They call it “growing in office” when a conservative Republican gets in the groove down there in DC, and starts to vote the “right”way.
After all, Trent Lott (in)famously said in 2010: “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint Disciples….. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them”! Especially when candidates get establishment help, they tend to “dance with those that brought them” after they get to Washington.
You don’t need to worry about Annie McKluster or Carol SEIU-Porter, or Taxing Machine Shaheen – they will stick to their Marxist principles and reliably grow the Leviathan. No, what we worry about is our lone Republican representative in DC, the mostly conservative Senator Kelly Ayotte. I had my concerns when her campaign was so quickly adopted by the RNC, even during the primary, and I worried about her ties to John McCain at the time. Now, just watch the TV, and you can see who her mentors are – those staunch defenders of free speech and secure borders, John McCain and Lindsey Graham!
We commend Senator Ayotte for her principled stand against Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, but she’s starting to get into the groove on other matters, such as the re-authorization of VAWA, where it may feel good, but it’s neither constitutional nor necessary.
Lucky for us, Club For Growth keeps a congressional scorecard, and it confirms our suspicions – Kelly Ayotte’s pro growth voting percentage slipped from 98% in 2011 to 86% in 2012 – below McCain, and equal to Graham.
(Click the graphics to enlarge, or click here for more detail.)