Three Republican candidates for the special election in Nevada’s second congressional district faced off in a debate Wednesday night sponsored by the Nevada Republican Assembly.
The debate between the three candidates, Mark Amodei, a former state senator who served as chairman of the Nevada Republican Party until recently; Greg Brower, a former state senator and US Attorney; and Kirk Lippold, the former commander of the USS Cole, comes just days before the Central Committee selects a nominee on Saturday.
The debate hit on the topics of Libya, raising taxes, balancing the budget, the debt ceiling, the Rep. Paul Ryan budget, immigration, green energy, education, how to curb high fuel prices, and defunding Planned Parenthood.
There was little disagreement voiced among the three, who Las Vegas Sun political reporter Jon Ralston has dubbed “the leading candidates.”
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All said they were supportive of Ryan’s budget plan, and that they would have voted for the Pence Amendment to defund Planned Parenthood. Education, they all agreed, should be dealt with on a local level, and the role of the Department of Education should be highly diminished, or the Department should be gotten rid of all together. On energy, all called for more domestic sources of energy, whether it be green energy, offshore drilling, or nuclear energy.
Amodei disputed the use of the phrase “green energy” saying that term “is another way of saying politically correct energy.”
Asked about their feelings on the Tea Party movement, Lippold and Brower expressed hearty approval.
“Any time you have citizens getting involved directly in how their government is run, it is a good thing for the United States,” said Lippold.
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“I couldn’t agree more,” said Brower. “Any movement that makes government more accountable is a movement I can get behind.”
Amodei, however, was less congratulatory.
“You know, Ron Paul is a Republican. Rand Paul is a Republican. Michele Bachmann is a Republican. And Ronald Reagan was a Republican … The intent to label the Tea Party as something other than what their leaders are, I think, is a creation of the media,” said Amodei.
While he said Tea Partiers are “entitled to be as proud of that moniker as possible,” at the end of the day, “they’re part of team elephant in my book,” he said.
He added that they could stand to focus some more on spending, as well as focusing on taxes.
Where the candidates really tried to differentiate themselves is on the subject of their record, as Brower went on the attack and the other two candidates defended themselves.
Lippold, who has never held a political office before, does not have a legislative record, something for which he has been criticized, and Brower took up that line of attack in the debate.
“If you haven’t been in the legislature… then you don’t know what it’s like to be in Congress,” he said, arguing that it was important to elect someone with experience who could “hit the ground running.
But Lippold said that some new blood was what was really needed.
“When you look at what we have to do here at home,” he said, “this is not a time, this is not an election, for business as usual politics.”
He said he would be someone who would represent his constituents’ ethics, “24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” a nod to the fact that the special election is being held as a result of Senator John Ensign resigning over ethics violations.
His “life experiences,” he said, more than made up for what he lacked in a legislative record. In his concluding statement, he compared his position to the Founding Fathers, noting that they also did not have any legislative experience in the government that they formed.
Brower also took a swing at Amodei, pointing to his introduction of a bill to raise taxes on the state in 2003, and his continued fight for collective bargaining rights for state employees while a state senator. Brower said he fought against those two things
Brower said that while he’d like to have a beer with Amodei, that those parts of his record put him “on the wrong side of where Republicans are right now in terms of taxes, spending, and the size of government.”
Based on their records, Brower said, it was a “clear choice” between him and Amodei.
Responding in his closing statement, Amodei pointed to the fact that he had won his Senate seat by 80 percent of the vote as evidence that he had been doing something right. The bill to raise taxes, he said, “was done to defeat the Nevada IRS” and find a way to raise the revenue without having an income tax in the state of Nevada.
The collective bargaining stuff, he said, was “a way to try to blow up the teacher’s union.”
Amodei attacked his opponents for demagoguing, saying that he would always tell the truth.
“My opponents are not telling you that because, you know what, it doesn’t serve their political purpose,” he said.