They Eat Their Own

 

The Republicans at their state convention yesterday in Greensboro voted to censure senior Senator Thom Tillis because he had not been sufficiently mean to the queers. No, seriously. Delegates -- we don't know how many of the 1,800, because the press was barred -- said "you're not welcome in the Republican Party because you supported gay marriage." (Tillis pushed a bill to codify same-sex and interracial marriage, which President Joe Biden signed into law last year.) Plus some other stuff about not being mean enough to immigrants. 

On a thread started by DemsParty Chair Anderson Clayton, someone tweeted, "When Thom Tillis fails their test for a 'real Republican,' you know their party has gone off a cliff."

Because reporters were barred, the only eye-witness source I have is extreme-MAGA blogger Brant Clifton (unreliable and prone to exaggeration, as he is). Clifton sez that the meeting was raucous and contentious because Party Chair Michael Whatley's lieutenants ran it with an iron fist. Motions of "no confidence" and "vacate the chair" were shouted out from the floor, "but were quickly dispensed with via parliamentary means by Whatley’s convention managers."

Whatley won reelection as party chair, incidently, against a determined faction of extreme-MAGA bullies who considered Whatley as big a weak loser as Thom Tillis. Anger at the convention boiled over mainly among the supporters of the insurgent MAGA candidate John Kane, who also ran and whose bitch against Whatley was that he wasn't a big enough election-denier. Kane boiled everything down to "election integrity," which was his shorthand for "every election that goes against us must be fradulent; therefore, we must crack down on people who are balloting ... to prevent fraud." It's simple logic, invented to cover crimes against democracy.

Michael Whatley

Whatley seemed to play into challenger Kane's hands by devising an electronic method of voting, with no paper trail, which the Kane adherants immediately condemned as potentially fraudulent, and when the electronic system went suddenly dark in the middle of voting, the Kane delegates erupted and chaos ensued. 

In his speech to the convention prior to the voting, Kane said (according to Brant Clifton),

“Everyone in this room knows the cardinal rule of election integrity is there's a PAPER TRAIL. Machines have issues, sometimes unintentional, sometimes intentional [there it is! the suggestion of fraud]. As we get ready to vote for our Party leadership today it will all be done electronically. No paper trail.

This simple election was 100% under the control of Chairman Michael Whatley and he broke the cardinal rule of election integrity. Here today, just like the elections in our State, Michael Whatley doesn’t think we have a voter integrity problem. I do."

Here's what I can't figure out: Why a convention of true-believers would censure the senator and still elect establishmentarian Michael Whatley with 60%-plus of the vote. It must come down to Whatley's term coinciding with Republican dominance at the ballot box: Two successful Senate races, a sweep of the judiciary, total dominance of both houses of the General Assembly, and a trophy party-switcher to put on display. 

Whatever else you say about Whatley, he's totally lacking the trumpist edge of aggressive nastiness. Plus Donald J. Trump re-endorsed him for the chair at the start of the convention, and Mike Pence praised him as the best state party chair in the nation.

DEMOCRATIC REACTION

State Party Chair Anderson Clayton tweeted a thread:

It’s ironic that the NCGOP can get away with criticizing my party on bullying ["bullying" had been Tricia Cotham's big excuse for leaving the Democrats], meanwhile, they just silenced their *senior* United States Senator over his support of a person’s freedom to love who they love. Which party is the party of freedom again? Not the NCGOP —

It’s ridiculous to still have the fight over basic human rights. And yet the NCGOP continues to fight against the LGBTQIA+ community and their existence. Guess what? Queer folks ain’t going anywhere! But we can make sure y’all do come next November. Folks who support attacking and persecuting our own citizens for being gay, trans, bisexual, gender-nonconforming, or don’t fit into the boxes defined by the right wing extremists in our state, do NOT belong in positions of power. We’re here to make sure everyone in North Carolina can call this state home.

We deserve a North Carolina that is diverse, welcoming, & accepting of all who live here, grow up here, or grow old here. But under the extreme NCGOP agenda, our folks continue to be attacked. I refuse to stand for it, & Democrats will always fight for rights for ALL NC’ians.

Former Republican Governor Pat McCrory condemned the convention:

“It’s time also for all NC state and federal elected republicans to stand with Thom and publicly voice their opposition to the action taken at our convention.”

