Tag: virginia foxx
GOP Split: Far Right Gains Ground In East, While Losing Out West

GOP Split: Far Right Gains Ground In East, While Losing Out West

The Republican Party’s radical right flank is making inroads among voters and winning key primaries east of the Mississippi. But out West, among the five states that held their 2022 primary elections on May 17, a string of GOP candidates for office who deny the 2020’s presidential election results and have embraced various conspiracies were rejected by Republicans who voted for more mainstream conservatives.

In Pennsylvania, Douglas Mastriano, an election denier and white nationalist, won the GOP’s nomination for governor. He received 568,000 votes, which was 44.1 percent of the vote in a low turnout primary. One-quarter of Pennsylvania’s nine million registered voters cast ballots.

In Idaho, by contrast, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who also claimed Joe Biden’s election was illegitimate and has campaigned at white supremacist rallies, according to the Western States Center, an Oregon-based group that monitors the far-right, lost her bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination to incumbent Gov. Brad Little.

Idaho also saw two 2020 election-denying candidates vying for the GOP nomination for secretary of state lose to a career civil servant and election administrator who defended 2020’s results as accurate. On the other hand, an ex-congressman who is an election denier won the GOP primary for attorney general.

“In addition to Janice McGeachin, who was defeated in her bid for governor, a number of other anti-democracy candidates were rejected by voters, including Priscilla Giddings, who ran for [Idaho] Lieutenant Governor; Dorothy Moon, who ran for Secretary of State; and Chad Christensen, Todd Engel and Eric Parker, who mounted bids for the state legislature,” the Western States Center’s analysis said. “In Ada County, anti-Semitic sheriff candidate Doug Traubel was soundly defeated, alongside losses for Proud Boy and conspiratorial candidates in Oregon.”

Voters in western states with histories of far-right organizing and militia violence have more experience sizing up extremist politics and candidates than voters out east, the Center suggested. However, as May 17’s five state primaries make clear, the GOP’s far right flank is ascendant nationally.

Various stripes of GOP conspiracy theorists and uncompromising culture war-embracing candidates attracted a third or more of the May 17 primary electorate, a volume of votes sufficient to win some high-stakes races in crowded fields.

Low Turnouts Boost GOP Radicals

The highest-profile contests were in the presidential swing state of Pennsylvania, where Mastriano, a state legislator, won the gubernatorial primary with votes from less than seven percent of Pennsylvania’s nine million registered voters.

In its primary for an open U.S. Senate seat, several thousand votes separated two election-denier candidates, a margin that will trigger a recount. As Pennsylvania’s mailed-out ballots are counted and added into totals, the lead keeps shifting between hedge-fund billionaire David McCormick and celebrity broadcaster Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Mastriano campaigned on his rejection of President Joe Biden’s victory, chartered buses to transport Trump supporters to the U.S. Capitol for what became the January 6 insurrection, is stridently anti-abortion and often says his religion shapes his politics. On his primary victory night, he sounded like former President Trump, proclaiming that he and his base were aggrieved underdogs.

“We’re under siege now,” Mastriano told supporters, according to a Philadelphia Inquirerreport. “The media doesn’t like groups of us who believe certain things.”

That “siege” appears to include a cold shoulder from pro-corporate Republicans who campaigned against Mastriano as the primary crested, fearing that he would lose in the fall’s general election. A day after the May 17 primary, the Republican Governors Association downplayed his victory, a signal that it was unlikely to steer donors toward him, the Washington Postreported.

Other election-denying candidates sailed to victory across Pennsylvania, including five GOP congressmen who voted against certifying their state’s 2020 Electoral College slate: Scott Perry, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Guy Reschenthaler and Lloyd Smucker. Their primaries, while not garnering national attention, underscore Trump’s enduring impact on wide swathes of the Republican Party.

It remains to be seen if any of the primary winners will prevail in the fall’s general election. It may be that candidates who can win in crowded primary fields when a quarter to a third of voters turn out will not win in the fall, when turnout is likely to double. But a closer look at some primary results shows that large numbers of Republican voters are embracing extremists – even if individual candidates lose.

That trend can be seen in Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor’s race. The combined votes of three election-denying candidates (Rick Saccone, 15.63 percent; Teddy Daniels, 12.28 percent; Russ Diamond, 5.87 percent) was about 35 percent. That share of the party’s electorate, had it voted for one candidate, would have defeated the primary winner, Carrie Delrosso, a more moderate Republican who received 25.88 percent of the vote and will have to defend conspiracies as Mastriano’s running mate.

Fissures Inside the GOP

While Trump-appeasing candidates won primaries in May 17’s four other primary states – Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oregon – some outspoken and badly behaved GOP radicals, such as North Carolina’s Rep. Madison Cawthorn, lost to a more traditional conservative Republican.

Cawthorn was defeated by Chuck Edwards, a pro-business Republican and state senator described by the Washington Post as “a McDonald’s franchise owner [who] was head of the local chamber of commerce.”

