With the upcoming GOP convention and talk of Vice Presidential candidates I thought it prudent to post this last part of our Rick Santorum series that I withheld following the “suspension” of his campaign. He shouldn’t even be considered without showing proof of Aldo’s citizenship at the time of his birth which he – unlike every other GOP candidate – has steadfastly refused to show. Oddly, many Santorum supporters still believe his false hype despite warnings from Christian broadcasters who have intimately known him for 22 years. (And for my Santorum supporting friends, I’m releasing it on a Tuesday – the slowest PolitiJim readership day - without promotion.)
Nescients Under The Trance of Santorum series:
Part 1: The Pennsylvania Prevaricator
Part 2: Rick’s Unprincipled Pro-Life Record
Part 3: Rick’s UnChristian Lack of Principles and Scruples
In a break from our series, I recounted a friend’s lunch with a Santorum supporter and their ensuing deprogramming. It resulted in this rather elegant defense of Saint Rick from one of his supporters:
Never let it be said Santorum supporters don’t have a way with words or that he can’t attract the either the heathen or religious hypocrite vote. But Pasta does make a point. How Rick rates on pecuniary resources is relevant to our analysis. (We will go through all the specifics of his ACTUAL economic plan below.)
All (smart) men know women like financial security. (How else do you explain smoking hot babes and bald billionaires?) WHY WOMEN WANT RICK has this to say:
He is every businesswoman’s handy banker. He is every school girl’s slightly geeky, but deliciously smart favorite math teacher. Women feel the financial strain created by this administration’s $1 trillion per year spending habit more than our sexier counterparts. We are the ones who have to abandon our choices and go to work. We have to clip coupons, stretch dollars, walk the tightrope between what our kids want and what our struggling budget allows, and we know we couldn’t do it without our spiritual strength.
For a complete view of Santorum the Spendthrift, we must intelligently evaluate:
- How did Rick vote on financial issues?
- How did Rick manage finances where he was an executive?
- How does his current economic plan stack up against others?
- What OBJECTIVE evidence is there to assume he can implement any sweeping plan?
Santorum Votes Liberal When It’s Politically Helpful.
I mentioned at the top of this post that a Pennsylvania Christian Broadcaster who was intimately familiar with Santorum and his staff for over 22 years, couldn’t take the “fake” conservative hype Rick and his Religious zealots were pushing. Here is just one excerpt where this broadcaster DEBATED Santorum on air, over Rick’s support of using tax payer money to build a new sports stadium.
I debated Santorum several times on TV and in person on this topic. He, and his team, asserted the typical Keynesian arguments about public works projects. They trotted out studies from local groups which used Keynesian multiplier models to argue that this government spending would more than pay for itself in economic development. They argued, much like the supporters of Obama’s government stimulus programs do, that this spending program would be a jobs generator.
Rick’s most frequent claim was that there was, and could not possibly be any Plan B; that if we voted down this tax hike, no new stadiums could be constructed and the Pirates and the Steelers would leave Pittsburgh. I remember one particular televised debate on a show which I hosted, called Pennsylvania Newsmakers, in which Santorum wagged his finger in my face and shouted that he had looked into the matter and that I should look into the matter and that if we voted this down, we would lose the franchises. Now much of the U.S. is familiar with the famous Santorum finger wagging bravado, but it took me by surprise that a man who claimed to be some kind of principled conservative had suddenly become a champion of a Keynesian tax hike government stimulus program, and was angry at me for not joining him.
What happened next is indicative of other research I uncovered early in the primary and what caused this citizen journo to go from possibly making Rick my pick – to realizing he was a deceptive and unbalanced Trojan horse unworthy of not just the “conservative” label, but of a “Christian” example:
Despite Rick’s best efforts (he actually had gone door to door with Mayor Murphy promoting the program) the initiative was completely repudiated. Not long after that I was summoned to Rick’s office for an alleged reconciliation meeting, where I was lectured about how he really was a true conservative and that people like me should not be ‘sore winners’ and should line up in support of him again. I offered to work with him to find private ways of funding the stadium projects, but he did not accept that offer. Instead, he and his team worked behind the scenes to do what they said they would not do: Go ahead and use tax dollars to fund the stadiums anyway.
