“Rep. Michael Grimm (R – NY) may have been forgiven by NY1 reporter Michael Scotto for threatening to throw Scotto over a Capitol balcony, but Grimm’s 2010 supporters in the Staten Island Tea Party gave up on the Congressman long before he told Scotto he’d ‘break’ him ‘in half. Like a boy,'” Kerry Picket writes today:
Activists in his home district are fed up with their Congressman’s antics and moderate record — their attitude is now “benign neglect,” a source within the Staten Island Tea Party told Breitbart News.
“It was a really unfortunate incident. It doesn’t cast Staten Island in a good light, but now he’s got to move forward without tea party support. He burned his tea party support shortly after he was elected,” the source added. “In 2012 he won against really a no-name opponent 52-48. Now he’s got to go into what’s going to be a tougher election without a chunk of his conservative base.”
The Staten Island Tea Party enthusiastically supported Grimm in 2010 from his primary race against Michael Alegretti to the general against one-term incumbent Rep. Michael McMahon (D – NY). Former Congressman Vito Fosella (R – NY) previously held the seat since 1997 until he decided not to run for re-election in 2008, when a drunken driving incident revealed he had a secret family from an extra-marital affair.
Picket’s article appears at Big Government — and the man who once had the support of the Tea Party is himself a sad proponent of outdated midcentury reactionary concepts of big government, as he revealed in this September Politico article:
“Ted Cruz and others like him have been writing checks with their mouth that their votes can’t cash, and, you know, I think now they have to put up or shut up,” Grimm (R-N.Y.) said on MSNBC’s “Jansing and Co.” on Friday. “That’s one message that I want to send back to the Senate, that they can’t continue this political rhetoric if they don’t plan on backing it up.”
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“When you have Sen. Cruz and others constantly going out there on every show imaginable and running ads that we can defund Obamacare, I think that hurts the Republican Party,” Grimm said. “I think this is an opportunity to maybe start putting an end to that and having maybe a unification of the Republican Party. … We have some things we need to work out among the far arch-conservative right wing of our party, and I think this is part of that process, as painful as it is.”
And as Picket notes, even before attacking Tea Party stalwart Ted Cruz, Grimm had done much to alienate his former supporters:
“We worked very hard to get him elected. He was pretty much a blank slate and it was during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and he said all the right things and made us believe he was a Tea Party candidate, but almost since the time he went into office, his voting record has been much more moderate than what the Tea Party would like to see,” said the Staten Island Tea Party source.
Grimm’s tea party troubles surfaced in February of 2013, when another Tea Party group, the Richmond County Tea Party Patriots, slammed him for supporting an Assault Weapons Ban in the wake of the Sandy Hook School massacre. This particular tea party organization also criticized Grimm, according to the Staten Island Advance, for his support of raising the debt ceiling and his early endorsement of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Earning Tea Party support — Grimm has been doing it wrong since the start.
But then, there’s much that’s going wrong in the world of New York politics these days.
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