Guest Post by Rick Sincere
Retired Air Force officer Karen Kwiatkowski now raises cattle in the Shenandoah Valley. She is also challenging incumbent Bob Goodlatte for the 2012 Republican party nomination to represent Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District in the U.S. Congress.
Kwiatkowski, who left the Air Force with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was posted to the Pentagon during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, identifies herself as a libertarian Republican. She told me at the Buena Vista Labor Day parade last September: “My heart is a heart of liberty. I consider myself a Thomas Jefferson Republican, if there is such a thing, and I think most libertarians would identify with that.”
Kwiatkowski thinks that her candidacy may be nudging Goodlatte to cast more liberty-oriented votes on the floor of the House of Representatives than he has in the past.
A statement released by her campaign via email on December 20 notes that Goodlatte has not faced a primary opponent since he was first elected in 1992, but “now that a conservative military veteran and farmer has entered the GOP primary race for the 6th District seat, we are seeing a new and improved kind of Bob Goodlatte.”
Kwiatkowski identifies two recent votes that suggest his improvement.
One was his vote against the $915 billion continuing budget resolution, which, she believes, may have been the first such vote of Goodlatte’s in at least eleven years.
The other was Goodlatte’s vote against the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which included a provision about detaining suspected terrorists that resulted in considerable concern among civil liberties groups, including the Republican Liberty Caucus and the Libertarian Party.
As Kwiatkowski describes it, the provision “seriously undermines posse comitatus, the prohibition of the US military from domestic law enforcement, and directly violates the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments.”
Despite Goodlatte’s voting no, both bills passed. As Kwiatkowski notes, “Goodlatte’s unfamiliar ‘Nay’ votes were not enough in either of these recent cases. Both the constitution-busting NDAA and the unaffordable 2012 federal budget bill passed. However, I heartily commend him for standing up against the NDAA power grab, and the nearly one trillion dollar 2012 budget.”
Offering her primary opponent a backhanded compliment, Kwiatkowski ends her statement by challenging Goodlatte “to continue his newly found conservative spirit to propose legislation to strip the NDAA of its problematic language regarding detention of Americans, and to propose serious budget cuts in order to rein in the federal bureaucracy. We’re watching his political evolution with great interest.”
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Rick Sincere, twice a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, blogs about politics and culture from Charlottesville. He is the author of two books on U.S. policy toward Africa and has contributed articles to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Examiner, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @rick_sincere