Edwards campaigned on returning the House to a GOP majority and backed a predictable obstructionist agenda to block the Biden White House, as opposed to Cawthorn’s embrace of 2020 election conspiracies and incendiary antics – which included taking loaded guns on planes and accusing other GOP congressmen of lurid and illegal behavior.

Edward’s focus, the Post reported, “will be on ‘removing the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hand, and then taking the teleprompter from Joe Biden and restoring the policies that we enjoyed under the Trump administration, to help get this country back on track.’”

Cawthorn’s defeat came as North Carolina Republicans chose a Trump-praising candidate, Ted Budd, for its U.S. Senate nomination over an ex-governor, Pat McCrory.

As Tim Miller noted in the May 18 morning newsletter from The Bulwark, a pro-Republican but anti-Trump news and opinion website, McCrory had “criticized Trump over his Putinphilia and insurrectionist incitement… he lost bigly to Ted Budd, a milquetoast Trump stooge who will do what he’s told.”

As in Pennsylvania, a handful of incumbent congressmembers in North Carolina who voted to reject their 2020 Electoral College slate, easily won their primaries.

“Virginia Foxx and Greg Murphy voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election after the events of January 6 and have been endorsed by Trump in their 2022 campaigns,” said a May 17 factsheet from ProjectDefendDemocracy.com, a website that tracks the GOP’s election-denying candidates. “Foxx was later fined $5,000 for failing to comply with security measures put in place in the House after the January 6 attack and Murphy has claimed that antifa may have been responsible for the violence at the Capitol.”

Foxx won her primary with 77 percent of the vote. Murphy won his primary with 76 percent of the vote.

Idaho Republicans Clash

The election-denial and conspiracy-embracing candidates fared less well in May 17’s primaries out West, the Western States Center’s analysis noted.

“Yesterday in elections in Oregon and Idaho, anti-democracy candidates were defeated in several marquee races,” it said. “Most notably, Idaho gubernatorial hopeful Janice McGeachin, whose embrace of white nationalism and militias was soundly rejected by voters.”

In the GOP primary for secretary of state, which oversees Idaho’s elections, Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, narrowly beat two 2020 election deniers, state Rep. Dorothy Moon (R-Stanley) and state Sen. Mary Souza (R-Coeur d’Alene). McCrane had 43.1 percent or 114,392 votes. Moon had 41.4 percent, or 109,898 votes. Souza had 15.5 percent or 41,201 votes.

“Donald Trump carried Idaho by 30 points in 2020, but… State Rep. Dorothy Moon has alleged without evidence that people are ‘coming over and voting’ in Idaho from Canada and called for the decertification of the 2020 election,” said ProjectDefendDemocracy.com’s factsheet. “State Sen. Mary Souza is part of the voter suppression group the Honest Elections Project and has blamed ‘ballot harvesting’ for Biden’s victory. Only Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane has stated that he believes that Idaho’s elections are legitimate, and that Joe Biden was the winner of the 2020 election.”

Another way of looking at the contest’s results is that an election-denying candidate might have won, had Idaho’s Republican Party more forcefully controlled how many candidates were running for this office. Together, Moon and Souza won nearly 57 percent of the vote, compared to McCrane’s 43 percent.

McGrane will be part of a GOP ticket that includes an election denier who won the primary for attorney general. Former congressman Raul Labrador received 51.5 percent of the vote, compared to the five-term incumbent, Lawrence Wasden, who received 37.9 percent. Labrador accused Wasden of “being insufficiently committed to overturning the 2020 election,” ProjectDefendDemocracy said.

On the other hand, another 2020 election defender won his GOP primaries. Rep. Mike Simpson won 53.3 percent of the vote in Idaho’s second U.S. House district in a field with several challengers who attacked him for being one of 35 House Republicans who voted in favor of creating the January 6 committee.

What Do GOP Voters Want?

But Mastriano’s victory in Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial primary, more so than any other outcome from May 17’s primaries, is “giving the GOP fits,” as the New York Times’ Blake Hounshell, its ‘On Politics’ editor, wrote Wednesday.

“Conversations with Republican strategists, donors and lobbyists in and outside of Pennsylvania in recent days reveal a party seething with anxiety, dissension and score-settling over Mastriano’s nomination,” Hounshell said.

That assessment may be accurate. But one key voice – or GOP sector – is missing from the Times’ analysis: the GOP’s primary voter, a third or more on May 17, embraced conspiratorial candidates – though more widely in the East than in the West.

