The 45-year-old, five-term Michigan Congressman is basing his candidacy on what he calls his “five core principles.” Those principles are: “1. Our liberty is from God not the government, 2. Our sovereignty is in our souls not the soil, 3. Our security is from strength not surrender, 4. Our prosperity is from the private sector not the public sector, 5. Our truths are self-evident not relative.”
Those sound like fine, if vague, principles. And it’s only fair to add that McCotter’s “Freedom Index” ratings have gradually risen over the years. He received a 70-percent rating for the previous Congress (2009-10) and an 89 percent in the first index for the current Congress.
McCotter has, however, failed to live up to his principles in some recent votes. He voted for the $4 billion “Cash for Clunkers” bill (June 2009) and for the $2 billion extension (July 2009) of the same program. If prosperity is not from government, why vote to fund such government programs? Since McCotter’s district is based in the suburbs of Detroit, the program could be seen as a giant pork barrel project for his district. McCotter also voted to fund the federal National Service program (March 2009) and the COPS program (April 2009), which serves to get local police forces dependent upon federal aid.
McCotter has voted repeatedly to extend the Patriot Act, which is a direct attack on U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The Patriot Act allows government to search citizens in many instances without probable cause or the particularity required by the Fourth Amendment.
The Michigan father of three has tried to shake up the presidential race by taking on frontrunner Mitt Romney directly, talking about an “Obama-Romney economy.” McCotter told Fox News July 9, 2011, “I think it’s pretty evident we have Obama as the champion of big government. We’ve seen Mr. Romney as championing the big banks and the Wall Street bailout. They are less rivals than they are running-mates.”
McCotter voted against the TARP bailout of banks under Bush (“I thought the whole thing was ridiculous,” he said in an interview at the Hoover Institution) and Obama’s “stimulus” bill. But he also strongly supported using TARP money for the auto bailouts, arguing in February 2009:
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) may not include credit access relief for domestic auto dealers to purchase cars from manufacturers. This past Wednesday, in the House Financial Services Committee, I reaffirmed the Federal Reserve must help make TALF work for auto dealers, consumers, and every working family in the American auto industry.
Again, use of the TALF funds for the auto industry was a multi-billion-dollar pork-barrel project for his metro Detroit district. Perhaps that’s why McCotter fashions himself as a trade hawk, telling Detroit’s NBC-TV affiliate, “What we’re seeing out of China is a mercantilist trade policy…. We are not producing the goods here to sell there, because they are an export-driven economy. They are curtailing their domestic market. They are putting barriers to U.S. investment and trade opportunities there. This is not a reciprocal relationship.” As a result, McCotter has sponsored H.R.554, the Freedom Trade Act, which puts punitive tariffs on any nation that denies freedom of religion or impedes the rights of workers to organize into unions and bargain collectively.
On foreign policy, McCotter is indistinguishable from most establishment Republican candidates and differs strongly from non-interventionist Ron Paul. He voted against withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in March 2010 and is an Iraq War hawk. He told Detroit’s NBC-TV affiliate, “The United States gave our word that we would help them achieve their liberty…. The fragile gains we have seen in Afghanistan, and the successful gains and strides that we have seen in Iraq cannot be abandoned, cannot be precipitously withdrawn from, or we will find ourselves worse off than we were when those were initiated.”
McCotter supports the status quo in the Middle East, even if it means backing corrupt strongmen with foreign aid. He called President Obama “ideologically purblind” on Mideast policy after Obama threatened to withhold foreign aid from the brutal regime of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. McCotter essentially wrote in a February 4, 2011 Human Events column that U.S. taxpayers should have continued to bankroll the barbarous 30-year Mubarak regime, whose police officers are known to use torture as a routine to obtain confessions:
Failing to back our ally the Mubarak government, the Obama administration has created chaos and a power vacuum — one that the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) is undoubtedly plotting to fill.
In refusing to support the Mubarak government and pressing both it and the responsible opposition to achieve constructive change from within existing institutional arrangements, the administration has left Mubarak no face-saving way to facilitate the peaceful transition of power and leave power; undermined the Mubarak government’s credibility to negotiate with the protestors; emboldened the opposition intransigently to refuse to engage the existing government prior to Mubarak’s departure (a de facto collapse of the government); frightened government supporters with the prospects of being purged in the chaos following Mubarak’s precipitous exit; and alarmed other nations that are or aspire to be America’s allies, which now wonder if the U.S. has become a fickle and feckless partner.
McCotter sees freedom demonstrators in Egypt as naive tools of radical Islamism, writing in a January 28, 2011 press release:
The Egyptian demonstrations are not the equivalent of Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution. The Egyptian demonstrations are the reprise of Iran’s 1979 radical revolution.
Thus, America must stand with her ally Egypt to preserve an imperfect government capable of reform; and prevent a tyrannical government capable of harm…. This is not a nostalgic “anti-colonial uprising” from within, of all places, the land of Nassar. Right now, freedom’s radicalized enemies are subverting Egypt and our other allies…. Strategically and cynically, freedom’s radicalized enemy is exploiting a real religion to undermine liberty and true reform just as Soviet communism posed as a secular creed to obtain the same illegitimate ends.
While it’s too early to tell for certain where Egypt’s revolution will lead, it is obvious that 30 years of American intervention in Egypt’s affairs has resulted in negative consequences for American policy.
McCotter served as Chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee from 2006-10, which effectively made him the fourth-ranking House Republican (after John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Mike Pence). McCotter is currently a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
The guitar-playing McCotter served as a Michigan state Senator (1999-2003) before entering Congress and is a bar-admitted attorney who graduated from the University of Detroit and University of Detroit Law School.
— Photo: AP Images
