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Immigration

Immigrant Activists Deliver Pink Slips To Heritage’s Jim DeMint

By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee on May 15, 2013 at 4:53 pm

On Wednesday, a group of immigrant activists jointly organized by the Center for Community Change and Fair Immigration Reform Movement demanded former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to resign as president of the Heritage Foundation. DeMint was an enthusiastic leader at the forefront of a flawed immigration study co-authored by Jason Richwine who argued that Hispanics have lower genetic IQ in his doctoral thesis.

While conservatives leaders and organizations have roundly criticized the Heritage study, Jim DeMint has not said anything about the controversial former employee. The activists take DeMint’s silence as a sign of his solidarity with Richwine’s racially tinged history. Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change stated in an interview with Chris Hayes, “the issue is that [Richwine] was hired knowingly by Heritage with these views way out of the mainstream by the pillar institution of modern Conservatism in America.”

Carrying pink slips and a banner, the activists approached DeMint as he exited the Heritage Foundation, but he quickly slipped back in through another door. As they stacked pink slips in front of the doors of the Heritage Foundation, they shouted “Jim DeMint Has Got to Go!” Watch it:

Justice

Seven Outlandish Things The Heritage Foundation’s Remaining Employees Believe

By Ian Millhiser on May 13, 2013 at 9:00 am

(Credit: AP)

Late in the day Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Jason Richwine, the co-author of their widely criticized immigration report, was no longer employed by the conservative think tank. Shortly after the immigration report was released, the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews reported that Richwine’s PhD dissertation claimed that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Heritage’s decision to hire Richwine was not a momentary lapse in judgement that was quickly rectified. To the contrary, Richwine was employed by the Heritage foundation for more than three years before reports of his quasi-eugenic views forced him to leave. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident. Although evidence has not yet emerged suggesting that Richwine’s racist views are common among Heritage employees, here are seven examples of radical, offensive or just downright weird beliefs held by current Heritage staffers:

  • Children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to starve. When news of Richwine’s racist dissertation broke, Heritage initially attempted to rehabilitate its immigration report by claiming that Richwine’s co-author, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, took the lead in designing the study’s methodology and Richwine merely “provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector.” Rector, however, is hardly a picture of moderation. Among other things, Rector co-authored a 2012 report arguing that we should “prohibit food stamp payments to illegal immigrant families.” Notably, because all nearly all children born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, one impact of Rector’s proposal would be starving American children in order to spite their parents.
  • Gay people and sexually active unmarried women should be banned from teaching. In 2010, Heritage President Jim DeMint told a rally at a South Carolina church that “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
  • The Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement.” Defending Justice Scalia’s statement that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky endorses Scalia’s view and writes that “the only thing certain about talking honestly about the current benefits and burdens of Section 5 (or voting against its renewal) is the very type of venomous attacks and false claims of racism and Jim Crow to which Scalia has been subjected.” Spakovsky’s disregard for the Voting Rights Act is not surprising, as he is one of the nation’s top proponents of voter suppression laws. Indeed, a panel of Virginia judges recently refused to reappoint Spakovsky to an election board in Fairfax, Virginia in the wake of allegations that he used his seat on the board to crusade against voting rights.
  • Todd Akin can save America from an “economic abyss.” At a time when former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) found himself friendless due to his “legitimate rape” comment, DeMint tried to throw Akin a lifeline in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In a joint statement with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), DeMint said that they “support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us so we can save our country from fiscal collapse.” As a bonus, Heritage published a column by Akin in 2011 where the former congressman claimed that “the constitutionality of much entitlement spending is debatable.”
  • Poor people aren’t really poor if they own refrigerators. In 2011, Rector and Heritage Policy Analyst Rachel Sheffield published a report arguing that “Congress should reorient the massive welfare state to promote self-sufficient prosperity rather than expanded dependence” in part because most impoverished households own appliances and do not send their kids to bed hungry. Among the report’s claims are that nearly all poor people have “kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator,” that “[n]early three-fourths have a car or truck” and that “70 percent have a VCR.” Of course, as Matt Yglesias points out, many of the common household amenities Rector and Sheffield dismiss as luxuries are actually signs of thrift — “[b]uying food at the grocery store and saving it thanks to the miracles of modern refrigeration is sound household budgeting.” Similarly, poor people in parts of the country without adequate public transportation would find it very difficult to hold a job if they did not have a car or truck. As Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper explain, a particularly well-equipped poor household could sell all of their household appliances and electronics and still only wind up with two and a half months rent.
  • Accused terrorists shouldn’t have legal representation and their lawyers should be punished. According to at least one former Bush Administration official, the “vast majority” of the 742 original Guantanamo Bay detainees were innocent of terrorism, which only emphasizes the importance of providing these detainees with due process and adequate legal representation. Yet, in a 2007 radio interview, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson made a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees by encouraging their law firms’ corporate clients to drop them. Stimson listed the names of over a dozen firms with attorneys representing detainees, and then said “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” Within a month, Stimson resigned from the Bush Administration (he also apologized for his comments and claimed they did not reflect his “core beliefs”). Yet, while Stimson’s comments were too disgraceful for him to remain in Bush’s Defense Department, they were not too disgraceful for the Heritage Foundation. Stimson is now a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage.
  • A J.J. Abrams TV show should guide America’s defense policy. The plot of J.J. Abrams’ show “Revolution” focuses around a new weapon technology that disables electronic devices and returns the world to the pre-industrial era. Most TV viewers understand that this show is science fiction. Heritage thinks it is a warning about the future. According to Heritage, the future world depicted in this show, “is not as unlikely as it might appear.” Heritage national security Research Fellow Baker Spring warns that America’s enemies could detonate “a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth” triggering an “electromagnetic pulse” (EMP) that would disable American technology. Another Heritage paper calls for a “National EMP Awareness Day.” In reality, of course, the idea of an EMP attack belongs in science fiction. Among other things, if someone who wished us harm possessed both a nuclear warhead and the technology required to detonate such a weapon in US airspace, there are plenty of other much more destructive things they could do — such as setting off the nuke in the middle of Manhattan.

