15 Times Renee Ellmers Betrayed Republicans
by MATTHEW BOYLE & DR. SUSAN BERRY
8 Jun 2016
Washington, DC
316 comments
The saga of soon-to-be former Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) undermining Republicans to help Democrats achieve their agenda has finally come to an end thanks to voters in North Carolina’s second congressional district.
Her overwhelming loss to Rep. George Holding (R-NC)—they were pitted against each other due to a last-second redistricting by the courts—comes after years of undermining conservatives in key legislative and political battles on Capitol Hill.
Below, Breitbart News has compiled a list of 15 times Ellmers undermined conservatives to push forward a liberal pro-Democrat agenda.
1.) It all started back in March 2014 during an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham when Ellmers called Ingraham “small-minded” and “ignorant” for standing up for American workers against Ellmers’ pro-amnesty viewpoints.
During the interview, Ellmers argued for amnesty for all illegal aliens in America and mass migration so her donor class friends could have a cheap foreign labor supply—and accused Ingraham of using “union-speak” for aiming to protect American workers’ wages and job prospects by arguing for more controlled immigration levels.
Ellmers devolved into defending herself using talking points written by the radical progressive pro-foreigner organization the National Council of La Raza—and then when Ingraham called her out on that, Ellmers referred to herself in the third person saying: “Renee Ellmers thinks for herself.”
2.) After that interview went viral, Ellmers spiraled into a series of desperate actions to barely win re-election against an overtly underfunded primary challenger in conservative radio host Frank Roche. Roche, who had raised under $30,000, finished a few more than 6,000 votes short of Ellmers in the primary. Former American Idol star Clay Aiken challenged her in the general election but did not succeed.
Even so, to get to where she won both the primary and the general in 2014, Ellmers engaged in a series of deceptions of the voters in her district. And she had lots of help from billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s pro-amnesty founder, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Ellmers’s lucrative allies pumped more than a million dollars into the district to flood the airwaves with the purposefully inaccurate and falsified message that she opposed amnesty.
“Ellmers voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment to cut the debt and stop the wasteful spending in Washington,” Zuckerberg’s inaccurate television ads said. “She’s protecting Fort Bragg and Pope Airfield from massive defense cuts and working hard to secure the border and fix our broken immigration system once and for all. No amnesty, period.”
Pro-amnesty ex-staffers for Mitt Romney and the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh—an amnesty shill—among others, including progressive group “America’s Voice,” all rushed to her side, as did the Chamber of Commerce.
3.) More importantly, regarding that rush from the pro-amnesty lobbying community to Ellmers’ side, was an important detail accidentally revealed by one such pro-amnesty group: Ellmers asked for their help.
“Rep. Ellmers’ office has asked for our help,” ImmigrationWorks USA wrote in an email to supporters activating its amnesty-backing activist core.
The fact that she would openly collude with leftists like this is not surprising but marked a new level to which establishment Republicans would go to further the pro-amnesty agenda against the wishes of the voters who put them in office.
4.) Still reeling before her eventual defeat of Roche in the 2014 primary, Ellmers went so far as to inaccurately claim at a local party convention in North Carolina that she supported the same position on immigration as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Mike Lee (R-UT). Since she actually backed the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill—and colluded with pro-amnesty organizations, supporting the leftist position on the issue—nothing could be further from the truth, as Breitbart News showed at the time.
5.) Later, emboldened by her re-election, in January 2015 Ellmers led a group of Republicans to cave to the Democrats on the issue of life. It’s the first demonstrable time Ellmers was at the center of another cave-in—not on immigration—and this time, she helped persuade House leadership to pull the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act from the House floor. The measure would have banned abortions past the fifth month of pregnancy. Ellmers said she was concerned that rape language in the bill could cost Republicans votes among women and millennials. However, she had voted to approve the same bill with the same language in 2013.
6.) A few weeks later, on January 23, 2015, conservative Princeton University Professor Robert George said the failure of House Republican leadership to pass the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act after Ellmers’ sabotage of the bill is nothing less than a “tragedy.”
“My understanding is that Rep. Ellmers voted for exactly the same bill last year,” George asserted. “I see no justification for the position that she took, especially for someone who has represented herself as pro-life, and who has accepted money from pro-life donors precisely because of her pledge to support the pro-life cause.”