Not long after denying even the possibility of the existence of a Plan B, they unveiled one which was almost completely dependent on government funding. After a massive lobbying effort, they succeeded in getting the bills through the State Legislature. Rick dutifully provided federal tax support, most conspicuously including a half a billion dollars for a tunnel connecting downtown with the stadium complex despite the existence of four bridges nearby. Of course, it didn’t work, and a few years later the city of Pittsburgh entered the municipal equivalent of bankruptcy and Mayor Murphy retired in disgrace.
Rick never acknowledged the error of his oft-made guarantees that voting down the tax would mean the inevitable loss of the teams, nor of his broken promises to abide by the will of the people. Nor has he addressed the tension between his claims to be a Tea Party kind of a guy and his arrogant dismissal of anti-tax activists who opposed the massively funded campaign in David vs. Goliath fashion. Nor has he explained to the conservative base of his party how he supported a plan which involved numerous high-profile takings of private property under the guise of eminent domain for the purpose of private economic development projects.
Now, Rick Santorum is not the Pennsylvania equivalent of Pelosi. With a lifetime American Conservative Union score of 88% – he had to have SOME conservative principles in play. Santorum supporters like TheRightScoop (subscribe to TRS here) have recently taken Romney and Paul supporters to task for even QUESTIONING the conservative credentials of the Catholic congressman. The Right Scoop went so far as to entitle their piece, Dear Santorum Bashers. Read this and weep. Weekly Standard highlighted Rick’s National Tax Union score which placed him in the top 5 (out of 50) senators for his tenure.
So he MUST be spiritual love child of Milton Friedman, Jim DeMint and Ronald Reagan right? Well….not so fast Sherlock. NTU doesn’t score EVERY piece of legislation that has a financial impact on government. PolitiJim lays out quite a few of them here including Rick’s decision to undercut a true conservative in favor for guaranteeing the election of a liberal RINO with a 46 ACU score that was the 60th vote nationalizing 1/6 of the economy.
And True Pennsylvania Tea Partiers might actually make Scoopy weep if he reads this excerpt from a Pittsburgh Tribune article from the year of his election loss:
The highly rated and eminently fair National Journal analysis gave Santorum a perfect conservative voter rating for 2003. He was one of 13 "perfect" Senate Republicans.
But last year, Santorum was rated slightly left of center. Thirty-two GOP Senate brethren had more conservative voting records. A trend has emerged.
As political gurus Terry Madonna and Michael Young noted in a recent column -- slicing and dicing the same National Journal numbers -- Santorum "consistently shifts toward the center in those years just before his re-election. Santorum may continue to talk like a conservative, but he's voting like a pragmatist."
Translation: The first thing Rick Santorum sees in his bathroom mirror every morning is Arlen Specter. And if liberaling up his pedigree in advance of an election year is required, well, Karen, pass me some more of that L'berelShave.
Some argue that the National Journal rankings are akin to painting a fine detail on a rich canvas with a flat shovel. You can't call Santorum a latent or emerging liberal just because of a few votes for, say, mandatory gun locks or restricting U.S. government contracts to U.S. companies, folks like Horsham, Pa., blogger Bill Fitzpatrick put it last month.
But Santorum's problem has grown deeper than his spotty voting record. It's a problem that suggests a wholly oxymoronic principled relativism. It's that other "P"-word, the one Messrs. Madonna and Young certainly don't use as a pejorative: It's "pragmatism," the new choice moniker of liberals and socialists -- a synonym for unprincipled.
- His charity gave away so little of the money he collected, it wouldn’t even pass the Better Business Bureau.
- He lied about where his children lived so that the State of Pennsylvania could pay $100,000 for his children’s homeschooling in Virginia.
- HIS OWN RE-ELECTION BROCUHRE gave these qualifications of how he was a good conservative money manager for the country:
- Sponsoring FAIR CAIR act to force companies to pay benefits to laid-off workers.
- Working with John McCain on campaign finance reform.
- Bragging about bringing home federal tax money for clean energy projects.
- Working with Bono to spend tax money on poverty in the third world.
- Working with Bono to spend tax money on AIDS.
- Sponsoring legislation to regulate gas prices.
- Authoring the Pet Animal Welfare State Bill. (Huh.)
- Voting for record tax funding of Pennsylvania public schools
- Authoring The Care Act: funding for Non Profits
- Working with Joe Lieberman on Working Families Act
- Supported increased tax funding for Chesapeake Bay
HOW MANY TIMES has Rick told us that we should elect him because he knew how to get elected in a blue state as a strong conservative?