Immigration

Author Of Heritage Immigration Study Resigns Amid Racism Scandal

By Zack Beauchamp on May 10, 2013 at 4:07 pm

Jason Richwine. (Credit: The Heritage Foundation.)

Jason Richwine, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s report on the cost of the current immigration bill, has resigned after it emerged that his graduate dissertation on immigration was premised on the idea that Latinos were less intelligent than whites.

The controversy, which began after The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews unearthed the dissertation on Latino intelligence, forced the conservative think tank into emergency damage control for the remainder of the week, when it emerged that Richwine had ties to extreme anti-immigration groups. On Friday afternoon, Heritage announced that Richwine has resigned. Heritage’s statement:

Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage. It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters.

Richwine’s dissertation argued that immigration policy should discriminate against low-IQ immigrants in immigration policy, but that such discrimination should be masked in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. The Heritage report, which had been widely panned on both the left and right, argued that US immigration policy should encourage high-skill immigration into the United States.

The arguments linking race and IQ in Richwine’s dissertation fit into a longstanding conservative tradition. Many major anti-immigration groups have some connections to racist pseudoscience.

Immigration

Marco Rubio Denounces Heritage Immigration Study: ‘The Folks Described In That Report Are My Family’

By Aviva Shen on May 7, 2013 at 2:14 pm

(Credit: CNN)

On Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined the growing chorus of conservative criticism of the Heritage Foundation’s new anti-immigrant report, which claims the Senate’s immigration bill would cost the economy $6.3 trillion. Rubio denounced the report’s assumption that all immigrants will forever be poor and uneducated, pointing to how his own family flourished after entering the U.S.:

“Their argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed,” Rubio told reporters. “That is these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S. Quite frankly that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S. That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S. The folks described in that report are my family. My mother and dad didn’t graduate high school and I would not say they were a burden on the United States…My parents were a lot better off 25 years after they emigrated here than they were when they first got here. And their children certainly have been. I still think we’re that country. And I still think we can be that country and even more in the future, so I guess I just have a lot more belief in the future of the country than some of the folks that helped prepare [the report].”

Indeed, the Heritage study ignores immigrants’ gains in wages and education after legalization, preferring to categorize all immigrants as “takers” who will be permanently dependent on the government.

Rubio’s heated critique of the Heritage study highlights widening divides in the GOP over immigration. In the past, Rubio has called Heritage president and former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) his best friend, according to the New York Times. But now, DeMint has vowed to work against Rubio’s pet cause. Rubio has stated before that their disagreement over immigration “is never going to change how I feel about Jim DeMint, and hopefully doesn’t change how he feels about me.” Today, he pointedly added, “Anyone who opposes this bill but fails to offer a real and specific alternative is in favor of the status quo.”