One Republican state senator, Bobby Hanig from the coast, took up McCrory's challenge and emphasized Uncle Thom's practical advantages:

“I believe that a mob mentality doesn’t do us any good. Senator Tillis does a lot for North Carolina, he does a lot for the coastal communities, so why would I want to make him mad?”

The Hill also quoted State Sen. Jim Burgin of Harnett County, who said the vote to censure Tillis "sets a dangerous precedent and does not allow enough flexibility for individual interpretation of party values."

Burgin questioned whether his own vote last month for North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban would similarly put him at risk of being censured because it’s out of line with the Republican platform, which states that life begins at conception.

“I don’t think we need to be attacking our own,” he said. “You don’t shoot your own elephants.”

Cannon Fire On the Right; And Young Republican Message Fails

We do follow conservative blogs in North Carolina. It's another way to take the barometric pressure, and sometimes we learn something. Or we hear something that makes us go hmmm and wonder at the turning of the heavens like on an axle.

Brant Clifton writes The Daily Haymaker down in Moore County. His bio: "...[He's] marched to the beat of a different drum from very early in life. The grandson of a Democrat party machine boss, Mr. Clifton registered Republican at 18 and campaigned for Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He worked for the late U.S. Senator Jesse Helms in Washington during and right after college.

"Mr. Clifton took on the liberal media as an analyst with The Media Research Center, then jumped into a lengthy career with the "drive-by media". His work has appeared in local newspapers in The Carolinas. He has done on-camera work for ABC's Good Morning America, and print work for national publications such as US News & World Report and People magazine. Mr. Clifton has also worked as a correspondent for AP, UPI, Reuters and Agence France Presse." [Beaufort County Now]

Unlike the numbskulls at Watauga Conservative, Clifton can be funny. He's always cutting and brings information (the verity of which I know naught), but his blinders are Tea Party, and I'd say he's on the mean end of that danceline. He insults people. Especially Republicans he considers too soft. And the Reverend William Barber.

So here was Clifton yesterday:

House Republicans are not battling to hold a super-majority.  They’re fighting to keep a majority period.

He says he talked to Republican operatives in Raleigh to reach that opinion. There's a concession, apparently, among insider Republicans, that they're going to lose their veto-proof majority in the NC House (which means Democrats will sustain Roy Cooper's vetoes, and the Berger-Moore bulldozer will lose its gas tank). There's real terror, according to Clifton, that they could lose control of the whole House.

Clifton brought his big guns yesterday for his longtime enemies in the top echelons of the Republican Party, particularly Dallas Woodhouse and his gang at the NC Republican Party HDQs:

[The reason Republicans are losing...] It’s a leadership and management problem.

House Republicans have a leadership cabal more interested in pleasing lobbyists than keeping the promises they made to voters. They’ve become what they replaced. 

The state GOP is dominated by people who have been there since you could fit ALL the state’s Republicans in one phone booth. There’s more interest in obtaining and accruing personal power than there is in growing the party and helping the state.

That rings true, cause it's true for the Democrats too. It's true for any power that grows too big and turns crusty with age.


I guess we're calling the Tea Party the Trumpsters now, and the cracks against establishment Republicans are interesting in the middle of an election, particularly this election. Divided parties don't win.

Look at this sign that showed up all over Boone Tuesday night, on the eve of the start of Early Voting.

When I first saw that, and heard that the Young Republicans were putting them out, I assumed it was a revolt against Trumpism, a comment on Trump's rallies and his Twitter spew. Little did I know!

The signs were especially prominent on the campus of AppState, maybe because they were put out there, and all over town, by the ASU Young Republicans:

They're not Republican moderates. Apparently, the #Walkaway sign is making a cloaked reference to the Trump meme that Democrats now constitute a "mob." So I would have to grade the black sign a big ole message fail. Which is also a piece of interesting information about this current election: Republicans have no defense.)

Republican Fratricide in NC Senate District 25

Helen Probst Mills

I wrote about Helen Probst Mills, the Pinehurst lawyer recently appointed to the Sandhills Community College Board of Trustees, back early in February when the only Republican in that race for NC Senate District 25 was the incumbent, Tom McInnis.

A lot has happened since then.

Helen Probst Mills is still the strong Democratic candidate, in a race no one thinks she can win. But that's the enduring narrative of 2018: impossible odds, overcome suddenly and without much warning.

