Posted on 10/19/2014 2:10:34 PM PDT by Din Maker
Campaigning for the Senate in 2012, former Harvard law professor cum left-wing populist Elizabeth Warren touched down in North Carolina and told voters, “The game is rigged.”
She was more right than she knew. As it turns out, North Carolina’s Democratic senator was doing some of the rigging. Now, Kay Hagan’s political future may depend on how voters react to the story.
Hagan’s vote for the 2009 stimulus, coupled with revelations that the legislation resulted in taxpayer funding for her family’s businesses, has emerged as an October surprise in a race hitherto marked by her unexpected resilience in a difficult political environment. The story has received limited attention in local press, but now a Koch-backed free-market group is launching a major TV ad campaign accusing the Hagans of self-dealing.
“Kay Hagan said that the stimulus would help North Carolina — instead it helped the Hagans,” James Davis of Freedom Partners Action Fund told National Review Online. “What voters despise most about Washington is that they aren’t playing by the same set of rules as everyone else. The fact that the Hagan family business received nearly $400,000 taxpayer dollars from the stimulus just reinforces what everyone already suspects. The Hagans got richer and North Carolina paid the price.”
The super PAC plans to spend at least $1 million to bring that message to TV screens across the Tar Heel state, starting next week.
In late September, Politco reported that JDC Manufacturing, a company owned by Hagan’s husband, received almost $400,000 in stimulus grants to help pay for energy-efficiency upgrades. Thereafter, the Carolina Journal reported that Hagan’s husband kept the stimulus money in the family by paying a company he founded with their son to make the upgrades. That decision “appears to be at odds with the conflict of interest policy the company submitted with the grant application,” wrote the Carolina Journal in mid October, noting that the elder Hagan assured the federal government that his company avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Hagan’s campaign told Politico that she had nothing to do with her husband’s winning the grants. Presumably, she also had nothing to do with his decision to use the stimulus money to hire another family-owned company to make the upgrades.
JDC Manufacturing did Hagan’s campaign no favors when, as the project came in under budget, it “kept all of the savings, sending none back to taxpayers who had funded the stimulus grant,” according to the Carolina Journal. The Freedom Partners ad puts it this way:
Kay Hagan claimed Obama’s failed $800 billion stimulus would help North Carolina, but now we know it was Kay Hagan’s family who profited. . . . And what did the company do? It funneled the money to another company owned by the Hagans to do the work.
This kind of story can damage a candidate, as a liberal super PAC acknowledged in another context. “Voters are connecting the dots when candidates take positions that are not in the best interest of their state or good public policy, but instead financially benefit a candidate’s campaign benefactors,” Christopher Lehane wrote in a memo obtained by Politico for Next Gen Climate. The super PAC, which is backed by environmentalist Tom Steyer, is “on pace to spend $50 million on the 2014 midterm elections” against Hagan’s opponent, Thom Tillis, and other Republicans, according to Mother Jones.
Now Steyer’s counterparts on the right are helping voters connect the dots between Hagan’s position in government and her family’s bank account. The issue has already gained traction among Republican voters. “A lot of the volunteers are really upset about this story,” Donald Bryson, executive director of American for Prosperity’s North Carolina chapter, told NRO. “Whether it’s illegal or not, it doesn’t look good.” Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-supported advocacy group focused on get-out-the-vote efforts in North Carolina, might also have its army of volunteers raise this issue when going door-to-door.
The independent swing voters likely to decide a close election, according to a public pollster in the state, tend to be very concerned about these sorts of allegations.
“Their suspicion of the integrity of government is part of their identity,” says Martin Kifer, a former Democratic staffer who now conducts polls for High Point University. That might explain why, for instance, Peter Schweizer’s book on congressional exemptions on insider-trading laws generated such outrage and immediately prompted action. More than 150 lawmakers co-sponsored the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act in response to the book, which was spotlighted by CBS’s 60 Minutes. In short order, a bill that had previously received minimal support was signed into law.
