Another Republican enters the 1st District fray

Just as soon as I start a mini-controversy about my view on the NRCC already endorsing Wayne Gilchrest 6 1/2 months prior to the GOP primary, I get word (h/t to Dave Wissing at Hedgehog Report) that a third candidate entered the field earlier this month.

Joe Arminio is the third guy in the race, and I’ve already linked to his website.

The Arnold resident certainly has an interesting set of views to be sure…a 3-way partition of Iraq, slashing immigration, and dropping out of NAFTA and CAFTA are his lead issues at the moment. Joe is the author of one book and is finishing up a second to be published later this year, The Decline And Fall of the American Way.

So Arminio is another face in the crowd seeking the seat. It’ll be interesting to see whether the conservative and/or anti-incumbent vote is split off enough by having two opponents to see Gilchrest get through the primary with just a plurality of the vote. Arminio claims to have raised $60,000 before entering the race, so he has a bit of a bankroll going in too.

If this keeps up, the WCRC is going to have a difficult time finding speaking slots for all of the GOP hopefuls for the First Congressional District seat.

Late edit:

While I’m on the subject of the First District race, Wayne Gilchrest is back trying to act like a deficit hawk:

U.S. Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest voted in favor of legislation last week that would have required an across-the-board spending cut in two key House spending bills.

Gilchrest voted for an amendment on Tuesday by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave that would have cut the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill by .5 percent or, $522 million.

“At a time when our national debt continues to spiral out of control, this seemed like a reasonable cut to help us reign in federal spending,” Gilchrest said.

Unfortunately, the vote failed by a vote of 198-229.

On Thursday, Gilchrest voted for the Musgrave amendment to the appropriations bill funding the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science and Related Agencies. That also would have implemented an across-the-board .5 percent cut, resulting in savings of $268 million. That vote also failed by a vote of 186 to 235.

“We had an opportunity to trim these proposals by a modest amount, but even that would have resulted in a savings for the taxpayers of $790 million,” Gilchrest said. “We will keep pushing for opportunities to cut spending in Washington rather than raising taxes.”

Gilchrest voted against the Democrat budget proposal earlier this year because of increases in spending and tax increases that were necessary to pay for the additional spending. He has cosponsored legislation to make the President’s tax cuts permanent and has called on his colleagues to cut spending rather than raise taxes to help get the budget back in order.

Somehow I don’t see that as being different than anyone else in the race would have done. Perhaps another candidate would have sponsored the measure or even went farther to curb spending.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

3 thoughts on “Another Republican enters the 1st District fray”

  1. Michael,

    I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it but I just read the dedication speech that Reagan gave at the eureka library in 1967. I never gave him the credit he deserved for being as intelligent as he was. This speech was apparently written before he had people write them for him. Below is an address where the speech can be read if you haven’t already. I know it’s off topic….I just thought it was extremely interesting.

    http://www.presidentreagan.info/speeches/eureka_library.cfm

  2. Many thanks for the previous coverage. Let us continue to inform the citizenry!

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    Send American Way Leaders To Congress
    Joseph A Arminio, PhD
    August 8, 2007

    According to State Senator Harris, the big news is that Congressman Gilchrest has been moving away from the Republicans—away from the Right—and toward the Democrats. But this simplistic view reveals more about Harris than about the complex agenda of Gilchrest.

    To make sense of the Republican primary in the First Congressional District, a vital digression is order. There is this movement afoot to transfer power from the American people to multinational bureaucracies and corporations. Big business is hardly all bad, but today the globalists, those who would, one day, close down the republic and subordinate us to unelected, multinational corporate elitists, and those who go along with the globalists knowingly or not, have become a strong force. The globalists and their helpers are not easy to identify; they call themselves liberals, moderates or conservatives, as always, but watch out, for they undermine the independence of America, that is, rule for, by and of the American people.

    Politics is no longer one-dimensional (left-center-right); it is now two-dimensional or a matrix, that is, there is the conventional or traditional dimension—are you on the left, center or right?—and the new dimension, are you for the independence and sovereignty of the country (nationalist) or not (globalist)?

