State, congressional hopefuls square off
Two third-party candidates take the stage in pursuit of Hoyer’s House seat
The Calvert County League of Women Voters forum for state and federal races Thursday was eventful, as candidates’ and attendees’ decorum ranged from civil to contentious to bizarre during the three-hour event intended to showcase what politicians residents have to choose from.
Before candidates could take center stage, LWV members tried to quietly mitigate a situation in the lobby of the St. John Vianney Family Life Center in Prince Frederick.
“I’m not a candidate. Trump’s not a candidate,” White Plains resident Jerry Morton Feith said, disputing the league’s policy of no campaign paraphernalia within the nonpartisan event, while donning a hat with President Donald Trump’s name.
Feith, an associate member of the Charles County Republican Central Committee, cited passages from the U.S. Constitution while refusing numerous requests to remove his hat prior to entering the auditorium and before being removed from the venue by Calvert County sheriff’s deputies.
Only two of the four candidates seeking to unseat U.S. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md., 5th) appeared at the forum. Green Party nominee Patrick Elder and write-in candidate Johnny Rice, who lost to Republican William “Bill” Devine in the primaries, were hoping to garner votes with their strong views on national topics in hopes of keeping Hoyer from an 18th term in Congress. Hoyer, Devine and Libertarian nominee Jacob Pulcher were not present.
“Absolutely, I support the DREAM Act,” Elder said in response to a question on his views of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2017. “If you’ve been here that long to become an American and you adopt this land and this land adopts you, and to take anybody like that and ship back off to Honduras — which, to them, is a foreign land — is not right. It’s harmful and I am adamantly opposed to it.”
While he supports it, Elder believes the provision that grants legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to America as children and attended school here has an insidious nature to it, though he believes it is often used by the Department of Defense military recruiting command to entice youth from overseas to serve in the U.S. armed forces.
“We love illegals — I’m a Christian,” Rice said, noting he opposes the act and that it is unconstitutional. “We need deportations and they can go Make Mexico Great or Latin America Great Again.”
Rice said another option would be to issue them “a lifetime work permit where they cannot be on welfare and they cannot vote. No birth anchor babies” should be allowed to become citizens, nor should they be allowed to sponsor family members into the country.
Pulcher, who said he could not attend the forum due to work obligations, believes the DREAM Act is a “fairly useful” piece of legislation but it only protects the “DREAMers” for about eight years.
“Most have already been here for a very long time. I do not see any reason not to offer a simpler path to citizenship. This would give these young people actual protection instead of using them as weapons in eight years to attack the Republicans or Democrats in their unending bipartisan war,” Pulcher explained to Southern Maryland Newspapers after the forum.
“Congressman Hoyer strongly supports the DREAM Act, and has consistently called on Congress to pass this legislation,” Hoyer spokesperson Annaliese Davis said, noting Hoyer was unable to attend the forum due to previously scheduled commitments.
Devine said he had already committed to another event and heard Hoyer was not going to attend, but shared “I am definitely against the DREAM Act. They are illegal immigrants so they are breaking the law.”
Rice and Elder were polar opposites on a woman’s right to choose and abortion rights legislation.
Rice referred to abortion as the murder of more than 70 million babies and points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which upheld a woman’s decision to have an abortion.
“It’s the blood of the children are crying out. So, I say I was adopted. So, I say let’s put money into adoption, $3 billion-plus into the adoption program rather than abortion,” Rice said.
Rice also scoffed at federal funding for Planned Parenthood, accusing founder Margaret Sanger of being racist and involved with the Ku Klux Klan.
“I struggled tremendously with this — I’m a good Catholic boy,” Elder said. “I think abortion is criminal, personally, but I can’t look at you and say you shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion. It’s really tough for me.”
Elder said he has been hammered for his view, which some might think is contradictory. “It’s really tough from the left side of the political paradigm to argue in favor of sanctity of life,” Elder added.
Pulcher said he is “generally” considered pro-choice and defers to the advice of the majority of medical professionals on when life actually begins. “We should not allow religious beliefs of some to decide laws that we will all have to live by. Religion should not be the basis for lawmaking,” Pulcher said, referring to what is meant by a “separation of church and state.”
Davis said Hoyer “supports a woman’s right to choose, and believes that a woman’s health decisions should be between her and her doctor.” Devine said he is pro-life. On ways to address the opioid epidemic’s drag on resources, Rice advocated legalizing marijuana as the solution, an idea he said was reinforced by conversations with those with addiction whom he met while driving a cab and on the campaign trail.
Elder said the “vicious, ugly, racist” criminal system that treats primarily African-American men poorly is where he would start combating the drug crisis, in the jails where he has worked before, by providing counseling, job programs and other support to minimize recidivism.
In his closing remarks, Elder took exception to big corporate money in politics, pointing to the continued use of fossil fuels due to corporate influence in elections.
Rice said Hoyer is just about the Democratic policies and that the longtime incumbent is a puppet for the Democratic Party. In his closing statement, Rice opted to pray instead for Trump and for “Russian collusion delusion.”