Senate District 25 has been seriously redrawn in court-ordered redistricting, and the crowd that elected Tom McInnis in 2014 no longer exists. Less than half of the voters in the new District 25 have ever seen McInnis's name on their ballot before. Mainly because the new district now contains all of Moore County, by far the center of population for the district, and Moore County pulsates as a hotbed of rabidly conservative politics (home of the Daily Haymaker) -- Republican voters who'll throw out a Republican incumbent at the drop of a bumpersticker.

So naturally, Tom McInnis has a Republican primary opponent, the mayor of Whispering Pines, Michelle Lexo.



Michelle Lexo --
She pins herself with neon words. From her website: "Mother. Christian. Conservative." Those periods are assertive, let alone the words. Ready for a fight.

Michelle Lexo

She spent her career in health-care services. Her last job was the assistant director of radiology at a large trauma hospital. She retired to Whispering Pines (pop. 3,000) and was soon tapped for the village council. She's known, apparently, as a know-it-all, being the one official in the room sure to have read every scrap of information available on a subject and to have developed a strong opinion about the whole shooting match. A strong opinion in synch, that is, with "Mother. Christian. Conservative."

She's strongly endorsed by Brant Clifton's "common sense conservative" website, "The Daily Haymaker."

Lexo ... is regularly attacked by incumbent senator Tom McInnis and his supporters as a “lightweight.” Never mind her advanced training in the medical field and her career as a senior hospital executive. Never mind that her hometown has experienced some of its most dramatic growth on her watch as mayor. McInnis supporters have worked overtime to paint Lexo as mentally unstable and not very smart.

Mentally unstable and not very smart?

Meanwhile, Lexo has compared and contrasted herself and McInnis on the issues: He supported the HB2 “repeal” / “compromise.” She didn’t like it. He supports the tier system in economic development. She does not. He supports government subsidies for solar and wind energy companies. She does not.

Got it.


Incumbent Republican Tom McInnis --

Tom McInnis

McInnis is a good ole boy auctioneer not above cutting deals. (Lexo is the deal. She doesn't cut them. Meanwhile, have you ever met an honest auctioneer, strictly speaking?)

According to VoteSmart.org, McInnis never took a college class, and his only education above the  high school level was auctioneer school. He's got native smarts, especially for sharp dealing, and he knows how to go along for a ride and how to milk a moment. Curiously, he lists no religious nor denominational affiliation, which might be an opening for Mother. Christian. Conservative.

Clearly, Lexo is making insurgent gains against him, because the Republican establishment has rushed in mailers for McInnis -- both the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and the NC Chamber of Commerce. Jonathan Kappler tweeted that McInnis was taking Lexo very seriously indeed: "I hear he's been in Moore county a lot and I saw lots of signs and billboards for him in the area."

McInnis campaign photo

Jonathan Kappler also dubbed McInnis "the pop heavy-weight" in the primary race, but if Brant Clifton at The Daily Haymaker thinks you're a fake, then you might be in trouble with other Moore County Republicans likely to vote in a primary.

So McInnis is going heavy on the crypto gun lover bit in his social media and posing as devoutly Christian in a kind of Trumpian way, tweeting out the text of John 3:16 on Easter Sunday.

If the Republicans of District 25 throw over McInnis for the mentally unstable and not very smart Michelle Lexo, then indeed the blue wave could crash there too.

Will Hasan Harnett Sue the NCGOP?

The Tea Party insurgents in the North Carolina Republican Party have not gone quietly into that good night. Once their leader, the now former Chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, Hasan Harnett, was ousted from his post last Saturday, we're hearing only war drums on the Neuse.

Chief drummer Brant Clifton at The Daily Haymaker is now calling new party Chair Robin Hayes the "Big Dummy," and Harnett's chief defender in the closed-door "trial" that was held by the GOP executive committee last Saturday is loudly proclaiming that the whole process was "illegal and illegitimate."

Illegal is an interesting word here, since Hasan Harnett himself is now speaking publicly: “I am in the process of reviewing all options for next steps and will communicate my plans soon,” Harnett wrote to his supporters on-line.

"All options" might logically include a lawsuit based on that allegation of illegal process.

Did a Gang of NC Republicans Boo Donald Trump in SC Debate?

You know the booing of Donald Trump in the South Carolina debate, when he was going all birther on Ted Cruz last week? Rush Limbaugh reported that the booing was coming from outside agitators with North Carolina addresses:

...The North Carolina GOP bused a bunch of people down there and their express purpose was to try to show that there is no massive support for Trump. They wanted to do some damage. They are grudgingly accepting Ted Cruz now....

