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Tag: karen handel
GOP Harassed Rep. McBath’s Family With Fake Residency Scheme

GOP Harassed Rep. McBath’s Family With Fake Residency Scheme

Republicans are going low in a House race in Georgia, harassing the elderly mother-in-law of Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, whose gun control advocacy following the murder of her son vaulted her to Congress in a historically Republican district in 2018.

The National Republican Congressional Committee — which exists to help elect Republicans to the House — sent a package to McBath’s elderly mother-in-law’s house in Tennessee in an attempt to “troll” the Democrat over phony residency questions.

McBath says her mother-in-law signed for the unsolicited package.

The NRCC claimed it was McBath’s signature, apparently trying to prove she actually lives in Tennessee and is therefore not eligible to represent the 6th Congressional District in Georgia. And it got Fox News, a.k.a. Republican state television, to write up the story as a hit piece, which they can inevitably cite in future attack ads against her in 2020.

Of course, the signature (pictured below) is obviously not Rep. McBath’s. She says her mother-in-law signed for the unsolicited package. And you can see that it’s signed “M McBath” — “M” being the first initial of her mother-in-law, Margaret.

A photo of McBath’s signature, pictured below, looks nothing like the signature from the package.

McBath called the NRCC’s trolling the kind of political hijinks that made her want to run for Congress in the first place.

“Sadly, the Republicans are pulling my family into false attacks,” McBath said in a statement posted on Twitter. “This is exactly why I ran for office in the first place, because I am tired of politics as usual — and my constituents deserve better.”

McBath is one of the Democratic success stories of 2018.

She defeated GOP Rep. Karen Handel in a suburban Atlanta House seat that has been historically Republican for decades. Her success was in part thanks to her personal story of becoming a gun control activist, after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed by a white man who was angry at Davis and his friends for playing music at a Florida gas station.

 

Angry about her win, Republicans are targeting McBath in 2020 — which is likely to be a rematch with Handel, who announced she’s running again for the seat.

And in order to boost Republican chances in the race, the NRCC is playing a game of immature “gotcha” politics.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Republican Handel Beats Democrat Ossoff In Georgia 6th Special Election

Republican Handel Beats Democrat Ossoff In Georgia 6th Special Election

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. (Reuters) – Republican Karen Handel won a hotly contested Georgia congressional race on Tuesday, CNN reported, fending off a Democratic challenge in a race that was widely seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump.

With more than 65 percent of the votes counted, CNN predicted that Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, would defeat Democrat Jon Ossoff, a political newcomer who sought to wrest control of a suburban Atlanta district that has elected Republicans to Congress since the 1970s.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Amanda Becker in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Peter Cooney)

IMAGE: Karen Handel, Republican candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, leaves after speaking to supporters during a brief appearance at her election night party at the Hyatt Regency at Villa Christina in Atlanta, June 20, 2017. REUTERS/Bita Honarvar

Purple Georgia 6th: Ossoff Scores Big Win But Faces June Runoff

Purple Georgia 6th: Ossoff Scores Big Win But Faces June Runoff

 

DUNWOODY, Ga. (Reuters) – A novice Democratic candidate weathered attacks from President Donald Trump and finished well ahead of his Republican rivals in a much-watched Georgia congressional race on Tuesday, but appeared to fall short of the majority he needed to win outright.

Democrat Jon Ossoff ended up as the top vote getter in a crowded field of 18 candidates vying to fill a vacant seat in the House of Representatives. But with 185 of 210 precincts reporting, he held 48.3 percent of the vote – just shy of the 50 percent he needed to become the first Democrat to represent Atlanta’s affluent northern suburbs since the 1970s.

That would tee up a June 20 runoff with Republican Karen Handel, who was headed to a second-place finish with 19.5 percent of the vote.

With few other events on the political calendar, the race was seen as a bellwether of the national mood during Trump’s turbulent first few months in office. Republicans have controlled the seat for decades, but Trump only won it by 1 percentage point in last November’s presidential election.

“This is already a victory for the ages. We have defied the odds, we have shattered expectations,” Ossoff told a cheering crowd of supporters.

The winner replaces Republican Tom Price, who stepped down to serve as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Democrats, searching for answers at a time when they are shut out of power in Washington, found a unifying figure in Ossoff, a 30-year-old documentary filmmaker who campaigned on a promise to “Make Trump Furious.” He raised more than $8 million in the first three months of the year, much of it from out of state, and drew volunteers from across the country.

