Republicans hoping to flip House seat

Candidates debated Tuesday for district held by Deutch

Republicans competing for their party’s nomination to flip a South Florida congressional seat held for decades by Democrats are making the usual, expected pitches to primary voters.

As they compete for attention in a crowded field — with seven candidates — most are also embracing a wide range of ideas that have resonance with the “America First” wing of the party, voters who were energized by former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

They’re candidates seeking the Republican nomination to run for the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a BrowardPalm

Beach County Democrat who isn’t running for reelection.

Beyond candidates’ calls to reduce government spending, increase production of fossil fuels, and stop illegal immigration, many topics came up Tuesday night at a debate in Pompano Beach that illustrate a much different set of issues.

Education Department

“One of the most important issues is defunding and dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. It is unconstitutional and should not exist,” candidate Christy McLaughlin said, adding that in her view the agency has been “abusing” people for decades.

Ira Weinstein wants to attach new strings to federal education funding.

“I would link the federal funding in aid to education to dismantling of the institutionalized teaching of hatred in our own school systems. Our students are taught to hate America, Americans, and to hate themselves, to consider lifelong alternatives to their own sex at a tender age while being fed a diet of critical race theory and cancel culture,” he said.

Big tech

Candidate Darlene Cerezo Swaffar said she wants to curb power exercised by technology platforms, such as Facebook. She said she’s been “through a lot of personal censorship. My Facebook account was deplatformed.”

She wants to revise or eliminate “Section 230,” a provision of public law lamented by people who believe that restrictions imposed by companies that own information platforms are censoring them.

Technically it refers to a provision of federal law that provides limited federal immunity to platforms. “Very simply put, Section 230 is the law that says that, if I post something defamatory on Twitter, the victim can sue me, but not Twitter. It also says, again put simply, that Twitter has the right to moderate stuff on its site as it sees fit,” legal commentator Ken White has written.

Swaffar said Section 230 “allows big tech to control the communication and narrative of this country. They literally pushed forward the pandemic, the Russian collusion hoax. Everything that we have experienced in the last few years it was the media that controlled that.”

Election fraud

McLaughlin said there was voter fraud in the 2020 election and she was in Nevada,

where she said she helped “gather” evidence in that state.

Candidate Myles Perrone said the “reason I’ve gotten involved in this race at such a young age is I love this country. I’ve seen what happened in the 2020 election and I had to get involved.”

Polling shows many Republican Party voters believe the former president’s oft-repeated, and untrue, claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Republican elections officials have said there was no widespread fraud. Federal judges appointed by Trump issued multiple opinions finding there was no basis to the claims of irregularities. Former Attorney General Bill Bar and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who eagerly championed Trump’s priorities as president, have said Biden was the clear, legitimate winner. So did the late Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kansas, who was the only living former Republican presidential candidate who endorsed Trump in 2016.

“We need to have better control of our elections. If we don’t control elections we can’t get the right people