Tea Party blogger and paint stripper Brant Clifton suggests that it was NCGOP Exec. Dir. Dallas Woodhouse and NC House Rep. David Lewis who got them the tickets to the debate. Woodhouse and Lewis had recently escaped a censure vote by Tea Party irregulars at a state GOP meeting and maybe wanted to flex some muscle RE the ascendancy of Trump.

Dunno. But we doubt the busing to South Carolina. Rich Republicans don't ride buses. Not even for the privilege of booing the enemy.

The GOP Establishment in NC -- Still in Charge

Woodhouse

Grumbling on the far right of the NC Republican Party against visible corruption in the General Assembly, not to mention the executive directorship of the state party, got put firmly back in its place at this past weekend's party meeting.

Our window into the grumbling has been Brant Clifton's "Daily Haymaker" blog: here and here, for example. To their credit, the Tea Party wing does not like pay-to-play politics (they're looking at you, Speaker Tim Moore, and at General Assembly members like David Lewis, who've made headlines recently for manipulating legislation for their funding pals) along with certain perceived weaknesses of nerve in Senator Thom Tillis and with the general sleaze associated with the NCGOP's new Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse.

Turns out, according to the leaked votes on censure of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Woodhouse, that the far right amounts to about one-third of the Party's power structure, and no more.

One wonders what happened to the Tea Party's insurgent new Party Chair Hasan Harnett, who was elected in a big upset just last September. He was supposed to clean house and set the Party on a more rigidly conservative path. He seems not to figure in any of this at all.

The House Speakership Will Destroy Congressman Paul Ryan

The speakership will destroy any Republican who takes the job.

Because the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party will never compromise on anything.

Witness the scribbling of North Carolina Tea Party blogger Brant Clifton.

New Leadership for the NC GOP

Meet Hasan Harnett, the insurgent Tea Partier elected yesterday as chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. Hasan beat lawyer Craig Collins, who had been anointed as the "chosen one" by the entire state Republican Party leadership, including Gov. McCrory, Sen. Thom Tillis, Senate President Phil Berger, and NC House Speaker Tim Moore.

Nope, said 700 delegates at the state GOP convention, decisively beating the 562 delegates who followed the establishment in voting for Collins. Make no mistake: this was a palace coup, and a fairly bloody one, according to Tea Party commentator Brant Clifton. And, also according to Clifton, moves are already underway to undermine and neuter Mr. Harnett by the GOP establishment.

The N&O describes Harnett as "a businessman and author from Concord." He previously served as campaign manager for GOP congressional candidate Vince Coakley, who lost his race for Congress against Alma Adams last year.

As Mr. Clifton has noted, this upset election of a far-right political novice to lead the NC GOP is a major set-back for Gov. McCrory, who is busily trying to reclaim the middle ground in the state, and it's a major set-back for the handful of political allies McCrory may have in the General Assembly, who may also be tacking back to the center.

Harnett and his Tea Party choir may make it much harder to tack back center-ward.

Uh-Oh. There's a Disturbance in the Farce*

*Hattip: EH & GN

Last Friday, Renee Ellmers fired back at her conservative critics in a blog post on her official U.S. House website. Ellmers has been in trouble with the cray-cray crowd over her opposition to the Ban All Abortions After 20 Weeks bill that was supposed to have been passed on Jan. 22, to coincide with the Washington March for Life. Ellmers' opposition seems to have killed the bill at the last minute, and conservatives are pissed. Like, extremely.

So Ellmers took them on: "I am appalled by the abhorrent and childish behaviors from some of the leaders of the outside groups." We suppose she was referring to Tami Fitzgerald, head of the NC Values Coalition, among other paint-strippers on the right like tea-blogger Brant Clifton, who has made biting Ellmers' ankles a personal project practically since she was first elected.

Near the end of her blog post, Ellmers returned to the Tami Fitzgeralds and the Brant Cliftons of this world: "It’s unimaginable to me why some outside parties would seek to target strong, pro-life conservative women and men who are serving in Congress."

Yeah. Go figure.

Tea Party Advice We Wish Tillis Would Adopt

Brant Clifton, our favorite scenery-chewer on the far right who always finds plenty of fault with Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Thom Tillis, is out with some advice on how Mr. Tillis should get off defense and on offense against Sen. Kay Hagan:

Tillis also appears to be buying into Hagan’s war on women nonsense. He’s sending his wife out to make campaign appearances for him. He’s hauling in South Carolina Nikki Haley to Fayetteville this week. If he even tried to look and sound conservative, he could have attack-babes like Laura Ingraham and Sarah Palin out there rallying the troops for him. (But no, he’s getting Chris Christie.)

