FINANCING A SECOND CAMPAIGN FOR OFFICE: WHERE IS ALL THAT MONEY COMING FROM?
- THE WATCHMAN
We are often asked where we get the inspiration for the articles we right. That is a very fair and legitimate question. We get our inspiration from various news articles we read on the internet. That is where this week’s story comes from. There was a very good article in the MuskogeePolitico.com. The article can be viewed here. The article covers an interesting subject about the campaign finance raised by Representative Hern over the last quarter. It’s well worth your time to read it.
The first thing we did was go to his campaign website located here to find out as much about his campaign as we could.
We started by going to the page that covers “Promises Kept.” You can see the report by opening this link. It looks impressive on the surface, but we had our doubts. We looked a little deeper.
We next went to the voting records page located here. We couldn’t help but to wonder why he would vote against a piece of legislation and turn around and vote for a motion to recommit. That negates his no vote.
We looked at a few of the pieces of legislation and found one that specified a particular Congressional district in Colorado. The House Amendment 659 is what got our attention. Specifically, House Amendment 659 to House Resolution 823. He voted Yea to recommit on the Amendment then No on the next vote. Voting no was a good vote. If passed this would have allowed one Congressional District to be granted a special exemption. He should have voted no in the vote to recommit. His vote to recommit was a bad vote. His o vote is tainted due to an arrangement being made to not let the amendment pass. You can see the details by going to this link. It is well worth the time,
We next went to this site to see what information they could provide. Mr. Hern is in his second full year as a member of the House. There is some good information about the election and some of the votes he made. It is recommended that you open the link and browse through the article.
We then found this article in Wikipedia. There is more biographical information on him here than anywhere else we looked. It’s well worth the read.
We found this this article on govtrack. We opted not to choose one of the bills he voted on as a member of the House. This article shows how he voted on many different bills. This is good material for anyone that wants to vote for him to see how his record is.
We next found this article from www.opensecrets.org. This covers a lot of his campaign financing. It’s not a complete picture, but it is worth reviewing.
We next went to www.votesmart.org to see what information they had available on Mr. Hern. We started by looking at the Just Facts portion of the bill found here. It condenses the overall report down to a quick glance. We found that it gave you an example of how and what he did as the Representative for District 1. We feel there is not enough information in this short article that can truly help an individual decide whether or not to vote for him.
We next went to the biography page located here. This page provided us with the best biographical information available.
We took the time to look at his complete voting record by going here. This covers his complete voting record. It can be an eye opener.
We next went to the evaluation page located here. We would have to say that we were disappointed in what we found. We found only four evaluations on this page that are important. You can see them below.
Abortion and Reproduction
Planned Parenthood Action Fund 0%
Environment
League of Conservative Voters 0%
Guns
National Rifle Association 93%
If we were going by endorsements only, then we would be saying that he’s a liberal. Based on his short term in office, we feel these low marks are presenting a false flag. We should review this section again prior to the voting.
We next went to the Campaign Finance page, which can be found here. We will say that donors seem to be evenly split between individuals and special interest groups. We found it completely disheartening to find that his campaign was over one million dollars in debt. How can he claim to be Conservative when he’s mis-managing his campaign like this. We did note that this page did not include the funds he received during the last quarter. We looked deeper.
We went to www.fec.gov to look at his campaign reports. We were disheartened again to see that even with the influx of donations, he was still over 1.3 million in debt for his campaign. You can find that information by going to this link here. Out of all that incoming funding, he only managed to repay $50,000 dollars of his debt. This guy is helping to see how much taxpayer’s money gets waisted by an over bloated government and all the wasteful spending, and he can’t even pay back what he owes on other loans.
We looked deeper into his finances and the $300,000 dollars his campaign received by to this page
Of the report. Again, we found the number of donors split between individuals and special interest groups. Looking at this report though it is clear that the special interest groups donated the bulk of the funds.
By looking at all the available information, it comes to a point where all we have here is a RINO Republican claiming , like so many legislators in Oklahoma, to be a Conservative. We do not endorse candidates, but we would highly recommend that voters do their research before they go to the polls next year. We cannot recommend voting for an individual that is so bad at handling his campaign finances.
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