    It turns out that Gilchrest supports an unusually broad array of globalist policies. He advances globalist (and neoconservative) trade policy. Hence his long standing support for job-killers such as NAFTA and CAFTA. What did the 18th century economist Adam Smith and Karl Marx both say about this kind of trade? It would dissolve the nation-state. Also Gilchrest advances globalist, radical environmental policy, insofar as he champions the Delmarva Conservation Corridor. The language of the Corridor is eerily similar to the language of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, and the Convention, among other things, promotes the “global commons” at the expense of individual countries ruled by their respective peoples. The incumbent deserves praise for protecting native Chesapeake Bay oysters but his tilt toward globalist environmental notions threatening sovereignty and private property rights outweighs such good. Those who promote globalist trade do not typically also promote the UN environmental agenda; those who promote the UN agenda do not typically also promote globalist trade; Gilchrest gives us bad policy from both camps.

    Yet another globalist (and neoconservative) measure Gilchrest promotes is UNESCO, which, among other things, is subverting American schools and nurturing “world citizens” who are easy prey of multinational corporate interests.

    There is another big point about Gilchrest. Why has he been silent about the build up of a North American Union? 26 of his colleagues in the US House have found the courage to sponsor legislation opposing this foul proposed merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada. Special interests—unelected bureaucrats and corporations–would evidently rule the new Union. Speaking about this North American Union, why has Harris been silent about it, too?

    Harris is right that Gilchrest is breaking ranks with the GOP as a whole on such matters as Iraq, and taxes and spending. But breaking ranks on Iraq is not necessarily bad. And why use the GOP as a whole as a benchmark for taxes and spending? What is certainly troubling (and not pointed out by Harris) are the votes in ’02, ’04 and ’06 that Gilchrest cast in lockstep with the GOP, which neoconservatives dominate, to raise the federal government debt by 50% from $5.8 Trillion, in 2001, to $8.9 Trillion, today. (Gilchrest also voted before 2002 to increase the debt.) What is even more troubling is the silence of Gilchrest (and Harris) about the immediate severe threat the public and private debt is posing for the economy and how comprehensive emergency measures must be taken, lest the public suffer greatly and become more vulnerable to the globalists.

    On the issues of gun ownership and family values, Gilchrest has always been, in the traditional sense, left of center. But his positions on such things—and anyone else’s for that matter—ought to be related to all other positions, especially those affecting America’s independence. I may disagree with someone who is left of me on guns and the unborn. If that other fellow is not a globalist, he and I are, at the end of the day, still Americans. If I encounter someone who is a globalist, that is another matter, even if he were an avowed pro-life and 2nd Amendment man.

    Harris, meanwhile, has done some good in Annapolis. But he does not bring vital clarity to this race, failing to warn us about the globalists in general and to protect us from their policies. As reflected in his campaign web site, he is silent on, among other things, the true economic plight of the country, the North American Union, present trade policy, the Delmarva Conservation Corridor and UNESCO. What is more, Harris aids the globalist (and neoconservative) agenda on immigration. Although he would bar illegals, he has said nothing about reversing changes to the law, beginning in 1965, that have allowed far more legal immigration to occur than we can assimilate and that have created explosive population growth typical of Third World countries.

    One hopes Harris is not a neoconservative. Perhaps he has received bad advice. Neoconservatives tend to be right of center on guns and the family, which, I feel, is good, yet, on balance, do more harm than good where sovereignty and the relationship between the people and corporations are concerned, advancing a number of globalist policies. They narrow discourse and would have us believe politics is only one-dimensional, namely, left-center-right. Above all, it can be shown that they have deviated from American Way* (nationalist) policies, which made American great, and which a long line of Republicans, including Lincoln, McKinley, Roosevelt, Coolidge, Taft and Eisenhower and the Reagan vision, and some Democrats, more or less upheld.
    What we desperately need are more American Way leaders in Congress.

    * “American Way” policies are defined, explained and traced through history in the new book The Decline And Fall Of The American Way.

    Editor’s Note: Joe Arminio is a Republican candidate for Congress in Maryland’s First Congressional District, and author of the new book The Decline And Fall Of The American Way, including A Plan For America’s Recovery. The campaign website is
    http://www.joearminioforcongress.org.

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