Update

In a response published by the Washington Examiner, Heritage argued Rubio’s parents worked hard because they came to the U.S. before many of the social safety net programs were created:

“Sen. Rubio’s parents came here in 1956, almost a decade before the introduction of the Great Society programs that laid the foundation of the modern welfare state. Over the following four and a half decades, our government has added layer upon layer of government involvement in our lives, creating a dependency that undermines self-respect and self-reliance.”

Immigration

Heritage vs. Heritage: Major Immigration Report Released Today Directly Contradicts Its 2006 Study

By Igor Volsky on May 6, 2013 at 5:26 pm

On Monday, the Heritage Foundation published a widely panned study arguing that comprehensive immigration reform that allows undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, as the population will take advantage of an array of government programs, including, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, public education, and population-based services like police and parks.

But the study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically” and warned lawmakers against succumbing to “a lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignore migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail.” Below is a comparison of the two:

Heritage in 2013
Heritage in 2006
“[F]ormer unlawful immigrant households would likely begin to receive government benefits at the same rate as lawful immigrant households of the same education level. As a result, government spending and fiscal deficits would increase dramatically.” “An honest assessment acknowledges that illegal immigrants bring real benefits to the supply side of the American economy, which is why the business community is opposed to a simple crackdown… Most immigrant families have a positive net fiscal impact on the U.S., adding $88,000 more in tax revenues than they consume in services.“
“Amnesty would also raise retirement costs by making unlawful immigrants eligible for Social Security and Medicare, resulting in a net fiscal deficit of around $22,700 per retired amnesty recipient per year.” “Social Security payroll taxes paid by improperly identified (undocumented) workers have led to a $463 billion funding surplus.”
“Many conservatives believe that if an individual has a job and works hard, he will inevitably be a net tax contributor (paying more in taxes than he takes in benefits). In our society, this has not been true for a very long time. “ “Whether low-skilled or high-skilled, immigrants boost national output, enhance specialization, and provide a net economic benefit.”
“Unlawful immigration appears to depress the wages of low-skill U.S.-born and lawful immigrant workers by 10 percent, or $2,300, per year. Unlawful immigration also probably drives many of our most vulnerable U.S.-born workers out of the labor force entirely.” Studies show that a 10 percent share increase of immigrant labor results in roughly a 1 percent reduction in native wages-a very minor effect… [C]ritics of this type of insourcing worry that jobs are being taken away from native-born Americans in favor of low-wage foreigners. Recent data suggest that these fears are overblown.”
Update

The author of the 2006 Heritage report disputes the 2013 analysis: “Unless they expect readers to believe all this household income (a) generates no productive work (e.g., makes product, mows lawns, nurses the sick, and starts businesses that hire other Americans) and (b) is 100% remitted abroad, consuming nothing in the U.S. macro economy, then the report is misleading.” Like the other fiscal conservatives today, he argues, “The net effect of this Special Report does real damage to the cause of dynamic analysis. For more than a decade, Heritage has called on CBO to add dynamic analysis to its tax reform studies.”

Politics

Ten People We Are Grateful Are No Longer Members Of Congress

By Ian Millhiser and Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 3, 2013 at 12:00 pm

Under the Twentieth Amendment, “[t]he terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January.” Accordingly, as of this very moment, many members of 112th Congress are now unemployed. Here are ten that we are particularly grateful will no longer be able to contribute to federal legislation:

Jim DeMint

It’s more ‘see you soon’ than ‘goodbye’ for former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who will take his far-right, tea party-loving persona over to the conservative Heritage Foundation. DeMint leaves a bleak legacy. Over his time in Congress, he’s gained notoriety for his anti-union, gay-bashing, anti-abortion, anti-obamacare, pro-austerity positions, among the most extreme in the Senate.

Todd Akin

Former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) thought he was moving up in the world when he abandoned his House seat to seek a spot in the Senate. Instead, Akin’s campaign made a crash landing after he told a radio host that victims of “legitimate rape” can’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Ron Paul

Most members of Congress leave politics with a few new laws to their credit if they are lucky, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), however, can take credit for reviving generations worth of terrible ideas and building a national movement behind his poor grasp of the Constitution and basic economics. Paul believes the Departments of Energy, Education, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Labor are all unconstitutional — as are Social Security and Medicare, which he compared to “slavery.” He would return to the gold standard. And he thinks states can simply nullify federal laws they don’t feel like following. Yet it is a testament to the grip Paul has on America’s lunatic fringe that his supporters will whip themselves into a frenzy every time anyone dares to question his ill-considered views. Don’t believe us? Just wait and see what they write in comments on this very post.