Hagan’s access to stimulus funding is obviously different from insider trading, but the story on “how Senator Hagan’s husband won stimulus cash” taps into the same kind of voter suspicions.
With Hagan and Tillis separated by 1.4 points in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, anything that increases the passion of the GOP base while appealing to independents could be decisive.
On Election Day, “if we’re within a few thousand votes of each other, everything matters,” Kifer says.
Why are they waiting until next week? This should be “viral” in NC as of this minute.
we already knew that the shovel in “shovel ready projects” was shoveling graft into favored liberal bank accounts, but that’s a little brazen, even for the illuminati.
I'm shocked!
The Republican Party is taking Sen. Kay Hagan to court to find out if she used her influence for a company owned by her husband to get special treatment from the federal government. A company owned by Kay Hagan’s husband, Chip, and his brothers received $390,000 in stimulus money.
Maybe it’s time that somebody looked into the fact that Chip Hagan was also a party to a lawsuit against the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority, which provides water to Greensboro, High Point, Randleman, Randolph County, Archdale and Jamestown.
Chip Hagan’s group sued, and the judge who made the original ruling in the case at that time had been nominated by Kay Hagan for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. The ruling went against the water authority and, in a settlement, the water authority agreed to pay Chip Hagan and the owners of other downstream hydroelectric dams $2.35 million.
Kay Hagan later dropped her support for part-time Superior Court Judge Calvin Murphy’s appointment, but three weeks before the ruling was made Hagan had nominated him. So when Murphy made the ruling in favor of Chip Hagan’s company and the other owners of small dams downstream who were represented by Hagan’s law firm, Murphy was recommended by Kay Hagan for the prestigious and lucrative lifetime appointment as a federal judge.
It was only after it became public that Kay Hagan had nominated a judge who made a controversial ruling in favor of her husband’s company that Kay Hagan withdrew the nomination.
The eventual settlement of the lawsuit cost the water users of Greensboro $1.25 million.
The executive director of the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority at the time of the ruling, John Kime, was quoted in newspaper reports as saying, “It was clear to me that we weren’t getting an unbiased opinion, based on politics.”
One of Kay Hagan’s husband’s companies gets $390,000 in federal funds and another gets an extremely favorable ruling by a judge who she had nominated to the federal bench, but Kay Hagan knows nothing about either.
http://www.rhinotimes.com/under-the-hammer-10-9-14.html
BTTT
Bob Beckell said there would be an October Surprise :)
I will vote for Tillis but he is a Rove dud, Hagen will win.
Thanks Din Maker.
Why are they waiting until next week? ...
They are Republicans. They ALWAYS wait until it is too late.
Relax, we will fix it the NEXT elections cycle.
“Voters are connecting the dots when candidates take positions that are not in the best interest of their state or good public policy, but instead financially benefit a candidate’s campaign benefactors...”
And yet those nut jobs Pelosi and Reid are voted in time and time and time again!
Hagen will win.
_____________________________________________________________
If that bi*ch does win reelection, I will lose all faith in the people of North Carolina; the home of Rev. Billy Graham.
The hapless Tillis campaign had better get the word out fast. There is no reason in the world Hagan should win except Tokyo Rove's friends are running his campaign - if you can call it "running". It's more like a slow walk on what should be a slam dunk.
Without Helms, NC will perish.
They may be preparing for a republican senate...
“I hope there are some North Carolinians who are moral enough...”
Some? Of course! Enough? Maybe. Way too many libtard yankees have moved here to guarantee that.
Kay and the rest of the self-dealing politicians must be real unhappy there is an internet and a website like Free Republic.
“The hapless Tillis campaign had better get the word out fast.”
All of the pro Tillis television campaign ads I’ve seen recently have been sponsored by Chamber of Commerce. Given the amount of money being spent by the Chamber it is clear Tillis has committed to being a servant of the GOPe if he is elected.
While I will cast my vote against Hagan, by marking Tillis on the ballot, I’m under no illusions as to where his loyalties lie. Follow the money.
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