Welcome to the 604th original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where we’ll be discussing the newly elected U.S. House Representative from Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Karen Handel, who finished third in the GOP Primary in the 2014 elections behind David Perdue while trying to win office to the U.S. Senate from there, and in 2010, lost a squeaker against Nathan Deal to be elected Governor of Georgia. In her 2017 special election race to replace former Congressman Tom Price, now the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Handel identified supporting anti-abortion efforts, repealing the Affordable Care Act, constructing Donald Trump’s border wall, simplifying the tax code, and increasing national defense spending as policy priorities if she would reach office.
Handel’s most recent work included taking an executive job at the Susan B. Komen Foundation (the one that gets less than stellar ratings for actually putting its incoming money towards efforts) where she deliberately tried to cut donations being made to Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screenings by the organization, because she drinks the GOP Kool-Aid and doesn’t like that a minute portion of their budget goes towards paying for abortions. She actually resigned after Susan G. Komen reversed her decision, but admits what she did in a book she wrote, “Planned Bullyhood”, where she paints herself as quite the martyr in the story.
Handel’s name also came up a lot at the Justice Department’s Voting Rights division from 2007 to 2010 while she served as Georgia’s Secretary of State, because of her efforts to purge voter rolls repeatedly to try and insure that Democrats couldn’t flip Georgia blue in any presidential election. In lower level races, Handel worked to literally block Democrat candidates from getting their names on the ballot. Hell, at one point in the build-up to her race against John Ossoff, she responded to the news that a judge would allow 8,000 voters who registered late to vote in the election by criticizing him and sending out a fundraising e-mail about how unfair all those actions promoting participation in our democracy were.
And Karen Handel is hardly sympathetic on LGBT issues, as evidenced in 2010 when she openly discussed banning gay adoption because she felt not only would two gay parents be not a good situation, but even “a situation where the parents are not married, as in one man and one woman, is not the best household for a child.” She wouldn’t even support straight parents with a kid out of wedlock. But did she evolve on the issue by 2017? HELL NAW as can be seen in this video where a constituent who admits to being conservative herself talks about how she has a gay daughter who might want to adopt one day, and asks if Handel supports the concept of someone being able to adopt a child regardless of their sexual orientation. Handel tells her with a smile and shrug, “my faith calls me to a different place on that issue,” because her faith apparently teachers her the virtues of bigotry and ignorance. Handel then scurries away like there might be some gay she could catch off this woman via her daughter. Both of these incidents enraged Georgia’s Log Cabin Republicans, who supposedly had Karen Handel as a member of their group in 2002, and have only watched her consistently argue against them having, y'know, rights.
In the final debate between Democratic candidate John Ossoff, Karen Handel shocked everyone present during what should have been a softball question on the minimum wage, when she not only opposed an increase to it, but phrased her argument as being that she “did not support a livable wage”. Karen Handel, ladies and gents… she doesn’t even care whether a working family can survive or not, the hand of the free market should get to decide that. Hell, even 55% of REPUBLICANS support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 at the moment.
After finishing second in the runoff to Jon Ossoff, with all of the other Republicans out of the way, Handel won with 51% of the vote on election day, in the most expensive House race in American history, where the national GOP spent millions to keep her afloat against all the individual donations Ossoff received. This was with the help of last minute ads that bizarrely tried tying John Ossoff to the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise. Her performance, while a win… is not a good bellwether for Republicans, who yes, held a seat, but a seat that has averaged twenty point wins for Republicans since the 1970s, and has a +8 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
She now is in Washington, D.C., and likely trying to raise money to again defend her seat coming up in November of 2018, and it bears watching if Ossoff takes another crack at her, or if this seat is one the Democrats are going to scale back their efforts to flip.
One Year Ago, September 14th, 2016: David Vitter (LA)… 2016 Update
Two Years Ago, September 14th, 2015: David Vitter (LA)… 2015 Update
Three Years Ago, September 14th, 2014: David Vitter (LA)… Original Profile