As Texas’ gubernatorial primary approaches, Governor Rick Perry’s main challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, is doing her best to pawn herself off as a conservative. But there’s an elephant in the room that’s hard to conceal, an elephant that keeps reminding Texans that no matter what Hutchison says about her so-called conservatism, she’s a pro-choice senator who believes “Roe v. Wade is working very well.”
And the cold hard facts are that Hutchison has a lot more than her pro-choice viewpoints to hide. In truth, she has a Senate voting record that spans seventeen years and makes her look less and less like a conservative, and more and more like John McCain in a dress.
Speaking of McCain, in 2005 Hutchison sided with him and the Democrats against President George W. Bush by supporting the legislation that hamstrung our war on terror by limiting our military’s interrogation options against captured terrorists. This legislation marked the beginning of McCain’s push for what Rush Limbaugh described as the “terrorist bill of rights,” and Hutchison was right there to support it.
In 2006, Hutchison again sided with the Democrats against Bush when she voted to expand stem cell research so that it would include the use of stem cells taken from aborted fetuses. If you consider the fact that she doesn’t believe a baby in a mother’s womb has “viability” until “six months” into the pregnancy, it’s not really surprising that she’d be willing to use aborted children for experiments.
It should also come as no surprise that Hutchison was a longtime member of “WISH List,” the political action committee formed to raise money for pro-choice, Republican Senate candidates who are female. She quit that group when she decided to run against Perry, because being openly pro-choice and running for governor of Texas is about as damning as being openly anti-gun and doing the same.
Hutchison has concealed many of these liberal traits by doing campaign stops the way she recently did one in West Texas. At that stop, which my wife attended, she spoke and afterward only answered questions that had been vetted beforehand. This Obama-like attempt to control every exchange with the press and the public is in and of itself proof that she has much to hide.
When I interviewed Mark Miner, Perry’s campaign spokesman, for this article, he stressed even more things that Hutchison doesn’t want Texans to think about between now and the coming primary. Like the fact that every Texan (and every American) lives beneath the shadow of the $12,000,000,000,000 debt to which Hutchison contributed by voting numerous times to raise the federal debt ceiling. And in an even greater disregard for fiscal restraint, she voted for the $700 billion bailout on October 1, 2008, shortly after saying she wouldn’t do so.
No wonder Miner said: “Hutchison’s work in Washington demonstrates that she is out of touch with conservatives.”
Miner said Americans would have been better served if Hutchison and others in Washington, D.C., had followed Perry’s lead in Texas by “cutting taxes and living within their means.” Said Miner: “While many states in this country are suffering from their own debt, Texas actually has an $8 billion rainy day fund which Perry built up via conservative fiscal policies.”
Therefore, while Hutchison and her colleagues in D.C. are driving this country into the ground fiscally, the economy in Texas continues to roll along and Texans have a safety net worth billions in case something unforeseen should happen.
Perry is conservative in word and deed, while Hutchison is such in word only. He has nothing to hide, while her campaign is actively seeking to control every question Hutchison will or won’t be asked.
She is John McCain in a dress. And when she talks about her so-called conservatism, she is strangely silent on the fact that she’s pro-choice, that she supports the use of aborted fetuses for stem cell research, that she supported the “terrorist bill of rights,” and that her career in D.C. has been marked by a spending spree the late Ted Kennedy would have envied.
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