And how did that “strong conservative” come across to Pennsylvania?
Apparently WHY WOMEN WANT RICK is because he pretends to be fiscally conservative and principled.
For all the screaming Rick does over the individual mandate, you would assume he never supported it himself. He did.
Allentown, PA’s Morning Call from May 2, 1994:
Santorum and Watkins would require individuals to buy health insurance rather than forcing employers to pay for employee benefits. Both oppose abortion services and support limits on malpractice awards. Santorum says non-economic damages should not exceed $ 250,000, adjusted annually for inflation, and lawyers’ contingency fees should be capped at 25 percent. [...]
Santorum introduced the idea of a medical savings account, called Medisave, which has become part of the Gramm bill. Under it, workers would buy major medical insurance and could make tax-free contributions to a Medisave account, from which they would pay for preventive services.
To Rick’s credit he discontinued his support of this before HillaryCare, disagreeing with MANY conservatives including the Heritage Foundation, that a “mandate” was a more conservative alternative to a public that seemed to DEMAND universal healthcare and thus would stop HillaryCare which Gingrich and the Republicans did. There is a FAR CRY difference from mandating you buy health insurance from a private company as the conservatives originally proposed – to taking over the entire health care pricing, regulations, insurance companies, R&D, as ObamaCare does. It is DISINGENIOUS to accuse BOTH Romney and Gingrich of being for something for which he claims he NEVER was.
From American Freedom by Barbara, a quick highlight of his fiscal voting record:
Taxes
Voted against a flat tax.
Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for Medicare prescription drugs
Voted to increase tobacco taxes to fund health insurance subsidies for small businesses.
Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for an $8 billion increase in child healh insurance.
Voted to increase tobacco taxes to pay for an increase in NIH funding.
Voted twice for internet taxes.
Voted to allow gas tax revenues to be used to subsidize Amtrak.
Voted to strike marriage penalty tax relief and instead provide fines on tobacco companies.
Voted against repealing the Clinton 4.3 cent gas tax increase.
Voted to increase taxes by $2.3 billion to pay for an Amtrak trust fund.
Voted to allow welfare to a minor who had a child out of wedlock and who resided with an adult who was on welfare within the previous two years.
Voted to increase taxes by $9.4 billion to pay for a $9.4 billion increase in student loans.
Voted to say that AMT patch is more important than capital gains and dividend relief.
Welfare
Voted against food stamp reform
Voted against Medicaid reform
Voted against TANF reform
Voted to increase the Social Services Block Grant from $1 billion to $2 billion
Voted to increase the FHA loan from $170,000 to $197,000. Also opposed increasing GNMA guaranty from 6 basis points to 12.
Voted for $2 billion for low income heating assistance.
Waste
Sponsored An amendment to increase Amtrak funds by $550 million
Voted to use HUD funds for the Joslyn Art Museum (NE), the Stand Up for Animals project (RI) and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Project (WA)
Voted to increase spending on social programs by $7 billion
Voted to increase NIH funding by $1.6 billion.
Voted to increase NIHnding by $700 million
Voted to for a $2 million earmark to renovate the Vulcan Monument (AL)
Voted for a $1 billion bailout for the steel industry
Voted against requiring that highway earmarks would come out of a state’s highway allocation
Voted to allow Market Access Program funds to go to foreign companies.
Voted to allow OPIC to increase its administrative costs by 50%
Voted against transferring $20 million from Americorps to veterans.
Voted for the $140 billion asbestos compensation bill.
Voted against requiring a uniform medical criteria to ensure asbestos claims were legitimate.
Voted to increase community development programs by $2 billion.
Spending and Entitlements
Voted to make Medicare part B premium subsidies an new entitlement.
Voted against paying off the debt ($5.6 trillion at the time) within 30 years.
Voted to give $18 billion to the IMF.
Voted to raid Social Security instead of using surpluses to pay down the debt.
Health Care
Voted to allow states to impose health care mandates that are stricter than proposed new Federal mandates, but not weaker.
Voted twice for Federal mental health parity mandates in health insurance.
Voted against a allow consumers the option to purchase a plan outside the parity mandate.
Education
Voted to increase Federal funding for teacher testing
Voted to increase spending for the Department of Education by $3.1 billion.
Voted against requiring courts to consider the impact of IDEA awards on a local school district.
