The Senate President gets some help from an influential friend.
The Senate President’s infamous quote.
The recall movement activated many average citizens.
RESULTS: Two Senate Democrats bite the dust.
Tries to make it about guns on the day the Colorado Senate President goes down
Steve Sweeney’s personal feud with Tom Kean hit the rocks today. Sweeney sent out an ill-timed hit piece on the Senate Republican Leader. The Star Ledger takes up the story:”The Democratic State Committee recently sent a mailer to Kean’s (R-Union) district attacking him over his opposition to Senate President Stephen Sweeney’s (D-Gloucester) ‘centerpiece’ gun control bill (S2723) to overhaul how the state issues firearm ID permits.
‘Tom Kean wants to keep it easier to buy guns than to buy cold medicine,’ the mailer reads.
Kean voted against the bill, which would have either encoded firearms purchase permits on driver’s licenses or a separate photo ID, expanded background checks for gun purchases and required buyers to have completed a safety training course.
The mailer was referring to the lack of a photo on New Jersey firearms purchase permits. Although the permits do not have a photo, prospective buyers need to show a photo ID to obtain them.
The flyer says Kean, whose father was a famously moderate Republican governor in the 1980s, is ‘too extreme.’
‘Send this tea party politician packing,’ it says.”
This represents yet another flip-flop by Sweeney, who used to run his campaigns claiming to be a Second Amendment champion. Sweeney even served a co-chairman of the legislative gun caucus. Now he favors taking away the rights of law abiding citizens to own a weapon for self-protection. What changed? We will get to that in a moment.
Meanwhile, out in Colorado, the Senate President there who is a Democrat like Sweeney was facing recall election along with another Democrat colleague in a safe Democrat seat. The two had championed legislation along the lines of Sweeney’s. They both lost yesterday. Who funded the contest and to what extent tells us a lot about Senate President Sweeney’s sudden conversion from pro-Bill of Rights to anti. The New York Times takes up the story:
“The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.”
“For advocates on both sides, the stakes in Tuesday’s elections were far bigger than the fates of two state politicians. As money and national attention poured into Colorado, a state of hunters that has been stained by two mass shootings, the races became a symbol of the nation’s bitter fight over gun control, with one side bolstered by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and the other by the National Rifle Association.
While both sides campaigned vigorously, knocking on doors, holding rallies and driving voters to the polls, gun-control advocates far outspent their opponents. A range of philanthropists, liberal political groups, unions and activists raised a total of $3 million to defend Mr. Morse and Ms. Giron. Mr. Bloomberg personally gave $350,000.”
Follow the money and it will always lead back to Steve Sweeney. The Senate President is the lynchpin to what has been described as the “grease machine” run by South Jersey political boss George Norcross. Even the left, like the teachers’ union, understands that Sweeney is corrupt and they called him out on it in a recent ad campaign:
Note: It’s not unusual to find the NJEA going after a Republican Governor, but when they call out the corruption of fellow Democrats, that is an indication of how low-down Steve Sweeney really is.
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