The GOP race to the bottom

Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet

1. Glenn Grothman (Wisconsin 6). Maybe the fact that the 6th congressional district is 95.3% white explains how Grothman can get away with mocking the African-American holiday, Kwanzaa, saying it should be treated with “contempt.” Or calling the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday “an insult.” Or saying the anti-poverty food stamp program “encourage(s) sloth.” Or calling teachers who protested GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union laws “a bunch of slobs.” Or bemoaning the “war on men” to conservative activists. Amazingly, Grothman ended his recent campaign with ads saying he was a quiet guy who wanted to solve problems.      

2. Jody Hice (Georgia 10). The 54-year-old reverend and nationally syndicated radio host believes America needs to return to its Christian roots, forgetting the founders intentionally established a separation of church and state. Before running for office, he spent years fighting (and losing in court to) the ACLU over displaying the 10 Commandments in a county courthouse. He’s written a book that says Muslims don’t deserve First Amendment rights and he believes homosexuality is a choice that can be cured with prayer.

3. Mark Walker (North Carolina 6). The 45-year-old Alabama native is a Baptist preacher and worship leader who never held elected office before winning his congressional seat. Apart from his conservative religious views, Walker not only said the National Guard should be deployed on the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration, but that the military should shoot at migrants. “We got to go laser or blitz somebody with a couple of fighter jets for a little while to make our point,” he said in a September debate, prompting the moderator to ask if he was saying the U.S. should start a war with Mexico. “Well, we did it before, if we need to do it again, I don’t have a qualm about it,” he replied.

4. Ryan Zinke (Montana). The state senator-turned-congressman is another loose cannon. Zinke is an ex-Navy commander who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a stealth assault team. He’s been a darling in right-wing circles for his incessant attacks on the Obama administration, saying, for example, that the president should not take credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. This past January, he called ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “the anti-Christ,” saying, “We need to focus on the real enemy.” Recently, he distanced himself from those remarks, saying he was worked up over the killings of the U.S. ambassador and others in Libya.

5. David Brat (Virginia 7). Brat, a libertarian-minded economics professsor, came out of political nowhere to defeat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in June's primary. His views are firmly grounded in the GOP’s most fervently anti-government wing. As Mother Jones reported, Brat “appears to endorse slashing Social Security payouts to seniors by two-thirds. He wants to dissolve the IRS. And he has called for drastic cuts to education funding, explaining, ‘My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money.’” Brat also said that “rich” nations have nothing to fear about climate change, MoJo noted.

6. Carlos Curbelo (Florida 26). Before Curbelo ran for Congress, his lobbying and public relations firm, Capitol Gains, notoriously represented two brothers convicted in Ecuador of embezzling hundred of millions of dollars who were in Florida fighting extradition, he told the Miami Herald, bragging part of that work was leading a smear campaign against the Equadoran government for its ethical lapses. He also was taped telling college students that Medicare and Social Security are “a Ponzi scheme” that need extensive reforms in order to remain sustainable, another example of more than just twisting the facts.

7. Barry Loudermilk (Georgia 11). Loudermilk is a state legislator who will represent a district in Atlanta’s northern suburbs known for sending extreme right-wingers to Congress. At the start of the 2013 session, he told one of Georgia’s most senior reporters that its state-run Medicaid, which brings healthcare to poor people, should be repealed. “We need to start in the direction to where we don’t have a Medicaid system, but we turn it back to the way it was before Medicaid, where there were nonprofit hospitals that provided indigent care to the people, that were run by churches and religious organizations,” he said. Georgia, of course, is a red state where ruling Republicans have not expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, and charities have not filled that caregiving void.