Rep. Pat Somerville is out with his first mail piece of the fall campaign, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows how vulnerable he is: it claims “outside groups and special interests” are distorting his legislative record and stresses his votes against Snyder’s pension tax and education cuts.
Check it out for yourself:
Rep. Somerville goes on to trumpet his record of standing up for “retirees, seniors and kids” – just before he mentions that he co-sponsored the legislation to cap welfare benefits at 48 months. This legislation, which affected benefits that helped put food on the table for thousands of Michigan families, kicked 46,000 kids off cash assistance with no warning.
Perhaps most outrageously, he takes credit for the auto industry investing more than $700 million in the Downriver area, even though Somerville’s party and the GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney’s plan for the auto industry was to “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” He also claims that “our unemployment is dropping.” Michigan’s unemployment rate actually increased to 8.5 percent in May.
Unfortunately for Rep. Somerville, it’ll be very difficult for him to pretend he’s a principled moderate just because it’s now campaign season. He has an 85 percent mark on the latest Tea Party scorecard on MichiganVotes.org, ranking his votes as more favorable to Tea Party extremists than all House members except just four Republicans: including Aric Nesbitt, Tom McMillin and Dave Agema.
Lansing politicians like Pat Somerville have the wrong priorities, and while many middle class families struggle to make ends meet, Pat Somerville struggles to distort his legislative record. Despite their out-of-touch claims about the state turning a corner, Republicans in Lansing can’t run from their record of spending two years focused on cutting funding for education across the board and raising taxes on the middle class to pay for huge tax breaks for big corporations that ship jobs overseas. Pat Somerville claims to stand on principle, but it’s clear that like Mitt Romney, he doesn’t stand for anything.
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