A vote for Sherrod Brown is a vote for putting Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer in power...
• Brown is an unabashed liberal, and has been rated as more reliably liberal than Rep. Dennis Kucinich by America’s oldest liberal organization – Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Brown’s voting record has been so far out in left field that the nonpartisan National Journal rated him on the Democratic “fringe” in its annual vote rankings. He has been endorsed by MoveOn.org, Progressive Democrats of America, Sen. Feingold’s Progressive Patriots Fund, Democracy for America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the AFL-CIO (he has received nearly $2 million from organized labor).
• Brown has stridently opposed President Bush’s judicial nominees, and said that he would have voted against confirming Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. He even plagiarized a letter, stealing from a liberal Internet blog, sent to Senator DeWine expressing outrage over the Alito nomination. The truth is that this Senate race could determine who controls the Senate and confirmation of future Circuit and Supreme Court judicial nominees.
• Brown has voted against protecting traditional marriage every chance he has had. He was in the minority of his own party (a consistent theme on values, taxes, terrorism, defense, and other key issues) in voting against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, and has voted at least twice against the Federal Marriage Protection Amendment, which Sen. DeWine has co-sponsored and voted for.
• Brown supports taxpayer funded abortion on demand, and has voted at least eight times in support of the grotesque practice of Partial Birth Abortion. He opposed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which recognizes in law that when a pregnant woman is attacked there are two victims, not one.
• Brown is a lifelong tax raiser, and was recently exposed as a tax cheat. From his early years in the Ohio House of Representatives, to his 14 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Brown has repeatedly voted for higher taxes. He voted for the largest tax increase in history, the 1993 Clinton tax hike, which increased taxes on Social Security benefits, gasoline, and small businesses. He even voted for a version of that bill that included a broad-based energy tax that studies found would have cost Ohio 24,000 jobs. In Congress, Brown has voted for higher taxes over 100 times, and opposed repealing the Death Tax.
• In 2006, newspaper reports confirmed that Congressman Brown failed to pay his unemployment taxes for a period of almost two years, and that he failed to file the paperwork to complete his payment of these taxes for nearly 13 years. Furthermore, Brown failed to pay his taxes until the State of Ohio took legal action against him, and then lied about this fact in campaign commercials.
• Brown has gone out of his way to block vital tools in the Global War on Terrorism. He voted in the minority of his own party against the PATRIOT Act, which passed the Senate 98-1 and passed by nearly 300 votes in the House. He has voted 10 times to slash intelligence funding, voting for each of these cuts within months of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, the Khobar Towers attack in 1996, and attacks on U.S. Embassies by al Qaeda in 1998. Even after September 11th, he voted against final passage of intelligence budgets and appropriations bills that fund our intelligence agencies. Furthermore, Brown has voted against the vital Terrorism Surveillance Program, and against the death penalty for terrorists that attack mass transit systems. Brown even voted against creating the Department of Homeland Security and funding for 9/11 Commission recommendations. On most of these votes, he was in the minority of his own party.
• Brown has been incredibly ineffective in the House. In 14 years, he has passed four bills – three helping Taiwan attend conferences held in Switzerland, and one renaming a federal building. On top of that, he has missed 287 roll call votes, including votes on funding for troops and protecting marriage.
• Brown’s term as Ohio’s Secretary of State from 1983 to 1990 was rocked by scandal. During this time, 3 separate investigations were conducted into drug dealing in his office, including multiple buys by undercover agents of marijuana & cocaine. Despite knowing that this was going on, Brown failed to take action against the drug dealers on his staff, and even promoted one of them. As a result of these scandals, voters threw Brown out of office in the 1990 elections.
More on these topics in the next few days...
