In the battleground state of Nevada, the GOP has landed yet another problematic candidate, former Texan and veteran Sam Brown, who won Tuesday night’s primary. He’s also the candidate that incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen probably hoped for: a militant anti-abortion extremist.
As soon as the primary results were in, Rosen released an ad featuring a woman who had to leave her home in Texas for abortion care. She now lives in Nevada.
Brown ran for a Texas state house seat in 2014 but lost in the Republican primary. Part of his campaign focused on his support of a 20-week abortion ban the state passed the previous year.
In Rosen’s ad, Valerie Preston talks about finding out late in her wanted pregnancy that her unborn son would not survive after birth.
“Because of the law Sam Brown pushed for, I had to leave Texas to get the care that I needed,” she says. “Now I live in Nevada, and I can’t watch Sam Brown take away our rights here too.”
The abortion ban Brown supported in Texas a decade ago didn’t include exceptions for rape or incest, making it one of the strictest bans in the country at the time. Now Brown is trying hard to downplay his anti-abortion extremism, saying that he was just respecting the will of Texas voters who elected the lawmakers that passed that bill. He’s using the line most Republicans running for federal office parrot—that he is “pro-life and believe[s] the issue is now correctly left at the state level.”
Brown served as chairman of the executive board for Nevada Faith and Freedom Coalition, an extreme anti-abortion group that has backed a federal abortion ban and called Roe v. Wade a “moral atrocity.” He stepped down from that role last year when he filed to run for this Senate seat.
Since stepping down, Brown has tried to distance himself from his anti-abortion past, with his campaign telling Axios that even his work at the Faith and Freedom Coalition really wasn’t about abortion, but instead about “several critical issues facing our state: combating human trafficking, advocating for meaningful criminal justice reform, and supporting the devastated communities recovering from the COVID-19 shutdowns.”
In 2014, banning abortion was “non-negotiable” for him. Now he says “I’m pro life, with exceptions for the tragic cases of rape, incest, and situations where the mother’s life is at risk.”
Brown’s campaign website says that he won’t support a national abortion ban but will “oppose any bill that pushes for federal funding of abortion, late term abortions, or abortion without parental notification,” and that he has a litmus test for federal judges, those “who understand the importance of protecting life.”
That same website has a section labeled “resources for women” that includes a list of crisis pregnancy centers, the health care “clinics” that “use misleading and deceptive resources … [aiming] to prevent or deter a person from seeking certain reproductive healthcare options, including abortion,” according to Medical News Today.
He also showed his misogynistic stripes, with sexist comments about one of his fellow opponents after a failed primary run for Texas State House in 2014 turned into a runoff between two women. That year, he endorsed Linda Koop over Stefani Carter, citing Koop’s “shared experience” in the community compared to Carter, who was “not married with children to provide for or nurture and has refused to plant roots.”
Called out for those sexist comments, Brown dismissed the concerns entirely, saying “I would be fundamentally disqualified from the definition of a sexist because I’m endorsing a woman.”
Rosen told The Washington Post that she’s making abortion rights a top issue in this campaign “because if Sam Brown wins—or if any of those other [Republican] candidates win—they will 100% put a nationwide ban in.”
“I live here in Las Vegas,” she said. “I will bet the house on it.”
Hopium Chronicles’ Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
Please donate $10 or even $20 apiece to each of these races to help protect abortion rights and keep the Senate in Democrats’ hands.
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via The Novum Times
The Novum Times 