Joe Lieberman

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) likes war, a lot. He was a leading proponent of the war in Iraq. He cheerleaded for war in Iran, and even pushed for more belligerence against Syria. Lieberman once defended waterboarding. He accused President Obama of “encourag[ing] Israel’s enemies.,” and he once called for Social Security cuts to pay for “war with Islamist extremists.” Lieberman loves Fox News, and he ended his tenure in the Senate will a call to raise the Medicare retirement age.

Joe Walsh

Now-former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) got himself kicked out of Congress by continuously bashing his opponent, a female war veteran and amputee who Walsh said was not a “true hero.” The tough-talking Congressman also once said that Muslims are “trying to kill Americans every week,” and once screamed at his own constituents.
Read more

Politics

Meet Sen. Tim Scott: The Tea Party Lawmaker Who Wanted To Impeach President Obama And Kick Kids Off Food Stamps

By Scott Keyes on Dec 17, 2012 at 9:46 am

Tim Scott is America’s newest senator today after getting tapped by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to fill the vacancy left by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). DeMint announced this month that he was leaving the Senate to head up the Heritage Foundation, an arch-conservative think tank in Washington DC.

Though DeMint left big, controversial shoes to fill for Republicans, few conservatives will be disappointed with Scott’s record. Elected to Congress just two years ago in the Tea Party wave, Scott has already garnered headlines for his plan to impeach President Obama, his legislation to cut off union members’ children from food stamps, and his defense of Big Oil.

Here’s a quick look at Scott’s record:

  • Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
  • Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
  • Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was unperturbed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
  • Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
  • Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

Greg Noth contributed research to this post.

Update

Scott is an ardent proponent of guns, calling them a “cornerstone of our democracy” on his congressional page. “The federal government should never interfere with this right,” said Scott.

Update

Learn more about Scott’s unwavering support for guns here.

Politics

5 Republicans Who Could Replace Jim DeMint In The Senate

By Adam Peck on Dec 6, 2012 at 2:02 pm

On Thursday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) announced that he would be resigning his seat in January to take up the position of President at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative tank in Washington D.C.

The task of replacing the outspoken Tea Party lawmaker now falls to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who will appoint someone to the seat until a special election can be held in 2014.

Speculation is already swirling around a handful of names to fill the seat, so ThinkProgress has put together an early look at some of the possible candidates for the job:

Rep. Tim Scott
Several reports are identifying Scott as DeMint’s preferred choice to replace him, and for good reason: the freshman congressman has already proven to be nearly as extreme as DeMint himself. In 2011, he voted to extend billions of dollars in subsidies to big oil companies, arguing that taxpayer-funded money going to companies that reap billions in profits was “fair.” And during the last fight over the debt ceiling, Scott floated the possibility of introducing articles of impeachment against President Obama. While a State Representative, Scott helped to defund South Carolina’s entire HIV/AIDS programs, including the elimination of the state’s AIDs Drug Assistance Program.

Gov. Nikki Haley
She would not be the first Governor to appoint herself to the Senate, and would be well within her authority to do just that. Her approval ratings have remained low for years, trailing even President Obama by 10 points in the reliably red state and jeopardizing her chances of reelection in 2014. She has her own impressive track record of extreme comments and policy proposals, from denying the existence of any war on women to then perpetrating said war by vetoing half a million dollars in funding for abuse and rape prevention crisis centers throughout her state.

Former Attorney General Henry McMaster
McMaster served as South Carolina’s Attorney General for six years before launching a bid for the Governor’s mansion in 2009. He ran in the 2010 GOP primary against Haley, but dropped out of the race and endorsed her ahead of the runoff election in June of that year. As AG, McMaster was one of 16 Republican attorneys general to file suit against ObamaCare. He also cut a political video touting his role in the case, raising questions about whether he filed the frivolous suit — at a tremendous cost to the taxpayers — simply to benefit his own political ambitions.

State Sen. Tom Davis
He too is a tea party favorite, especially amongst Ron Paul supporters. Conservatives had been trying to convince Davis to challenge South Carolina’s other Senator Lindsey Graham in the 2014 GOP primary. Davis gave a speech at Paul’s rally in Tampa, Florida during the RNC in which he called Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “a dictator and a traitor.”

