Sue Myrick's choice to leave Congress at the end of this term, gives NC voters a chance to put a real fiscal conservative in that seat. I'm not sure they'll get the chance though.
Sue Myrick is certainly a strong foreign policy conservative, and she may be a good social conservative too. However, I stopped seeing her as any sort of fiscal conservative when she supported the Charlotte Streetcar project back in 2010 to the tune of #$25M. See her letter of support here. This letter came in late in the project's application process for Federal grant money and likely put the project over the top by rounding out support from our local congressional delegation. (The line doesn't even go into her old 9th district by the way.) It was the last nail in the coffin for any effort to prevent what will surely be a huge waste of money.
Here's a link about Democrat Jim Pendergraph running for Sue Myrick's seat. No, you didn't misread that.
That link is from 2007 when speculation was rampant that then Democrat Pendergraph was planning to run for the 9th District seat even back then. Pendergraph was leaving Mecklenburg County for what turned out to be a short-lived Washington job at Homeland Security. While in DC working under the Bush administration, he switched parties to become a Republican.
Now that he's thrown his hat in the ring for the newly redrawn NC-9, we'll get to see how far that conversion from Democrat to Republican has truly come. My guess is not far enough for some in the GOP.
This will be an absolute cage match of a primary. I'm guessing that Jim isn't as conservative as I am on fiscal issues, but he's certainly (at least for now) the front runner.
ReplyDeleteYou also have to wonder if he didn't know this in advance, what with him previously announcing he wasn't running for reelection to the BOCC.