Geoff Davis Dismisses Tea Parties, Club for Growth
Wednesday on The Pulse, Leland Conway's radio show on WLAP 840 in Lexington, Leland got to interview Kentucky Congressman Geoff Davis.
In the interview, Davis calls the ideas of the Tea Parties, that bailouts and reckless spending is bad and the expansion of liberty is good, as "Pie in the Sky", then proceeds to criticize the Club for Growth, saying as David Adams transcribes:
"A lot of conservative groups like Club for Growth and others unfortunately spend all their time going after Republicans. As I've shared, it would be nice if they tried to defeat a liberal now and then."
Mr. Davis, just because someone has an "R" next to their name doesn't mean that that person is voting to uphold conservative principles.
In fact, if there are Republicans in Republican districts who vote for taxes and spending, then they should be the top priority for replacement. While we will continue to educate Americans in all districts, it is these winnable districts that are most important to be represented by those who will reliably cast conservative votes. We could run candidates against Nancy Pelosi all we want and it would never matter. But if there's someone in a district like southern Indiana who should be a reliable conservative vote but isn't, then that district deserves a reliable conservative vote.
As Pat Toomey put it in an editorial last year:
The Club for Growth Political Action Committee has long been attacked for intervening in Republican primaries and targeting the party's most economically liberal incumbents.
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Republicans would be better off, the argument goes, if the Club PAC spent its money targeting Democrats instead of liberal Republicans. This is the argument of politicians who care more about maintaining power than using that power to implement conservative policies.
Thus comes the demand for an uncompromising obeisance to the bottom line: Elect as many Republicans as possible, regardless of how they will vote once in office.
It is for this reason that challenges to incumbents are deemed sacrilegious, no matter how far the incumbent has strayed from conservative principles. And it is for this reason that party leaders defend some of the most liberal incumbents, also known as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), and assail the Club PAC for helping to elect true conservatives.
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A Republican majority is only as useful as the policies that majority produces. When those policies look a lot like Democratic ones, the base rightly questions why it should keep Republicans in power. As the party gears up for elections in the fall, it ought to look closely at the losses suffered under a political strategy devoid of principle. Otherwise, it can look forward to a bad case of déjà vu.
