Back home in the ideological wilds of Orange County, we've got a special election tomorrow to fill Chris Cox's seat. The race is effectively between John Campbell, longtime state senator, and Jim Gilchrist, looney-tunes founder of The Minutemen. And it's truly proving insane:
Minuteman Project founder and 48th District Congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist today chastised his Republican opponent, John Campbell, for Campbell's recent attacks on Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo.
“John Campbell has spent this entire campaign trying to make voters forget his long record of pro-amnesty, pro-open borders votes and advocacy in the California State Legislature by new-minted ‘tough talk' on illegal immigration and border security. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for the rest of us, his whole political career belies his ‘tough talk' conversion for this Congressional race, and reveals his true colors,” said Gilchrist.
Gilchrist, obviously, is something of a nativist natural. He also hates spending, choice, taxation, and puppy dogs. He promises to work to overturn Roe though, as a congressman, he'll have no authority over the law or the judges who can affect it. Guess he hates bicameralism, too.
Given all this, I've been spending the day trying to decide who I'm rooting for. Originally, it was Campbell. Less of a maniac, and I went to school with his kid. But now I'm coming 'round to the Gilchrist point of view. The more Tancredoesque voices lashing C-SPAN viewers to their seats, the quicker the Republican Party will have to figure out its actual position on immigration. And considering that vocal, popular, populist figures in the party are demanding an end to brown people, it promises to be the sort of elevated, sober-minded policy debate the Republican Party so desperately deserves.
