Posted on 02/10/2020 4:23:44 AM PST by The Houston Courant
Seemingly everyone watching 2018’s race in Texas’s 7th Congressional District felt the same way about Lizzie Fletcher. Her Democratic primary opponent Laura Moser called her “Republican-lite.” When Fletcher won the primary, the Huffington Post called her an “establishment-backed moderate.” The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott saw Fletcher’s campaign as “less a collection of partisan talking points and more a commentary on local issues….” Once Fletcher prevailed that November against incumbent Rep. John Culberson, The Houston Chronicle said “Lizzie Fletcher looks to legislate the way she won: in moderation.”
This year, Fletcher needs a new campaign playbook; her moderate self-portrayal can’t hold up against her record. Even if the press stays exceptionally docile and her fundraising remains strong, Republicans and conservatives’ urge to display her leftism to voters is palpable enough that it should worry her. And in only a year, the Houston-area congresswoman gave them solid-gold material.
But Just How Bad Could She Be? Fletcher is a business litigator educated at Kenyon College and William & Mary Law School. She’s smart enough to know that while the 7th District is undergoing demographic shift; it hasn’t become a Democratic cakewalk. Before she came along, only Republicans have represented it since 1966. (Factoid: George H.W. Bush was the first to hold it.) Hillary Clinton did beat Donald Trump by one point there in 2016, and Fletcher’s margin over Culberson two years later was a modest but respectable five percent. The area’s residents can abide a centrist Democrat, but probably not an incorrigible progressive. And Republicans can’t just, compare every Democrat they target to New York’s infamously socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Yet they can in Fletcher’s case. Her voting record actually falls to the left of the Bronx-based Marxist. Among those who’ve noticed is the advocacy group FreedomWorks for America. The outfit scores members of Congress on a zero-to-100 scale each year based on adherence to limited government and free markets. Ocasio-Cortez earned a score of “18” in 2019; Fletcher received a “2.”
Unlike the socialist New Yorker, Fletcher voted last February for a 1,169-page omnibus spending bill that legislators had fewer than 12 hours to read and that cost over $300 billion. Also, contra Ocasio-Cortez, she voted to allow funding for a national patient-identification system that federal law had prohibited for two decades on privacy grounds. Fletcher furthermore opposed a bill limiting the warrantless collection of citizens’ communications by the National Security Agency—another move for statism that was too much for Ocasio-Cortez.
And while allowing that Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her socialist colleague Bernie Sanders have somewhat different scorecards than Fletcher—those two being in another chamber and having had many campaign-related absences—FreedomWorks Political Director Colby Bledsoe notes they also compiled less statist records than the Houston freshman last year.
“You’re taking a Texas district—a moderate district—and you have a member there who has, from our standpoint, a worse record than AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders,” Bledsoe told HC. “That doesn’t fit with that district and I think voters are going to see that.”
Center-right organizations like FreedomWorks aren’t the only ones to have examined Fletcher’s record and found it rigidly leftist. ABC News’s FiveThirtyEight website compiled and analyzed 66 major votes in the 116th Congress and reported that Fletcher’s position aligned with President Trump’s on only five of them. Even some of those votes don’t necessarily jibe with centrism: One was approval of Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA, which 80 percent of House Democrats—and even the AFL-CIO—supported; another was a bloated two-year budget bill, sponsored by Congressional Progressive Caucus member John Yarmuth of Kentucky; and a third was to table articles of impeachment against Trump, a move Fletcher would eventually support.
The only two votes Fletcher cast suggesting any moderation were against banning oil and gas extraction off the American coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
No representative with as many constituents in the energy sector could have supported those proposed bans, which passed the Democrat-run House but face near-impossible odds in the Republican Senate. Yet Fletcher has voted to support other measures that would deal the fossil-fuel industry a veritable head-wallop if enacted, including the Climate Action Now Act, which would force carbon-emissions reductions in line with the immoderate 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Several Republicans have launched primary campaigns for the nod to challenge Fletcher. Among them, FreedomWorks is supporting former U.S. Army Captain Wesley Hunt. A West Point and Cornell graduate who served in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Hunt is largely favored to win the nomination and has received endorsements from a bevy of dignitaries including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz as well as Harris County Commissioners R. Jack Cagle and Steve Radack.
