This is a post about Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. If you want to read about Lynne Homrich, you can skip to below. But first, I want to talk about the Georgia 7th District because the fortunes and failures of mainstream Republicans in the 7th speak volumes about the future of the Party itself.
Currently, Rob Woodall, a mainstream GOP foot soldier, holds the 7th. Woodall is typical of a certain type of Republican. He takes easy positions on obvious issues and refuses to take a stand on difficult ones, especially illegal immigration.
Once upon a time, groups like Heritage Foundation held the line on difficult issues. Now they have squished and purged into a more acceptable, post-conservative stance on difficult issues. Yet even they don’t think highly of Woodall.
Woodall has abandoned difficulty. And it isn’t difficult to understand why: GA 7th is ground zero for massive immigration, legal and illegal, which has transformed the region and lined the pockets of many politicians willing to, above all else, vigilantly say nothing at all about the illegal immigration and only act as cheerleader for the legal type.
Legal immigration brings with it rapid cultural transformation, much of it good, some of it — structurally — bad. Contrary to the claims of the New York Times, Americans are very good at rapid cultural transformation, so long as they are not demeaned or ripped off in the process. And by “process” I mean seeing new workers from other countries, often people far more wealthy than they are, or subsidized by their own government or their own employers, competing with them for jobs and slots in universities they alone support, with their hard-earned taxes, in their own backyards.
But in the case of illegal immigration, the burden being placed on citizens is far worse — it is wild abandonment of the rule of law itself. That burden is a job market where every elected official except the police are essentially taking kickbacks for ignoring illegal immigration. The kickbacks come in many forms, but the people whom they benefit are, in rough order: big corporations, politicians, the contractors who love them, and wealthy virtue-signalling gated community types who like domestic slave labor so long as the slaves’ children do not drag down test scores in their children’s schools.
Locally, the kickbacks involve subcontractors bidding for county road work while pocketing the extra money they make from hiring illegal workers from that gas station on, say, the intersection of War Hill Park Road and HW 53. Yes, that one. Or the bennies and union clout the teachers get for growing their ranks to educate the children of illegal immigrants, preferably — see above — at completely different facilities from the ones housing their precious moppets.
At the level of Congress, the kickbacks involve the sort of grotesque perks congress-critters get befouling their own district nests while arranging to be airlifted out when they exit office, say to a nice lobbying job in DC, where they are even more removed from the consequences they visited on the irritant folks back home.
So, too hard, thinks Woodall. And says nothing. Too hard, knows Heritage. And they don’t even ask candidates questions about illegal immigration anymore.
Where there is a vacuum, something fills it. In the last District 7 Republican primary, that “something” was decorated Marine veteran Shane Hazel. I’ve met Shane, briefly. I could not have more respect for his career in the military. I like Shane’s vocal criticism of welfare fraud and illegal immigration and his support for the Fair Tax. He is dedicated to finding solutions for veterans subjected to shoddy healthcare.
I am not so sure about his seeming preoccupation with the legalization of pot.
In the 2018 Republican primary, incumbent Rob Woodall defeated upstart conservative Shane Hazel with 72% to 28% of the vote. Then Woodall went on to nearly lose the general election to Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux. It was the closest Congressional race in the country: 140,443 to 140,010 votes. Bourdeaux raised almost twice as much money as Woodall. Like many in the GOP mainstream, Woodall didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.
In fact, over the last decade, Republicans have lost — or maybe abandoned — a massive advantage in the 7th District. The record of the district is potholed with bad choices by the Republican Party.
In 2000, Bob Barr, whose post-office career has been more potholed than most, including a repulsive stint defending Baby Doc Duvalier, combined with another repulsive stint defending DragonCon child molester Ed Cramer, won the 7th for the last time with 55% of the vote to his opponent’s 45%.
Republican John Linder carried the district for the next three races. His margins were 79%, 71% and 62%. Note the decline, as an Edwardian butler would say.
Rob Woodall had four easy elections. In 2010, he won by 67%. In 2012, he won by 62%. In 2014, he won by 65%. In 2016, he won by 60%.
As he was in charge of the district, Woodall oversaw its extraordinary transition without uttering so much as a peep. So maybe it’s not so odd that he was a flaccid candidate in 2018, when, to mangle a metaphor, he screwed the pooch flaccidly, almost losing to college-professor-of-irritating-sweaters-and-socialism Carolyn Bourdeaux by that mere 433 of more than 280,000 votes. Yikes, as they used to say everywhere, when they were more surprised than a flaccid Republican at almost losing to an out-of-nowhere inappropriate-for-the-district Democrat.
I don’t know what happened between 2016 and 2018 … except that Rob Woodall was exposed as a piker, and Trump won the district, and then outside money flowed into Atlanta’s northern suburbs by the buttload from everyplace else in the country from Democrats searching for a narrative that would take them back to the glory days of Barack!2008.
And so we arrive at Lynne Homrich. Homrich gained a little media bump yesterday by releasing a pre-campaign commercial criticizing radical leftist congress-critters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
The commercial certainly gained attention as a trial balloon. Which it was. I can hear crickets of consultants whispering sibilantly in her ear: it’s just a trial balloon for the hicks. Because, Lynne Homrich is no conservative. She is lying.
Why is she lying? Let me count the ways. She runs a sustainability company (oddly, her website for this firm seems to have been hacked: it is called Homrich Partners and I will not link to it).
She has some alleged nonprofit for girrl empowerment called “She’s a Ten,” which is supposed to convince girls that they don’t need to be judged by others by judging them all to be “a 10.” In the same spirit, you can insert your own ideas about why this is a terrible idea. The nonprofit is also practically impossible to find online without going through Linked-In and other people’s websites, which alerts my compost sensors. Here is their incoherent mission statement:
We create and distribute public service campaigns to redefine what it means to be “a 10” and deliver educational programming to girls where they learn to base their value and worth not on body or looks, but on what matters most – strengths, character and achievements …
In the spirit of elite teenaged girls everywhere … whatever.
Her husband is an executive for the taxpayer-sucking side of the Home Depot executives as opposed to the other side of the Home Depot executives that mostly believes in not vacuuming up tax dollars for personal hobbyhorses.
By far worst of all, she is on the board of the Jimmy Carter Center.
You cannot be on the board of the Jimmy Carter Center and be a conservative. They are open borders radicals, among all the other things that make most Georgians hack up Jimmy’s political legacy like a hazelnut stuck in Ms. Lillian’s hackle. I will leave it to others to explain why, but it’s pretty frigging simple.
It has to do with illegal immigration. Ergo, Lynne is lying. End of story.