Posted on 05/30/2012 10:29:51 AM PDT by Justaham
Arthur Davis was first elected to Congress from Alabama in 2002. The Harvard Law School grad was quickly tapped as a rising star among Democrats. He became a Senior Whip for the caucus, co-chair the New Democrat Coalition and even headed up the Southern region for the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. His eight years in Congress showed him to be a thoughtful, independent and energetic member. Yesterday, he announced he is now a Republican.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
In the immortal words of Joey "Stand up Chuck" Biden, this is a BIG f'ng deal!
Awesome sauce. I wonder if Obama’s newfound love of faggotry had any bearing on this decision.
Outstanding! Welcome,Mr Davis...let’s all work to restore this nation’s economy and its traditional moral structure.
I don’t think that love was “newfound.” Davis will now be subjected to vile attacks, be labeled an Uncle Tom, GOP “house n****r,” and working on “Massa’s plantation.”
Unless he’s added the letter “h” to his name, it’s Artur Davis, not Arthur Davis.
I’m not kidding.
Just damn!
There’s no up to Obama. The man is an embarassment to the country. He’s represents everything contrary to what made America great. Anyone ought to be able to see that. Even before Obama’s “coming out” most folks’ gaydar had pegged.
What are you doing!!??? We can’t welcome him - he’s black!! You’re going to do great harm to our “Conservatives are all racists” street cred!! /sarc.
” Davis will now be subjected to vile attacks, be labeled an Uncle Tom, GOP “house n****r,” and working on “Massa’s plantation.””
It won’t work. Davis will just continue to expose the rat party as Marxist. They won’t benefit from attacking him.
Arthur Davis, Former Black Caucus Member, Switches to GOP
RATS jumping the sinking ship!
Good for him. Now I wonder how long it will take Cory Booker to make the same change.
Yes, both are too liberal for my tastes, but if the Democrats start losing people like them it underscores how radical and statist the Democrats have become. (Besides both Ronald Reagan and John Stossel started out as liberals.)
A Response to Political Rumors Originally published in Official Artur Davis Tuesday • May 29, 2012 • by Artur Davis. While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010. The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another. As to the horse-race question that animated parts of the blogosphere, it is true that people whose judgment I value have asked me to weigh the prospect of running in one of the Northern Virginia congressional districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2015. If that sounds imprecise, it’s a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to tear down the ground you build. I by no means underestimate the difficulty of putting together a campaign again, especially in a community to which I have no long-standing ties. I have a mountain of details to learn about this northern slice of Virginia and its aspirations, and given the many times I have advised would-be candidates to have a platform and a reason for serving, as opposed to a desire to hold an office, that learning curve is one I would take seriously. And the question of party label in what remains a two team enterprise? That, too, is no light decision on my part: cutting ties with an Alabama Democratic Party that has weakened and lost faith with more and more Alabamians every year is one thing; leaving a national party that has been the home for my political values for two decades is quite another. My personal library is still full of books on John and Robert Kennedy, and I have rarely talked about politics without trying to capture the noble things they stood for. I have also not forgotten that in my early thirties, the Democratic Party managed to engineer the last run of robust growth and expanded social mobility that we have enjoyed; and when the party was doing that work, it felt inclusive, vibrant, and open-minded. But parties change. As I told a reporter last week, this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party (and he knows that even if he can’t say it). If you have read this blog, and taken the time to look for a theme in the thousands of words (or free opposition research) contained in it, you see the imperfect musings of a voter who describes growth as a deeper problem than exaggerated inequality; who wants to radically reform the way we educate our children; who despises identity politics and the practice of speaking for groups and not one national interest; who knows that our current course on entitlements will eventually break our solvency and cause us to break promises to our most vulnerable—that is, if we don’t start the hard work of fixing it. On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country. You have also seen me write that faith institutions should not be compelled to violate their teachings because faith is a freedom, too. You’ve read that in my view, the law can’t continue to favor one race over another in offering hard-earned slots in colleges: America has changed, and we are now diverse enough that we don’t need to accommodate a racial spoils system. And you know from these pages that I still think the way we have gone about mending the flaws in our healthcare system is the wrong way—it goes further than we need and costs more than we can bear. Taken together, these are hardly the enthusiasms of a Democrat circa 2012, and they wouldn’t be defensible in a Democratic primary. But they are the thoughts and values of ten years of learning, and seeing things I once thought were true fall into disarray. So, if I were to leave the sidelines, it would be as a member of the Republican Party that is fighting the drift in this country in a way that comes closest to my way of thinking: wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities. Full confession: you won’t find in my columns a poll tested candidate who could satisfy a litmus test. Immigration is a classic example: I wince at the Obama Administration’s efforts to tell states they can’t say the word immigration in their state laws, and find it foolish when I hear their lawyers say that a local cop can’t determine the legal status of a suspect validly in their custody. At the same time, I wince when I see Latinos who have a lawful right to be here have to dodge the glare of so-called “self-deportation laws” that look too uncomfortably like profiling. (It’s a good thing Virginia hasn’t gone that path). And while I haven’t written about the subject as much as I should have, I can’t defend every break in our tax code, or every special interest set-aside, as a necessary tool of a free market. And I can’t say every dollar spent on our weak and our marginal is a give-away: a just government is mindful of the places where prosperity never shines (and I give a lot of credit to an undisputed conservative, Mitch Daniels in Indiana, for saying so, and doing it at the nation’s leading conservative political caucus at that.) A voter and a columnist have all the freedom in the world to say these things; perhaps a candidate does, too. Should I ever cross that bridge again, I will be trusting voters more than ever (despite having seen how wrong they can get it!) to test ability more than rigid ideology, and to accept that experience changes minds (if it is so in our lives, why shouldn’t it be so in our politics?) I might well decide that all of that is asking too much, and that party demands too much for a guy who doesn’t fit a partisan caricature. Or I might someday not so far off say, “Let the people decide.” Stay tuned.
