NV Republican Senate Nominee Sam Brown *Of Course* Wants To End Social Security!
Guess that or the total abortion ban explains how he got Trump endorsement.
This year’s Republican primary for US Senate in Nevada was pretty crowded, with almost a dozen candidates hoping to run against incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen, who’s seeking her second term. As usual, the competition among the Rs was mostly over who could press their lips most lovingly to Donald Trump’s nasty old ass, and the weekend before the June 11 primary, Trump endorsed the asskisser who led the polls, Army vet Sam Brown, who went on to win the nomination.
Rosen, for her part, was in the news earlier this week for her outraged reply to Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the asskisser who may be at the top of Trump’s VP list, after Vance dismissed efforts by Senate Democrats to ban bump stocks as a “huge distraction” from the nation’s “real problems.”
Vance asked whether the Senate should be addressing “fake problems,” and said he thought Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s push for a bump stock ban was “aimed at a PR problem” after the Supreme Court threw out a ban on the devices put in place after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. He also said, of the 58 people who died and the 400 wounded (not counting the hundreds injured in the stampede) in that mass shooting, “The question is: How many people would have been shot alternatively?” and asked whether anyone would be dissuaded from buying a bump stock “because Chuck Schumer passes a piece of legislation?”
Rosen laid into Vance, inviting him to visit memorials to the dead in Las Vegas and meet with first responders who dealt with the carnage, so he could understand why devices that enable semiautomatic rifles to have a rate of fire like a machine gun are not a “fake problem.” Rosen, not usually a fiery speaker, closed her remarks by saying, “Shame on him. Shame on him for disrespecting the dead.”
We suspect she’s not likely to brook any nonsense from Sam Brown, either.
Brown had previously run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2022, and has some legitimate war hero credibility, having survived a roadside bomb in Afghanistan that nearly killed him, leaving him with severe burns and injuries. “Purple Heart recipient” is in the first line of his campaign site bio. (The Trump endorsement is on the front page.)
He also has some rightwing baggage that Rosen is making an early focus of her reelection campaign. Back in 2022, for starters, Brown was an enthusiastic supporter of Sen. Rick Scott’s 11-point manifesto that called for, among other terrible ideas, sunsetting all federal laws every five years, which would give Congress a regular chance to kill Social Security and Medicare by simply not reauthorizing them. Among other bad ideas, the plan also called for raising taxes on retired folks and low-income workers, eliminating large parts of the federal workforce, and firing all federal employees after 12 years to make sure agencies are run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
At a Republican women’s luncheon two days after Scott released the plan, Brown praised Scott and the plan, saying that “what Rick Scott has done in attempting to create a roadmap for a better America is something that I admire as well.” But golly, can you really say he knew that included endangering Social Security? Yes. Yes you can, since that was among the first things opponents of Scott’s plan focused on. And as the Nevada Democratic Party points out, Brown
has also welcomed the endorsement of Americans for Prosperity Action, the super PAC arm of the Koch network that has called for major changes to Social Security, including raising the retirement age and cutting benefits.
But wait, there’s more! Brown says on his campaign page that if he’s elected to the Senate he will not vote for a national abortion ban, saying, “Nevada voters have made it clear where they stand” in a 1990 referendum protecting abortion rights (a second initiative to enshrine a “fundamental right to abortion” in the state constitution is likely to make the ballot this fall).
However, as the Nevada Current reports, Brown arrived at that position only after months of dodging the question, insisting it wouldn’t be prudent to comment on “hypothetical” legislation, don’t you see. The Current also details how in 2018, Brown “personally recruited and managed the campaign” of a failed Texas candidate for Congress, one Sam Deen. Deen promised he would never support any exceptions to a ban on abortion, describing himself as “100% Pro Life, no exceptions” in social media posts, although that wasn’t his top issue in those carefree halcyon pre-Dobbs days, before the Texas Lege even came up with its “bounty” ban on abortions.
And Axios points out that in between his Senate runs, Brown was the head of Nevada’s branch of the national “Faith and Freedom Coalition,” a group that routinely supports the strictest possible abortion restrictions, including Texas’s. Since then, Brown has insisted that the Nevada group hardly dealt with abortion, because it was focused on stopping human trafficking, and, um, “supporting the devastated communities recovering from the COVID-19 shutdowns,” according to his comms director, Kristy Wilkinson. Abortion? Why would the Faith and Freedom Coalition take a stance on a minor issue like that when there’s all that COVID shutdown debris to clean up?
Also, in a fun postscript to Nevada’s GOP primary, the AP reports that the second-place candidate, Jeff Gunter, who positioned himself as “110% pro-Trump” in the campaign, is the only primary rival who hasn’t swung his support to Brown. Gunter calls Brown the beneficiary of “establishment influence and money” and has questioned Brown’s commitment to Sparkle MAGA, not only because he refused to attend primary debates, just like Trump, but also because Brown was too close to Mitch McConnell, who silly progressives keep forgetting is one of them.
Gunter even slurred the Great Man himself, suggesting in a tweet that Trump or those running his campaign must have received a “big check” from “the swamp” in exchange for the endorsement. That resulted in a characteristically calm reply from Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, who said in a statement, “You have a habit of making up crap. President Trump makes his own decisions and this is another example of him choosing wisely.” God, we love GOP unity.
Rosen’s campaign has been going after Brown’s record, so far as it can be found, and if you want to help Democrats hold the Senate, her campaign page is right here.
[NBC News / AP / American Journal News / Nevada Current / Axios / AP]
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Republican platform: End Social Security and Medicare, the Jim Crow era was awesome, women’s reproductive rights should be based on laws from the 1800s, Democracy is overrated, Hitler’s speeches about vermin are awesome, Trump is our retribution, and project 2025 the 900 page blue print for a dictatorship is awesome.
Media: Joe Biden should drop out of the race. He’s 3 years older than Trump.
I will never understand why Democrats let Republicans get away with their semantic wins. Pro-life is a big one that makes no sense when they are killing women with their legislation (and not actually saving any babbies), but "entitlement programs" really chaps my ass. Entitlement is SUCH a loaded word, and it makes these programs that people have been paying for out of their paychecks their entire working lives into a "handout" from the government. Democrats need to scream from the rooftops about how these are EARNED BENEFITS, hammer home "you've already paid to have this money there for you later in life, and now they want STEAL YOUR HARD EARNED CASH." It's not fucking hard. Stop using the phrase "entitlements" already, FFS.