“For decades we’ve seen that our [western] region has been a bellwether for white nationalist and paramilitary attacks on democratic institutions and communities, but also home to the broad, moral coalitions that have risen up to defeat them,” said the Western States Center’s Eric K. Ward. “The defeat of anti-democracy candidates with white nationalist and paramilitary ties up and down the ballot is evidence that those of us committed to inclusive democracy, even if we have vastly different political views, do indeed have the power to come together to defeat movements that traffic in bigotry, white nationalism, and political violence.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth.He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

James Clyburn

House Republicans Insisted On Probing Benghazi — But Not Coronavirus Carnage

The House of Representatives voted 212 to 182 on Thursday to create a special panel to oversee the coronavirus pandemic and the federal government's response. But all 181 Republicans present and one conservative independent opposed the measure, with many dismissing the request for additional oversight as a scheme to hurt Donald Trump during an election year.

The new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis will be chaired by Majority Whip James Clyburn, under the auspices of the Oversight Committee. It will have broad subpoena power and be tasked with overseeing taxpayer-funded COVID-19 relief programs, the pandemic's economic impact, any disparate impact on minorities, and the executive branch's preparedness, response, and decision-making.

Read NowShow less
Top Donor For House Education Chair Is For-Profit College Facing Federal And State Fraud Probes

Top Donor For House Education Chair Is For-Profit College Facing Federal And State Fraud Probes

by David Halperin, Republic Report.

As reported recently by OpenSecrets, Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) has no serious opposition in her bid for re-election, yet has received more than $800,000 in campaign contributions. More than half of that money has come from outside North Carolina, much of it from corporate special interests.

The biggest industry donating to Foxx, who is chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education, is the for-profit education industry, which is fighting to stop the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” rule. That regulation, for which public comments are due this week, would hold predatory companies in the career education industry accountable for its heavily documented waste, fraud, and abuse of federal tax dollars and for the countless students across the country who have been left with worthless degrees and overwhelming debt.

For-profit colleges don’t have any credible arguments against the gainful employment rule, so instead they use the thing that talks loudest in Washington: money. And they have plenty of it; despite declining enrollments and plunging share prices amid mounting public awareness of industry abuses, the for-profit colleges have cash to spend, because their industry has been getting as much as $33 billion per year from taxpayers.

The single biggest donor group to Foxx, by almost a factor of two, is Santa Ana, California-based, for-profit Corinthian Colleges.

Corinthian, which operates Everest, Heald and WyoTech colleges, has a troubling record. The company faces a major lawsuit from California attorney general Kamala Harris, who has charged that Corinthian has engaged in “false and predatory advertising, intentional misrepresentations to students, securities fraud and unlawful use of military seals in advertisements.” Corinthian is also under investigation by a group of 16 state attorneys general (Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington and Pennsylvania) into its recruiting and business practices, and faces a separate probe by Massachusetts’ AG.

Federal investigators also are probing Corinthian. In June 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a subpoena to the company concerning student recruitment, degree completion, job placement, loan defaults and compliance with U.S. Education Department rules. In September 2013 Corinthian reported that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating claims that the company violated the False Claims Act with respect to its recruiting and financial aid practices and by, among other things, manipulating attendance records to keep federal aid for students no longer in attendance. In December 2013, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau notified Corinthian that it expected to pursue legal action against the company for violation of federal laws with respect to private students loans.

And in January, even the U.S. Department of Education, whose enforcement efforts have generally failed to address for-profit colleges abuses, moved toward taking tough measures with Corinthian, saying in a letter to the company that there were signs of “systematic deficiencies” in its operations and charging that the company “has admitted to falsifying placement rates and/or grad and attendance records at various institutions and because of ongoing state and federal investigations into serious allegations.”

Corinthian fared poorly under a trial run of an earlier version of the gainful employment rule, which would take away eligibility for federal student grants and loans from schools whose graduates and dropouts are consistently unable to repay their student loans. Schools with high prices and poor records of training and placing students tend to flunk the gainful employment test, because their students borrow too much and earn too little after leaving.

Foxx in the past has invoked the Nazi Holocaust in discussing regulation of for-profit colleges, and on another occasion stated that she has ”very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.”

Corinthian is a member of the for-profit trade association APSCU, which is leading the opposition to the gainful employment rule. Corinthian also spent $310,000 in the first quarter of 2014 for its own lobbying team, included former Rep. Vic Fazio (D-CA) from the law firm Akin Gump.

Foxx, along with House Education Committee chairman John Kline (R-MN), another major recipient of for-profit college campaign cash, has led the effort in the House to oppose the gainful employment rule and other measures to curb abuses by for-profit colleges. Foxx is lead sponsor of the “Supporting Academic Freedom Through Regulatory Relief Act,” which has nothing to do with actual academic freedom, but instead would block the gainful employment rule and also would relax federal standards so for-profit college boiler room operations can more easily engage in coercive recruiting of students.

CQ has reported that Kline is urging House Appropriations Committee members to include a policy rider in the Labor-HHS-Education bill blocking the gainful employment rule.

This article originally appeared on Republic Report.

This article also appears onHuffington Post.

Photo: Rep Virginia Foxx via Flickr