Well, he's "getting" Chris Christie into the state for a private fundraiser. If there are any firm plans to show Christie off to ordinary voters, it hasn't surfaced yet.

But by all means, yes, let's get some Republican female-brand furniture stripper like Laura Ingraham in to rigidify Mr. Tillis's anemic conservative credentials. And Sarah Palin. Oh, especially Sarah Palin! How could Tillis go wrong with the woman recently made famous by a dog-pile fracas that erupted at a snowmobilers party in Alaska? The quote I loved from that: "The party was peaceable until the Palins arrived."

Other advice from Clifton? Hammer Obamacare, sez he ... when every poll we've been seeing suggests strongly that the general voting public has moved on. Too, too many formerly uninsured Americans have now gotten some insurance coverage, to their considerable relief, so, yes again, by all means, Mr. Tillis, you should start harping all over again about how insurance coverage for all Americans is a dangerous idea. (Attacks on Obamacare had already pretty much disappeared from TV ads supporting Mr. Tillis, as though some people had a clue.)

We can feel Mr. Clifton's pain. After tens of millions of $$ expended to tout Thom Tillis and to attack Kay Hagan, millions by Karl Rove and other third-party interlopers, Tillis has zero traction ... largely because he's dragging around a very unpopular NC General Assembly as a major anchor on his hopes.

Worms in the Cabbage

The National Republican Party's delegate rule changes (a.k.a., "The Tampa Rules Changes"), which elicited boos in Florida at the National Republican Convention in August, amounted to the strong-arming of insurgent campaigns like Ron Paul's. Paulites had out-maneuvered and out-organized the Romney machine in states like Maine and Minnesota and recruited more convention delegates that Romney. Romney, looking forward to his inevitable re-coronation in 2016, and according to The Daily Beast, bull-dozed through the adoption of some new rules to cover his right flank in a future conventions:

In an effort to get more control over the delegate-selection process in the future, Romney’s people overstepped in a way that infuriated many conventiongoers who are otherwise supporting him. Yesterday [29 August 2012], the Republican National Committee proposed a new rule that would allow the party’s nominee to overrule state conventions and choose his or her own delegates. This, many feared, would turn delegate slots into perks for insiders and donors, and further shut activists out of the process.

If this is the new rule, why have expensive primaries? Huh?

Among those loyal Romney lieutenants who helped ram through this rather significant change to the way delegates to the national convention are chosen was one Robin Hayes, former Congressman and current chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, who was by gawd apparently determined to keep his state delegation in line on this. There's existing video of him "ranting" (according to a Tea Party eye witness ... video if you're brave enough to wade through an hour of bad sound and bizarre cinematography). It was as if Robin Hayes shouted, "Respect my AUTHORI-TIE!" or words to that effect. Later, in a videotaped confrontation with disgrunted Tea Partiers at a Moore County Republican Party meeting, Robin Hayes inadvertently (it's downright hysterical, like a comedy routine) admits something he didn't intend to admit in responding to a comment from his audience:

Tea Partier: "You treated the fellow from Louisiana ... who brought in the minority report [on the rules changes] very shabbily."

Hayes: "He wasn't from Louisiana."

Anyhoo, those rule changes ("a power grab," described as "a blow to the Tea Party and the Ron Paul insurgency -- movements that have sprung up precisely because Washington insiders of both parties have abandoned the traditional bedrock principles of the Republican party, namely, economic freedom, fiscal common sense, and smaller, constitutionally limited government")  and Robin Hayes's role in getting them installed are coming back to bite Mr. Hayes in the ass.

At the state Republican Party Executive Committee meeting in Cary yesterday, apparently Hayes was under fairly direct attack. A resolution passed calling for the reinstatement of the old delegate selection rules (hell, why not? Mittford Romington is gone forever!), and if we're to believe Brant Clifton, Tea Party members managed to scuttle the ascension of one Wayne King to the Party Chairmanship. King is a pariah to Tea Partiers largely for allegedly intervening in the Republican primary for State Auditor. You can read about that here.

Always Piping Hot

One early-warning system for how Gov.-Elect Pat McCrory is handling (or not handling, as the case may be) the Tea Party Right is Brant Clifton's blog. Clifton is brimming with suspicion and prepared to be outraged ... constantly.

Which makes him required reading.