On Tuesday, the overwhelmingly outspent ten-term North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones defeated<\/i> his neoconservative, establishment-backed opponent and former Bush II official, Taylor Griffin.<\/p>\n
Griffin was endorsed by Sarah Palin and heavily subsidized by Sheldon Adelson\u2014but to no avail.<\/p>\n
This is huge news, for it signals a potential change of the tides in both the GOP and the \u201cconservative\u201d movement.<\/p>\n
Jones, you see, is very much a man of the old right, a conservative, <\/i>not a neoconservative.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
Though a one-time supporter of the Iraq War, he has since become not only one of its<\/i> staunchest critics; Jones has become an impassioned opponent of the entire missionary foreign policy vision that informed the decision to invade Iraq and for which the GOP became known\u2014notorious\u2014during George W. Bush\u2019s tenure in office.<\/p>\n
On Jones\u2019 website, there appears a rapidly changing ticker calculating the costs of America\u2019s wars since 2001.\u00a0 Visitors are informed that to subsidize the 1.5<\/i> trillion <\/i>dollars <\/i>that have been spent on our foreign adventurism over the course of the last 13 years, American taxpayers pay <\/i>on an hourly basis<\/i> well over 10 million <\/i>dollars!<\/p>\n
Jones makes his position on this issue clear:<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Constitution, a document I have sworn to protect and defend, explicitly states that our nation does not go to war without Congressional approval.\u00a0 I believe in our Constitution, and I will continue the fight to prevent the president from waging war unilaterally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones has taken President Obama to court for violating \u201cthe Constitution and the War Powers Clause\u201d in launching \u201cwar against the Libyan regime without authorization from the U.S. Congress.\u201d\u00a0 He has also proposed legislation \u201cexpressing the sense of Congress that it is an impeachable<\/i> offense for any<\/i> president to wage offensive war without prior Congressional approval\u201d (italics original).<\/p>\n
In addition to the exorbitant costs of sophistically redefining the \u201cnational interest\u201d to justify military activism anywhere on the globe, the newly re-elected incumbent identifies another fatal objection to this utopian enterprise: it is inimical to liberty<\/i>.\u00a0 Jones declares his intentions to \u201ccontinue the fight to reign in<\/i> the executive branch and restore power<\/i> [liberty] to the citizens of our nation\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n
Jones maintains that since our policy objectives in Afghanistan\u2014the killing of Osama bin Laden and the dismantling of Al Qaeda\u2014have long since been accomplished, it is a fool\u2019s errand to keep American troops there.\u00a0 He also vehemently opposed intervening in Syria, calling such action \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n
More recently, Jones has refused to endorse any foreign aid to the Ukraine, a position in keeping with his refusal to endorse any and all foreign aid that\u2019s been proposed over the last 16 years.\u00a0 \u201cIt makes no sense,\u201d Jones states, \u201cto borrow money from countries like China only to then transfer that money to other foreign countries and the United Nations (UN).\u201d<\/p>\n
It is doubtless his stance against all<\/i> foreign aid\u2014which, obviously, includes foreign aid to Israel\u2014that invited the slur from his opponents that Jones is \u201canti-Israel.\u201d Thankfully, however, the leftist smear tactics to which establishment Republican types routinely resort when going up against those to their right failed in this case.<\/p>\n
Of 435 members of Congress, the pro-immigration enforcement organization, NumbersUSA, locates Jones among an elite group of ten\u2014ten!\u2014that can be trusted to combat illegal immigration.\u00a0\u00a0 Jones has co-sponsored legislation designed to eliminate birthright citizenship, \u201cchain migration,\u201d and promote English as America\u2019s official language.<\/p>\n
Yet Jones isn\u2019t just an opponent of Unlimited Government now that his party is in the minority.\u00a0 He as well voted against President Bush\u2019s No Child Left Behind act, which Jones (rightly) refers to as a \u201cfederal takeover of our education system.\u201d\u00a0 Moreover, Jones would not support Bush\u2019s \u201cmassive expansion of the entitlement system through the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill,\u201d his \u201cpork-filled Highway Bill that included the infamous \u2018Bridge to Nowhere,\u2019\u201d and the former President\u2019s \u201cWall Street bank bailout also known as \u2018TARP.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones is also the sole member of the House of Representatives \u201cto have voted against every single increase in the federal debt limit over the past nine years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does Walter Jones\u2019 victory portend a reversal of fortunes for the neoconservatives that have dominated the GOP for decades?\u00a0 It\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess at this moment.\u00a0 Yet that his establishment opponent lost despite having far bigger names (like Palin) and far bigger bucks (like those of Adelson) behind him, suggests that, at the very least, the neocon halcyon days of Bush II are far behind us.<\/p>\n
Jones\u2019 victory also might serve as a wake-up call to the Republican Party that it is at its own peril that it refuses to recognize that a not insignificant segment of its base will no longer tolerate being ignored or mocked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Tuesday, the overwhelmingly outspent ten-term North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones defeated his neoconservative, establishment-backed opponent and former Bush II official, Taylor Griffin. Griffin was endorsed by Sarah Palin and heavily subsidized by Sheldon Adelson\u2014but to no avail. This is huge news, for it signals a potential change of the tides in both the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n