GOP candidate walks, talks like Democrat

“In a piece of campaign literature,” writes (Las Vegas Review-Journal) columnist Steve Sebelius, “state Senate District 9 candidate Becky Harris declares she’s ‘not your typical Republican.’ In fact, her stances on education funding, certain taxes, and other issues sound downright Democratic.”

In other words, while she may not be your typical conservative Republican, she’s absolutely your typical moderate establishment Republican.

In a 30-minute interview with Sebelius, Harris declared that she might support former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control petition — now being circulated in Nevada — which would require background checks for private gun sales, demurring, “I don’t know that I don’t support the petition.”

Oh, come on. Of course she does.

The fact is Harris was a registered Democrat until just a couple of years ago and appears to have switched parties out of pure political calculation, not some change in philosophical heart. Indeed, Sebelius writes that “Harris said she’s not philosophically opposed to requiring background checks for all gun sales.”

Spoken like a true Democrat.

Harris, who ran and lost a race to replace a retiring Republican assemblyman just two years ago, also divulged in the interview that if elected she intends to nail the state’s mining industry to the wall, which would devastate many of Nevada’s rural counties.

“Harris said she will vote for Senate Joint Resolution 15, which will appear on the November ballots as Question 2, a measure to repeal a constitutional cap on taxation of the net proceeds of minerals in Nevada. That would allow the Legislature to pass a new mining tax at its next session,” Sebelius writes.

“And why? Harris says in her flier that ‘… our schools are underfunded and overcrowded,’ and that she wants to reduce class size, pay teachers more and expand reading programs.”

Spoken like a true Democrat.

She also supports Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Spoken like a true Democrat.

Harris went on to declare that electing her as a Democrat-lite Republican “would be a fantastic thing because I can do great things for everybody.”

Fantastic things? Like constrict gun rights and raise taxes to spend even more money on our failed public education system? What’s so “fantastic” about that?

The only thing worse than voting for a gun-grabbing, tax-hiking, big-spending Democrat is voting for a gun-grabbing, tax-hiking, big-spending Republican. Such Republicans, as my friend Grover Norquist of American for Tax Reform is wont to say, ruin the brand. He refers to such tax-hiking Republicans as “ratheads in a Coke bottle.”

Indeed. And strong argument can be made that, in the long run, a real Democrat is better than a fake Republican. As such, in the Senate District 9 race I’m seriously thinking of urging conservatives to boycott voting for either candidate. No sense in aiding and abetting a fraud.

Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a conservative grass-roots advocacy organization. He can be reached at www.muthstruths.com.