Bachmann warns against Clinton presidency; challenges GOP on immigration
1 hour ago • By Kevin McDermott
post-dispatch.com
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Rep. Michele Bachmann shakes hands with attendees during the Madison County Republican Party he 59th Annual Lincoln Day Dinner in Bethalto on Saturday, March 22, 2014. Photo By David Carson
BETHALTO, Ill. • Tea Party headliner Michele Bachmann brought her take-no-prisoners brand of oratory to the Metro East Saturday, warning a Republican gathering that Hillary Rodham Clinton “represents Barack Obama’s third term in office” and taking her own party to task over immigration.
“We will have a woman for president of the United States,” Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 GOP presidential hopeful, told a crowd of several hundred Republican supporters gathered in Bethalto. “It just has to be the right woman. People think Hillary Rodham Clinton is already crowned queen as president ... (but) she’s got a couple of questions to answer.”
Bachmann — who herself has been called the “Queen of the Tea Party” — then rattled off a litany of criticisms of the former secretary of state and potential 2016 presidential candidate, centering largely on familiar allegations about the attack on the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Bachmann expanded the attack to include leveling partial blame at Clinton for current Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“They’re resetting the boundaries in Ukraine as we speak,” said Bachmann. Clinton, she said, “has to answer for it” based on her former position as U.S. secretary of state.
Speaking at the Madison County Republican Party’s annual “Lincoln Day” gathering, Bachmann rallied GOP supporters with warnings about the need to end party in-fighting, a familiar theme at Republican gatherings these days.
“Every (Republican) candidate isn’t going to be one that we necessarily agree with” on every issue, said Bachmann, invoking former President Ronald Reagan’s “80 percent” rule of agreement within the party.
But she then went on to press at one of the weakest internal fault lines in the party today: The overtures of some in the GOP toward immigration reform that would include some form of amnesty for those in the country illegally, a possibility Bachmann sharply criticized.
“What I cannot figure out about the Republican Party is, why in the world would you be the handmaiden to Barack Obama” on the amnesty issue, Bachmann asked. She alleged that Obama supported the concept because “he wants to bring in millions of voters” for Democrats.
Bachmann is a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus and one of the most recognizable public faces of the Tea Party movement. In the 2012 Republican presidential primary she won the Ames, Iowa, GOP straw poll but ultimately dropped out of the race.
She announced last year that she wouldn’t seek re-election to Congress this fall. She has maintained that decision is unrelated to continuing investigations of her 2012 campaign staff by congressional and federal officials.
She has continued to court controversy, most recently in supporting an Arizona bill that would have allowed businesses to legally discriminate against gay customers on religious grounds, then criticizing Republican Gov. Jan Brewer for vetoing the legislation.
During her Bethalto speech, Bachmann referenced the deep-blue politics of Democrat-controlled Illinois, which she called “the poster child of what not to do” in running government. She highlighted violence in Chicago and “all the pensions that are going to be owed in Illinois. That’s not the fault of Republicans in Illinois.”
In fact, the state’s worst-in-the-nation pension crisis has been more than a generation in making, spanning both Democratic and Republican control of government.
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