EARMARKS
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a deficit-cutting public advocacy group," estimated Mr. Santorum helped secure more than $1 billion in earmarks during his Senate career," the New York Times reported last month. That’s bad enough. But as he did MULTIPLE TIMES on the Abortion issue, he turned on conservatives TRYING to be fiscally responsible. Including Jim DeMint:
In the 104th Congress Sen. Santorum joined all Democrats and a minority of Republicans in voting to filibuster the bill S. 1788, the National Right to Work Act of 1995. (“On the Cloture Motion (motion to invoke cloture on motion to proceed to consider S.1788),” Senate Bill Clerk, Vote Number: 188, www.senate.gov, 7/10/1996)
During that same congressional session, Santorum also voted to retain the 1930s-era Davis-Bacon Act that forces taxpayers to pay union wages in government-funded construction and gives Big Labor an unfair advantage over non-union companies and workers (“On the Motion to Table (motion to table Kennedy Amendment No. 4031 to S.Amdt. 4000 to S.Con.Res. 57),” Senate Bill Clerk, Vote Number: 134, www.senate.gov, 5/22/1996)
Santorum supported Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004 helping Specter secure the nomination. Specter went on to cast the 60th vote for Obamacare and then lost, in 2010, to Pat Toomey. Toomey, now in the Senate, is con-sponsoring Jim DeMint’s National Right to Work legislation — the very legislation Rick Santorum filibustered.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Santorum actually went to South Carolina two weeks before Jim DeMint’s reelection and tried to sabotage his campaign.
One of the gifts of Rick is that he can speak so forcefully on things that we learn later are NOT his long held convictions. THIS, in my opinion, is why so many Social Conservatives have been suckered since he puts so much emotion behind whatever his opinion is …at that moment. When he rose in the polls he spoke out adamantly against earmarks. But at the beginning of the rise, he revealed his TRUE sentiments.
The Club for Growth puts it this way:
His record is plagued by the big-spending habits that Republicans adopted during the Bush years of 2001-2006. Some of those high profile votes include his support for No Child Left Behind in 2001, which greatly expanded the federal government’s role in education. He supported the massive new Medicare drug entitlement in 2003 that now costs taxpayers over $60 billion a year and has almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities. He voted for the 2005 highway bill that included thousands of wasteful earmarks, including the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, in a separate vote, Santorum had the audacity to vote to continue funding the Bridge to Nowhere rather than send the money to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Indeed, Santorum was a prolific supporter of earmarks, having requested billions of dollars for pork projects in Pennsylvania while he was in Congress. Perhaps recognizing the sign of the times, Santorum finally reversed his position in 2010, saying that he was opposed to them , but one must remain skeptical about his sincerity. As recently as 2009, he said, “I’m not saying necessarily earmarks are bad. I have had a lot of earmarks. In fact, I’m very proud of all the earmarks I’ve put in bills. I’ll defend earmarks.”
And while Santorum voted against the Farm Bill in 2002, he sponsored a bill to extend milk subsidies in 2005, which he claimed he did to “save countless Pennsylvania dairy farmers.”
His local paper’s internet site – Philly.com – added more including this one:
Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they're linked to his allies and campaign contributors. Consider the type of project that the Tea Party loves to hate, a $750 million energy plant in Schuylkill County, Pa., that was to convert coal to liquids but needed massive subsidies. Santorum boasted of his rule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hired Pennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as a lobbyist and paid him at least $900,000. Despite Santorum's efforts, the plant has not been built.
Rick Santorum’s record proves that he represents EVERYTHING that went bad with the GOP during the George Bush years.
LOBBYING
- Many suspect the reason Santorum didn’t go to jail like Tom DeLay did for the K-Street project, (which Rick himself admitted was a “cause” of his in 2004 and 2005), was because it was he who provided evidence to the prosecutor in exchange for immunity. There is no way the man that Big Pharma Glaxo called “their guy in the Senate” could otherwise escape the net cast against the Abramhoff lobbying scandal.
- There are two clear instances where Santorum cast extremely anti-conservative votes following direct donations by a Saipan sweatshop millionaire and the second was when he attempted to enrich his donor Accuweather by prohibiting the National Weather Service to collect essential data. The former had widely publicized rapes and forced abortions, the former would have literally killed Americans.
- Santorum was literally the king of special interest money and continued to receive almost a million dollars after leaving the Senate from the health care industry for essentially doing nothing.