Ossoff benefited from a fractured Republican field of 11 candidates, some of whom emphasized their loyalty to Trump while others kept their distance. Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, did not mention Trump during a 10-minute speech on Tuesday night, according to local media.

National Republican groups spent millions of dollars painting Ossoff as a neophyte who does not live in the area he aims to represent. Trump himself targeted Ossoff with robocalls and a barrage of Twitter messages.

“BIG ‘R’ win with runoff in Georgia. Glad to be of help!” he wrote late on Tuesday.

Ossoff grew up in the district and says he will move back if he wins.

An Ossoff win would not tip the balance of power in Washington, where Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress. But it could weaken the already shaky hold Trump has on his fellow Republicans by encouraging lawmakers to distance themselves from him.

Trump’s approval rating has not topped 50 percent since he took office on Jan. 20, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

The party avoided embarrassment last week when it narrowly held a conservative Kansas seat vacated when Trump tapped Republican Representative Mike Pompeo to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Peter Cooney and Stephen Coates)

IMAGE: Supporters of Sixth District Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff cheer at Election Night party in Sandy Springs, Georgia, April 18, 2017.  REUTERS/Marvin Gentry

Tea Party Has Succeeded In Moving GOP Further Right

Tea Party Has Succeeded In Moving GOP Further Right

Last week, primary elections in several states killed off a few ultraconservative candidates whose views flirted with nuttiness. In Georgia, for example, U.S. Rep. Paul Broun — a physician who has called evolution and the big-bang theory “lies straight from the pit of hell” — drew only 9.8 percent of the vote in a crowded race to become the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

In the same Georgia primary contest, U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, an obstetrician-gynecologist, pulled down just 10 percent of the vote. Last year, the gaffe-prone Gingrey drew national ridicule for defending former Missouri congressman Todd Akin, who had said that natural processes protect a woman from pregnancy after rape.

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell easily dispatched a Republican challenger, Matt Bevin, who had suggested that legalizing gay marriage could lead to parents marrying their children.

Those results, among others, cheered the Republican establishment, which has grown tired of fielding weird candidates who cannot win general elections, and led to a round of obituaries for the Tea Party movement, which had backed several of the losers. According to the chattering classes, the election results prove that the Tea Party is on life support, a dying force in conservative politics. That goes double for the doyenne of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin, whose chosen candidate in the Georgia Senate primary, Karen Handel, also lost.

But that view is just wrong. Tea Partiers have already accomplished what they set out to do: move the Republican Party much further to the right. While the foot-in-mouth, reality-challenged candidates may have been swept from the stage, the Tea Party has grafted its DNA onto the GOP. The Republican Party is now a small tent of hard-right absolutists who deny science, worship the rich and detest compromise.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize his party — and wouldn’t be welcome there either, as former Florida governor Jeb Bush noted two years ago. “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground,” he said.

Georgia’s Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat (as Senator Saxby Chambliss retires) was instructive. It was a frenzy of Obama-bashing, an unedifying contest among candidates who repeated far-right orthodoxy like a mantra. They pledged to fight Obamacare, to resist tax increases, to cut spending on social programs, to defend every citizen’s right to own a shoulder-fired rocket launcher. Each of them pledged to fight abortion, though they all want to cut the programs that help keep poor babies healthy.

When the leading candidate, millionaire businessman David Perdue, said something rational, it was denounced as a gaffe and used as fodder by his opponents. Asked by a Macon Telegraph editorial writer whether he would chose spending cuts or increased revenue to improve the economy, Perdue said “both.” His opponents jumped on the remark quickly, claiming he had given notice that he would raise taxes.

The peculiar aversion to compromise runs counter to the example set by Reagan, the patron saint of the modern conservative movement. He famously bartered with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill to arrive at a 1983 agreement to cut spending and raise taxes, which firmed up Social Security for a generation.

Yet, the Tea Party takeover of the GOP is holding strong, producing an adherence to far-right dogma. That’s what voters are likely to see in the runoff for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat, in which frontrunner Perdue will face U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston on July 22. Both candidates will feel pressure to prove themselves to the Tea Party supporters who voted for Gingrey, Broun and Handel, so they’ll engage in even more ultraconservative rhetoric and indulge even more right-wing impulses.

The Republican establishment thought that it was going to use the energy of far-right activists to win elections while remaining firmly in control. If any members of the GOP establishment — including old-line institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce — still believe that’s what happened, they are only fooling themselves.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Hyosub/Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/MCT