There IS A Line: GOP Will Try To Remove Racist Candidate From Ballot

by Sandi Behrns

It is a year when it has come to seem impossible for a Republican candidate to be too outrageous, offensive or extreme. So the revelation last week that the GOP nominee for Congress in New York’s 18th District, Jim Russell,  is a published racist struck many as startling, but not surprising. As Politico reported:

Longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Nita Lowey’s Republican challenger this fall is a Christian conservative author and activist whose writings have frowned on inter-racial marriage and movies like “Save the Last Dance,” touted the benefits of studies linking race to IQ and said parents need to teach their kids “appropriate ethnic boundaries” for marriage and socializing.

Russell wrote about the need to preserve discrete ethnicities, and wrote approvingly of eugenics.

“Despite threats on his life, Arthur Jensen persevered in studying the relationship between IQ and race. In Canada, neither state-sponsored censorship nor private harassment has deterred J. Philippe Rushton’s inquiries into Race, Evolution and Behavior. The importance of applying eugenic measures in the West becomes evident from Richard Lynn’s recent work on Dysgenics and his just-released seminal work Eugenics: A Reassessment.”

There’s more, (much more), see the Politico piece for several choice quotes.

Already the underdog to an incumbent, these positions are certain to not play well with the 18th District’s constituents.  However, it appears that we have finally found a line that cannot be crossed (at least in New York.)

The chairman of the Westchester County Republican Party, Doug Colety, has announced that the party will go to court to have Russell removed from the general election ballot. It may be a longshot, but they will make the claim that “he doesn’t have core Republican values.” If the effort fails, they will select another candidate to run a write-in campaign.

By: Sandi Behrns

Sandi Behrns is a noted policy nerd, new media & web developer, and consultant to progressive organizations and campaigns. She is a senior contributor to Liberaland, and the Executive Editor of Progressive Congress News.