Geez, my eyes, qman!
This is a MAJOR blow to the demoRATs, especially given the fact that he is BLACK and was a member of the Black Caucus. No wonder it's being covered nonstop wall-wall by the mainstream media -- oh wait, guess it isn't. /s
In any case, this is a big deal. Wonder what made him flip over and leave the demoRAT plantation? I can guarantee you, his former "black" colleagues on the Black Caucus now hate him with more hatred than we can hardly imagine.
More importantly will he be a CONSERVATIVE, or just another Rino Repub?
Not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. The Republican party is already in decline. Will this accelerate that decline?
There, I finished it for him.
Back on topic, "Welcome to the party, pal!"
And they are *allowed* to infiltrate the GOP?
There really is no difference, is there?
.... can you trust an ex-Rat politician? ...
Depends whether he’s a GOPe or a Tea man.
Hope he becomes a Mister Tea.
” he clearly is having a rethink of his parties communist party take over, for clearly the communists have take the democrat party over. “
Davis said he left for this reason.
“Rev” wright was right about one thing he said. The “chickens are coming home to roost,”
His eight years in Congress showed him to be a thoughtful, independent and energetic member.
Yep, those are the beggining signs alright. gateway signs to conservatism.
How long will it take for some idiot to post here, telling us that this switch is a very bad thing?
The guy’s still confused. He believes that the democrat party of a generation ago is subtantially different than it is today. I reckon it depends on what you call a generation. A generation ago, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Fortney Stark were in the congress and Bill Clinton was President. Yeah, those were the good ole days alright!
Paging Lt. Colonial West. Cover his back.
Ronald Reagan started-out as democrat, not as a liberal! There was a diffrence back then!
Has he revoked all the leftist ideology he supported for many years?
IOW, for example, is he just moving from MN or WY because they now get 15 ft of snow every other weekend instead of the 10 ft he was accustomed to when he moved there?
Has he stood up and stated that he now realizes that the Founders created an absolute document and that a "living" Constitution has no place in a Constitutional Republic?
Has he held up any of Mark L's books and said that he has had an epiphany?
A "no" to any of these questions means, to me, that we are just getting another RINO to deal with.
One of my concerns when Democrats change party affiliations is, does the defection express a true change of heart or merely the realization that in many ways the Republican Party is the Democrat Party of 2000.
This guy seems to understand core principles better than the Republican Party Elites. Wonder which party he’ll be changing to next, when he gets a belly full of our idiots.
I am glad to see him express the views he has. Sounds like a stand up guy.
this happened when TSHTF for democraps under clintoon too
this is the first of many
and we lost our hold thanks to RINO’s so we have to watch them carefully
A "yes" to the first question and a "no" to any of the last 3 questions means, to me, that we are just getting another RINO to deal with.
The Republican party has big problems.
However, “in decline” remains to be seen.
Compared to what?
Right now they hold the House. They are within striking distance of the Senate. Their nominee sorry as he is, is tied with Obama months out from the election.
The Republican party won HUGE all over this country in state and local elections last time out. I believe they took about 700 positions away from Democrats.
Just because some are disgruntled enough to switch to third parties, that does not mean that anecdotal behavior is going to be so statistically significant that it takes down the party.
Don’t get me wrong. The party is fractured and people are extremely tense right now. And have been for several years.
But that is reflected more among a limited number of grass roots conservative activists than it is among Republicans as a whole.
It remains to be seen what will happen to this party.
This party with real problems, to be sure.
I’m sure this will be the lead story on the evening news tonight. :)
That’s actually Artur Davis, not Arthur Davis.
Agreed. He was definitely the most intelligent and reasonable black congresscritter in Alabama, and a lot smarter than most of the white politicians down here.
Never did understand why he quit congress to run for governor...he never had a chance.
Mr. Artur Davis, Welcome home!!
“Ronald Reagan started-out as democrat, not as a liberal! There was a diffrence back then!”
He favored the New Deal and Roosevelt. He learned better. But unless you believe the New Deal was somehow . . . moderate . . . I’d say Reagan could be described as liberal.
That is not a rip on Reagan, btw — it is evidence of his ability to learn.
Of course the MSM will now start asking other CBC members everyday if they intend to join Davis in this important new shift in the political landscape!...not
Good for Artur ! He’s a good guy.
I do hope that Col. West has or will work with him through this transition.
Good for Mr Davis. Unfortunately it won’t be long until he figures out the people calling the shots in the GOP aren’t about to fix anything either.
Before the real estate bubble burst, Mr Davis was one of the Reps in the boat with Franks. However, after videos like this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPSDnGMzIdo his youtube Mr Davis was the only one who apologized for being so wrong.
I hope he’s the stand-up guy he seems to be.
The worst of it is that now when he's in session, he's evidently no longer allowed to be black.
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