“We’re excited to support him,” Bledsoe said. “I think his military background and business background give him a lot of interesting insight into the budget” as well as into regulatory reform addressing “how red tape hurts businesses and… its impacts on the energy industry in Texas.”
‘A Thoroughly Inoffensive Campaign’ Fletcher’s 2018 campaign often avoided partisan issues and focused on Culberson’s failure to secure adequate disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The August 2017 storm saddled Space City with over 50 inches of rain and killed 75 people. It has uprooted many from their homes and left considerable damage.
“So, he’s been on notice since he took office that this was something we needed to deal with,” Fletcher said of Culberson in 2018. “I didn’t ever agree with his positions in the first place… but what we are dealing with, in terms of flooding, is a years-long problem, and Culberson has been completely missing from the discussion.”
In an otherwise idolatrous profile of Fletcher in the September 2018 Atlantic, Elaina Plott called her “inaccurate to criticize Culberson as ‘absent’ from the [Harvey] discussion” and observed that “Culberson was indeed a key force behind the billions of dollars in disaster-relief bills that were signed into law in the past year.” Plott reported on the slow pace of the federal government’s Houston-area flood relief, but added, “That’s not Culberson’s fault necessarily: America’s byzantine disaster relief system, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps [of Engineers], has long been the bane of Republicans and Democrats alike.”
And after a year in Congress, Fletcher has hardly overseen disaster relief more impressively than her predecessor. Like Culberson, she has spearheaded germane legislation: A bill of hers intended to streamline disaster mitigation passed the House of Representatives in December and awaits consideration by the Senate. Yet much hard work over at least a decade remains if affected areas are to see comprehensive storm-safety improvements. One major step would be the excavation of dirt from Barker and Addicks reservoirs to maximize their capacity to hold stormwater; another would be the creation of a new reservoir benefiting Harris and Waller counties. Having served for eight years in the Army, Wesley Hunt is running on his ability to work with the Army Corps to cut through red tape and expedite these efforts. “From what we all can see, there has been no movement on that,” Hunt told HC.
Plott ultimately judged Fletcher’s 2018 bid a “thoroughly inoffensive campaign, the kind that could very well encourage the turnout from moderate Republicans and independent voters she needs to win.” Other media outlets continue to treat the congresswoman with similar adulation. National Public Radio has repeatedly featured her in a favorable, centrist light. (Nota bene: In October 2018, NPR named former Houston Chronicle Executive Editor Nancy Barnes as senior vice president for news and editorial director. The Chronicle endorsed Fletcher that year.)
‘She Doesn’t Really Talk About Issues’ The Center for Responsive Politics determined that “ideological/single issue” organizations and their members donated $297,190 to Fletcher’s campaign in this election cycle. That includes $24,075 from the pro-abortion EMILY’s List and its associates as well as $8,100 from Planned Parenthood’s. (Twenty years ago, the congresswoman herself co-founded Planned Parenthood Young Leaders.) Progressive Americans for Democracy, a political action committee (PAC) headed by far-left Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR), has chipped in $3,000. Lobbyists meanwhile gave her $18,250. Lawyers and law firms contributed $205,975. Labor unions provided $61,000.
The national Democratic Party made it a priority to elect Fletcher in 2018 and they are undertaking great effort to keep her there. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s PAC has given her $10,000, as has Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s. Fletcher has raised over $2.2 million altogether last year and, as of December 31st, had over $1.8 million on hand. Though she leads in fundraising, her likely opponent Hunt is off to a robust start, raising $1,321,000 with $808,000 currently on hand.
“It’s not going to work out, I think, in her favor,” Bledsoe said. “We’re watching this race and trying to see what she’s talking about… She doesn’t really talk about issues right now. I don’t really see what she runs on in this district.”
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