“I think this is, if I can use the term in the political sense, ‘unforgiveable,’” he continued. “So I hope that she will be subjected to a strong primary challenge in the next election by someone who is genuinely pro-life and that our movement to protect the lives of unborn children at all stages and in all conditions will now move forward.”
7.) The pro-life community, one of the core bases of the GOP, rightfully expressed a significant amount of anger with Ellmers over her actions on this matter. What’s even more shocking—or perhaps not, given the way she handled Ingraham in the past—Ellmers proactively took to her blog to defend herself. In the blog post, she called out the pro-life groups criticizing her as “abhorrent” and “childish.”
8.) Fast forward to June 2015. Under fire again from Roche, who announced his candidacy to challenge Ellmers again before redistricting shook up the race and pitted Ellmers against Holding in a member-member race, Ellmers appeared on a local radio program to push Obamatrade. A priority of the donor class, and therefore of House GOP leadership including eventual Speaker Paul Ryan, Ellmers promoted the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) fast-track legislation that greases the skids for President Obama to force through Congress his signature global trade deals in Asia, Europe, and worldwide. When asked by radio host Bill Lumaye for details about TPA, Ellmers responded: “I will tell you I’m not sure exactly the process, but the fact of the matter is if we don’t have the trade promotion authority, we literally give up our ability to have that oversight and that final say.”
9.) September 2015 rolls around, and Ellmers is at it again. This time, the erstwhile liberal Republican introduced a bill supposedly aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood. However, as Breitbart News uncovered, the Women’s Health Accountability Act would have allowed the abortion business to keep almost 90 percent of its taxpayer revenue.
10.) Then a month later in October 2015, Ellmers sent a campaign flyer to her constituents touting her vote for curbs on late-term abortions, even though she led the group of Republicans that persuaded House leadership to yank the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act from the House floor.
11.) Ellmers also stated in her flyer: “This year, I will be on the congressional committee investigating the horrific revelations about Planned Parenthood harvesting fetal organs.” When this statement appeared in her flyer, however, the members of the select panel had not even been announced. It ended up turning out to be false. Ellmers was not selected to serve on the select committee, chaired by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).
12.) By this point, Ellmers has drawn multiple primary challengers into the field against her. One of them, conservative Jim Duncan, charges that Ellmers is “the ultimate Washington, D.C. insider” because 83 percent of donations to her campaign were coming from out-of-state.
13.) Also in October 2015, as now-former House Speaker John Boehner was searching for a replacement and originally sought House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy for the position, rumors pop up of an alleged extramarital affair between Ellmers and McCarthy. The rumors, which surfaced on website GotNews.com, derailed McCarthy’s nascent bid for the Speakership and sent the House GOP conference into a tailspin searching for a new Speaker. Eventually, Paul Ryan—perhaps one of the most liberal Republicans to ever emerge as Speaker, given his positions on “social justice,” immigration, trade, crime, spending, and more—rose from the Ellmers-created chaos into the Speakership. Ryan’s Speakership was built on a lie as well, since Ryan claimed he would not run for the Speakership without the endorsement of the House Freedom Caucus; while Ryan was supported by a majority of the members of the conservative group, he never received an official endorsement.
During the sex scandal rumors, however, Ellmers reportedly sent out a memo that thanked colleagues for their “prayers and support” as she made it through them.
14.) As a clearly bald-faced effort to stop the bleeding back home, Ellmers—who stands opposed to now-presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump on the issues of immigration, trade, and more—heads home and announces in March 2016 that she voted for Trump in the North Carolina primary.
15.) That prompted an eventual endorsement in the days leading up to her congressional primary by Trump of her campaign against Holding, again inviting more ire against Trump by the pro-life base of the Republican Party. Trump has had a difficult enough time assuring pro-life conservatives he will not betray them, and Ellmers’ successful effort to convince him to endorse her puts him in a worse position than had he remained neutral in the primary. What’s more, Ellmers’ loss makes it harder for Trump to convince weary Republicans he is the right choice moving forward as he aims to unite the GOP behind him heading into a general election battle with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...d-republicans/