From the 2006 Senate race:
The Summation of Santorum’s Fiscal Fallacies
As mentioned earlier in the series, Rick Santorum’s PAC and Charity are PRIME examples of why he can not be trusted to uphold fiscal (or Christian) conservative values as a leader. Philly.com encapsulates the charity issue this way:
This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.
The Scriptures give us a very clear measuring stick of someone’s REAL convictions. Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Perhaps the biggest indictment against Rick in this area, isn’t his personal misuse of Pennsylvania tax money for his homeschooling kids, but his propensity to lie and not be held accountable. This was also noted by the Pennsylvania Christian Broadcaster on his lack of giving:
So, when confronted with an extremely low charitable giving record, Santorum blames the size of his family and the health problems of his youngest daughter, except that his return for 2007, before his daughter was born, is no better than the others. Rick gave 1.97 percent of his income to charity that year according to his tax return. So the claim that he gave so little because of the need for an around-the-clock nurse was a lie. And an interesting side note on his contributions is that of his $13,000 dollars in contributions, $4,000 were for donations to Goodwill, which leaves only $9,000 dollars in cash contributions which comes to a measly 1.36 percent in charitable giving.
That is a strangely high deduction for giving clothes to Goodwill. I also have seven children and we give all our old stuff away to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, but have never had a charitable deduction for more than a thousand dollars from that. Any thrift store shopper, and the Bowyers are thrift store shoppers, knows that the market value of second hand clothes is extremely low. Is that deduction another lie, or did the Santorums really give away, say 400 articles of clothing at a value of roughly 10 dollars each?
I’m all for people being rich and living in big two million dollar houses, but I’m not all for people who live in a house which is almost ten times the national average value saying they are too poor to give away a significant portion of their income. This is especially hard to take from someone who wears his religion so prominently on his sleeve, announcing in one of his speeches that we ‘need a Jesus candidate’ with reference to his own candidacy. The Scriptures which Santorum purports to believe tell us that almsgiving in particular (not public acts of piety, nor references to God in political speeches, nor stances on issues) are the test of the genuineness of faith.
From James chapter 2:
“14What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Shall faith be able to save him? 15 And if a brother or sister be naked, and want daily food: 16 And one of you say to them: Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled; yet give them not those things that are necessary for the body, what shall it profit? 17 So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself.”
How could a candidate who believes that it is his role as a candidate to lecture American couples on the evils of contraception, not reasonably have expected that we would take an interest in his family’s finances?
In finishing this column started back in March, I came across some replies to comments I had posted on other websites like Townhall.com.
It is fascinating to me that NEVER are the actually charges addressed either in dispute or in apology. Instead it is the Saul Alinsky method of distraction, diversion and counter-attack the messenger. It also comes from the human condition as we see in our 6 to 8 year olds. Rather than “own up” to the transgression, blame someone else or argue how bad “everyone else” is.
There are some who believe that Romney is NOT inevitable as the nominee even now. But he certainly still could be considered as a VP prospect, so I’ll answer this whether it be for this ticket or for 2016.
Fake conservatives who hang around long enough, loose their RINO stink over time. Romney, although he hasn’t actually EVER governed conservatively – was able to get selected because the old RINO charges are old. They loose they outrageousness over time. I want to make sure that Rick Santorum is not EVER trusted again until he has been in a lower office (like Governor) and has proven that his Zebra stripes have reversed.
And yes. I believe Rick Santorum is WORSE than Romney. Both are big government, hypocritical liars. Santorum however has a bigger bulleseye due to his sleeve-wearing Christian Catholicism hypocrisies that don’t just hurt the GOP, but the Kingdom of God in my opinion.
I also see ZERO evidence of executive leadership which is ESPECIALLY necessary in the times we live. Romney at least was very fiscally conservative in his first two years as Governor. Personally, I don’t care WHAT the politics are for Romney in selecting a Hispanic, Woman, Southerner or Homosexual for VP. The VP position isn’t only important as who will run the country in the event of the President’s death, but since so many VP’s like George Bush one END UP in that office, it is important to whom all that good political will is accruing.
If I can’t have a direct say over the 2012 GOP Presidential nominee, then I will work damn hard NOW to start getting a TRUE conservative with the experience and charisma to lead us out of this mess, reform government and educate the American people on why we can no longer allow socialism to get this close again.
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