Rep. Joe Wilson
With one outburst three years ago, Wilson became perhaps the most well-known congressman in the state. His unprecedented interruption of President Obama during the 2009 State of the Union address made him something of a hero for far-right extremists, and their impression of him has only been reinforced in the intervening years. Wilson is a longtime member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group with deep ties to white supremacists and other right-wing extremists. He was an outspoken defender of the confederate flag, and fought to keep it affixed atop the state capital building.

Politics

11 Reasons You’re Glad Jim DeMint Is Leaving The Senate

By Scott Keyes on Dec 6, 2012 at 11:29 am

In an unexpected move, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), an arch-conservative and leader of the Tea Party movement, is resigning his seat in order to head up the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington DC.

DeMint has been among the most extreme members of the Senate since first getting elected in 2004, drawing a hard-right line on issues from unions to LGBT rights to abortion and beyond.

Here’s a look back at some of DeMint’s Senate highlights:

1. Stood with Akin after “legitimate rape” remarks. Following Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous statement that victims of “legitimate rape” can’t become pregnant, DeMint was one of the first major conservatives to stand with the Missouri congressman. DeMint even used his political action committee to donate $90,000 to Akin’s campaign and used its network to raise hundreds of thousands more. “We support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us,” DeMint’s group said.

2. Led the opposition against Obamacare. In 2009, during the height of the GOP’s opposition to health care reform, DeMint told a conference call of conservative activists that, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Ironically, DeMint once supported Mitt Romney’s health care reform in Massachusetts, the law on which Obamacare is based.

3. Wants to prevent gay or unmarried teachers from teaching in public schools. In 2010, DeMint “said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.” During his first Senate campaign in 2004, DeMint agreed with the state party’s platform barring gay teachers from public schools, claiming that the government shouldn’t endorse certain behaviors.

4. Pushed a bill outlawing the discussion of abortion over the Internet. Last year, DeMint proposed an amendment to an unrelated bill that would have barred a woman and her doctor from discussing abortion over the internet, even if her health was at risk and tele-conferencing was the most feasible option to receive care.

5. Wants to strip all federal employees of collective bargaining rights. Though most federal employees don’t enjoy the rights and benefits of unionization, DeMint wants to take away even the few bargaining rights they currently enjoy. “I don’t believe collective bargaining has any place in government,” DeMint told ThinkProgress last year.

6. Blocked creation of the National Women’s History Museum. Along with fellow arch-conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), DeMint placed a hold on a 2010 bill to sell land near the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC in order to create the National Women’s History Museum. Coburn justified their move to block the museum by noting that there already exist museums for “quilters” and “cowgirls”.

7. Likened striking Chicago teachers to “thugs” in the Middle East. Speaking at the Values Voters Summit in September 2012, DeMint blasted Chicago teachers who were on strike for a brief period earlier this year. “On my way over, I was reading another story about a distant place where thugs had put 400,000 children out in the streets,” DeMint said. “And then I realized that was a story about the Chicago teachers strike.”

8. Threatened to single-handedly shut down the Senate. In September 2010, DeMint warned his colleagues that he would place a unilateral hold on every single piece of legislation in the Senate, bringing the entire lawmaking process to a grinding halt. Despite being in the minority, DeMint threatened to only allow bills to proceed that his office had personally approved.

9. Used a failed terrorist plot to attack unions. Following the failed “underwear bomber” plot in December 2009, DeMint went on Fox News and used the episode as an opportunity to bash unions. “I am concerned, because it’s related to another issue that we’re dealing with now in the Senate,” DeMint said. “The administration is intent on unionizing and submitting our airport security to union bosses’ collective bargaining.”

10. Argued that people with pre-existing conditions got better care before Obamacare. Speaking with ThinkProgress at a Tea Party rally this year, DeMint argued that Obamacare actually hurt people with pre-existing conditions, despite that fact that it bars insurance companies from denying them care. “I can guarantee you people with pre-exisitng conditions are going to get less health care—lower quality health care—under Obamacare,” DeMint said.

11. “Willing” to cause “serious disruptions” in the economy in order to secure draconian cuts. During last year’s debt ceiling showdown, DeMint appeared on Fox Business and said that, despite the fact that not raising the debt ceiling would cause “serious disruptions,” he was “willing to do that” in order to get major cuts to social programs like Medicare and Social Security.

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