GOP lawmakers oppose tea party candidate in Ala. race

[TomCADem]

Source: USA Today

WASHINGTON — More than two dozen members of Congress have donated to Bradley Byrne in Tuesday's runoff in Alabama's 1st District, a bold move by Republican leadership to choose an establishment candidate over a tea party favorite.

Using their political action committees and campaign accounts, the members, including several GOP committee chairmen, have sent Byrne's campaign about $86,000 in just the last few days, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures.

* * *
Byrne's tea party opponent, Dean Young of Orange Beach, has campaigned as the anti-establishment choice and has vowed to be the Ted Cruz of the House. Cruz is the junior GOP senator from Texas who engineered the recent government shutdown to protest the 2010 federal health care law. The strategy failed, and Republicans took most of the blame.

"The last thing the mainstream conservatives in the House GOP caucus want to see is yet another reinforcement arriving on Capitol Hill for the tea party faction," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Business has clearly decided to fight back lest the GOP fall further behind, and many of the GOP congressmen backing Byrne are allies of business."


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/11/01/mainstream-gop-works-against-tea-party-candidate/3360765/

[SleeplessinSoCal]

1. Alabama is a very odd place.

Poor Don Siegelman languishes in prison to this day for a supposed crime that the Tea Party campaigns on doing as matter of course.

Also there's this blogger who got beat up for daring to write about the hypocrisy of Alabama politicians.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-politics-blogger-jailed-for-writings-on-ex-governor-s-son

[gopiscrap]

2. interesting

[delrem]

3. Reps know that their only possible salvation is to scapegoat "The Tea Party".

So there'll be a bit of scrambling and the MSM will talk it up, and "The Tea Party" will conveniently vanish, the $$ that funded that AstroTurf "movement" going elsewhere to fund the same thing under different names.

Meanwhile the newly cleansed Republican Party will claim to represent "centrists", not those left/right-wing loonies.

I'm not going along with such a tired ABC political maneuver.

[frog64]

4. 3rd party

Yes, I hope that the business GOP will continue to resist the Tea baggers, with the result that the latter will form a third party which will divide the conservative vote, making it a picnic for the Dems in the general.