NY-19 is one of those swing districts that Democrats must win to have any chance of recapturing the House majority. It’s been represented since 2010 by relative moderate (for House Republicans) Chris Gibson, who has decided to retire from politics (for now).
NY-19 is a Hudson Valley/Catskills district that includes all of Columbia, Delaware, Greene, Otsego, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster counties, and part of Broome, Dutchess, Montgomery and Rensselaer counties. In the only presidential election since this district was redrawn, Obama won it by 6.2 percent.
The candidates this year are Democrat Zephyr Teachout and Republican John Faso. Teachout has run once for public office, garnering an impressive 34 percent in the Democratic gubernatorial primary against incumbent Andrew Cuomo. Faso was an assemblyman for eight two-year terms (minority leader for his last two terms), representing a district within the current NY-19, and lost two statewide races, for comptroller in 2002 and governor in 2006 (since the Assembly, he has become a wealthy lobbyist). Despite his obvious name recognition advantage, according to a private poll released by Faso’s campaign, he is ahead by a mere 46-41. The race is rated a toss-up by Cook Political Report.
Teachout is a wonderful progressive candidate, which I will detail in another diary. This one will be about some of the far-right company Faso is keeping in his first campaign in a decade.
Back in the day, Faso was a fairly standard upstate Republican state legislator — fiscally conservative, anti-choice, gun-loving, and primarily interested in getting as much state money as possible into his district.
But he was ahead of the curve in “supporting some of the earliest legislation for gay rights in New York — a position influenced in part by the fact that one of his brothers, Peter, is gay and in a long-term relationship” according to this NYT profile in 2006.
Judging from the issues pages of his current campaign website, Faso is working to appeal to the large cohort of moderates in the district — the first issue listed is equal pay for equal work, and there are no mentions of immigration and trade policy. Also missing are abortion and the “sanctity of marriage,” though he is against heroin and for affordable higher education.
But Faso is running post-tea party for the first time, so he also has to make nice with that sizable part of the GOP base.
Like the local Oath Keepers chapter, at its second annual awards dinner in June. The event, organized by retired state trooper John Wallace, attracted two national-level far-right speakers — Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (who does more speaking outside his county than any sheriff ever, lately as a Trump surrogate) and Oath Keepers founder/leader Stewart Rhodes.
Oath Keepers fancies itself as a patriotic group of current and former military and police who are true guardians of the Constitution. Their oaths are clearly based on John Birch Society anti-government conspiracy theories, which is not surprising given that Rhodes is a protege of Ron Paul, a Bircher fellow traveler.
Here’s video of the entire event, Faso’s intro and remarks begin at 18:00:
Here’s most of what Faso said:
What a delightful crowd and what a tremendous patriot we have in Sheriff David Clarke, it’s so great to be with you Sheriff Clarke.
And I truly appreciate what you’re doing. Our liberties are at risk, that’s one of the main reasons why I decided to run. …
It is a great honor and privilege to be here with you tonight, but the most important thing for us to do is to remember that we are here to defend our liberties, defend our Constitution, defend religious liberty, freedom of speech and the Second Amendment, because frankly if we don’t defend these things, these rights are at risk of being taken away from us.
So it’s vitally important that we unite, that we decide to elect Donald Trump as the next Republican President of the United States, that we maintain a strong Republican majority in the House of Representatives. …
I want to thank you for everything you’re doing, and thank John Wallace.
Wallace then came back and said that while the Oath Keepers does not endorse candidates (wink-wink, every candidate he promoted at the dinner was a Republican), he was endorsing Faso.
Faso’s buddy Wallace is a proud Birther and Bircher, who later in the evening gave his group’s second annual Karl Marx Award to NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio (Obama got the first one, naturally). Which is basic Bircherism — any non-Bircher is the commie enemy within.
Wallace also recommended (at 2:17:10 ) that people check out the “Articles of Freedom” that he and a couple hundred other Birchers came up with to “retake our country” at a “Continental Congress” in 2009.
We can only hope that Faso and other Republican candidates campaign on Wallace’s recommended Bircher claptrap, which demands that the federal government recognize the unconstitutionality of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the income tax, property taxes, paper money, membership in the United Nations, any regulation of firearms, birthright citizenship, mandatory vaccinations, etc.
Or else:
We demand that Government immediately re-establish Constitutional Rule of Law, lest the People be forced to do so themselves; and we hereby serve notice that in the Defense of Freedom and Liberty there shall be NO COMPROMISE to which we shall ever yield.
This is the kind of far-right wingnut John Wallace is. And John Faso is just fine with that.