 57 percent, below the Republican average of 67 percent. Cochran was weakest on reining in government spending, but like many otherwise fiscally conservative politicians, Cochran was happy to see his own state get a generous share of Federal spending. McDaniel is more conservative on spending. In consequence of his more conservative positions, especially on spending and immigration, McDaniel had widespread grassroots-conservative backing including the support of Mississippi Tea Parties.
Like South Carolina, Mississippi has no party registration. Registered voters participate in whatever primary they choose but are prohibited in voting in runoffs, if they voted in the other party’s initial primary. This has resulted in extensive opposing party manipulation of primary results. In both South Carolina and Mississippi, it was Democratic oriented voters crossing over to influence the Republican Primary. In South Carolina, cross-over voting allowed, Lindsey Graham, one of the GOP’s most liberal U.S. Senators to beat three formidable conservative opponents. Graham got 56 percent of the vote, well over the required 50 percent in South Carolina. Only 113,000 voted in the Democratic Primary, down 75,000 from the 2010 primary. With immense help from pro-amnesty liberal PAC money, Graham also had $8.5 million to spend against four funded opponents, who did not have $2.0 million among them. They never raised Graham’s amnesty voting record against him. Even many conservative Republicans have been intimidated from raising critical immigration issues—a grim testimony to the effectiveness of media-backed cultural Marxist methods of enforcing political correctness in the United States. Following his primary victory, Graham raced to Mississippi to help Cochran, an indication that conservative concerns about Cochran’s leftward drift on immigration were not unwarranted.
A huge part of the national background on all this was a full-court press by powerful Republican Establishment leaders; including the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Reince Priebus; the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, the recently defeated Republican House Leader, Eric Cantor; and the four Republican members of the Senate Gang-of-Eight—John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Jeff Flake--authors of a pending Senate amnesty bill, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says will also bring in at least 20 million additional legal foreign workers over the next decade. The last four have been crying that there is a labor shortage, even though 20 million Americans want a full-time job and cannot find one. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) also just released a report confirming that the entire net gain of 5.7 million in U.S. employment since 2000 went to immigrants. U.S. born workers suffered a net employment loss of 127,000 over the same period despite a 26 million, 14 per cent, growth in working-age population. In addition 7.5 million workers were reduced from full-time to part time. At the heart of this issue, according to Harvard economist George Borjas, is that cheap foreign labor profits U.S businesses $435 billion per year, but does not benefit the U.S. economy, principally because it depresses U.S. wages $400 billion per year, nearly $2,800 annually per American wage earner.
The conduct of Cochran’s campaign staff and supporters may have reached a new low in Republican ethical standards. Literature was distributed saying that McDaniel’s Tea Party supporters wanted to stop blacks from voting. The British Daily Mail reported that one “commercial” or robo-call tried to connect McDaniel to an alleged supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. The narrative of this “commercial” included this sentence: “If the Tea Party with their racist ideas win, we will be set back to the ‘50s and ’60s.” The ad further warned that voting for McDaniel could mean losing food stamps, school lunches, and other government programs. Another robo-call voiced by a woman began: “The time has come to say no to the Tea Party, no to their disrespectful treatment of the first African-American President.”
Also according to the Daily Mail, the ads were tagged “paid for by Citizens for Progress,” which is not listed with the Federal Elections Commission. The name has been used before, however, by Atlanta Pastor Mitzi Bickers, who is on the payroll of Mississippi Conservatives a “Super-PAC” created by former Mississippi Governor and prominent amnesty/cheap labor lobbyist, Haley Barbour and run by his nephew, Henry Barbour. The largest donors to Mississippi Conservatives are liberals. Henry Barbour has admitted hiring Bickers to do robo-calls, but has denied running any racially charged commercials. He was the author of the RNC’s misinformed 2013 report recommending amnesty. Allegations of cash vote buying have also surfaced.
Allegations of significant illegal primary voting have been made by McDaniel.
Run-off voting was up 40 percent in heavily black counties.
Senator Ted Cruz recently rebuked the “D. C. machine” for racially charged false attacks. Missouri GOP Chairman Ed Martin, an RNC member, has asked RNC Chairman Priebus to appoint an investigative task force on disreputable campaign conduct.
Hooray for Ted Cruz and Ed Martin. Aren't Republicans supposed to be the good guys? Some, however, want to cover up GOP ethical transgressions, because they threaten the GOP target of 51 Republicans to control the Senate. The author of Proverbs 28: 13 would reject the cover up alternative. “Whoever covers his transgressions will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
Let’s be a party that honors truth and fairness to all and quickly remedies its transgressions.
Check NRO article on Mitzi Bickersi by Eliana Johnson
No comments:
Post a Comment