On Tuesday night, Republican-nominated U.S. Senate candidate Wendy Long urged a group of New York Republicans gathered at the Republican National Convention to support her candidacy, portraying herself as a politician cut from the same cloth as now-official GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“How great would it be to have a native son lead us out of turmoil and trouble to peace and justice?” she said of Trump. “Someone who follows the rule of law and not the rule of mob… This is the path Donald Trump has set for our great nation and it’s the same path I’m on.”
The two-time candidate who is mounting a long-shot bid to unseat Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) then echoed much of Trump’s rhetoric during a Wednesday morning radio interview. During that interview, Long claimed that “Christians are being persecuted, not just in the Middle East but here in this country.” She also said that under a President Trump, the nation would “start saying merry Christmas again,” and urged the country to “unite around being Americans and not around Sharia law.”
The comments mirror statements Trump has made about Christians being persecuted in the U.S., though these claims have been widely debunked.
But while Long has cast herself as aligned with Trump, some of her public statements indicate a record that may be even more extreme than the Republican nominee.
She thinks child labor laws are unconstitutional
In 2008, Long wrote a book review in which she agreed with an opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that could have resulted in child labor laws being determined unconstitutional. Congress has the ability to regulate things that “substantially affect interstate commerce,” which is the statute Congress uses to make universal labor laws. But Thomas wrote that the “substantial effects” clause is contrary to the design of the Constitution.
She race-baited a President Obama judicial appointee
As chief counsel for the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN), Long was involved in an attack ad widely seen as an attempt to race-bait then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The ad implied that because of Sotomayor’s Latina heritage, she would not be able to be unbiased as a judge. The JCN and Long later walked back the ad after it proved controversial.
In a separate ad in 2008, Long implied that Obama would appoint people like a Chicago slum lord to the bench.
She thinks no one would notice if abortion was criminalized
During her last run for Senate in 2012 when she unsuccessfully took on Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Long suggested that people don’t really care about Roe v. Wade, the ruling that made abortion legal.
“If Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, nobody would even notice, because the states are legislating their own laws about abortion, completely independent,” she said.
Long’s overall views on abortion can best be characterized as extreme. She has stated that she is “100% pro-life from conception to natural death,” presumably meaning she would support fetal personhood. Long is also on record as saying she would support defunding Planned Parenthood. In addition, Long supports giving an exemption to employers who have moral qualms about providing health coverage for abortions.
She lent legitimacy to a hate group
Long recently spoke at a gathering of the Oath Keepers, an extreme right-wing, anti government group whose founder has advocated hanging U.S. Senator John McCain.
Though the Oath Keepers specifically lobby for local officials to refuse to follow federal law, Long nevertheless praised the group for its work to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
She compared gay marriage to marrying your parents or your pet
Long once wrote a legal analysis arguing that the legalization of same-sex marriage could lead to marriage to one’s parents or pets being legalized. Long defended the brief during her campaign against Gillibrand by saying she would have liked to marry her sick mother.
Also during that campaign, Long said she would refuse, on principle, to attend a wedding of a same-sex couple. She supported a controversial anti-Jihad ad
Long defended an ad set to appear in subway stations in 2012. The ad read “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
In an interview, Long defended the ad, saying it “didn’t seem very ugly to her.”
Long’s campaign website notes that she hopes to restore “Judeo-Christian culture” to America.
Evan Popp is an intern at ThinkProgress.