Ismay was Governor Baker’s undersecretary for climate change. He made some colorful and ill-advised comments on a zoom call with the Vermont Climate Council last month. Someone recorded the comments and slipped the video to MassFiscal, which gleefully released it. Ismay was gone in a matter of days.
Before we go further with today’s theme of the far right’s targeting RINO Charlie for extinction, let’s remember why MFA is trying to torpedo Baker’s Transportation Climate Initiative in the first place. MassFiscal is shilling for fossil fuel interests, perhaps tied to Charles Koch. Back on October 20, 2020 MFA signed on to an “Open Letter on the Transportation and Climate Initiative” with a number of other right wing dark money fronts; the letter’s first signatory was from a functionary at Americans for Prosperity, Koch’s political organization. And we know Koch funded the legal operation that brought suit against Governor Baker’s use of emergency health powers in the battle against Covid-19, an attack launched by MassFiscal.
I paid this possible GOP primary little attention until a quote from MassFiscal spokesperson Paul Craney. Upon Governor Baker’s decision to sign on to TCI, Craney released a statement saying of Baker and Lt. Gov. Polito, “I don’t see a path for either of them being able to win an election in 2022.” Word. I mean if Paul Craney says so . . . .
But then odd little factoids began to add up for me. For example, last month’s contested election for chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party was held in MassFiscal founder Rick Green’s parking lot at 1A Auto Parts. Green hired former state representative and U.S. Senate candidate Geoff Diehl candidate to work for the company, just as Diehl is reportedly considering a run against Baker. Then, from masslive, “The Boston Herald reports that Geoff Diehl, the former co-chair of Trump’s campaign in Massachusetts, wants the Republican governor to retract his stance.” Also, in his capacity as “State Committeeman Finance Chairman, Massachusetts Republican Party” Diehl sent out a fundraising pitch attacking Baker’s use of his emergency powers, which are also under assault from MassFiscal and Charles Koch. How about this one. New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Koch funded ($1 million per year) which got shellacked in its lawsuit for MassFiscal and Koch against Governor Baker wants people to sign up to take a stand on a lawsuit they already lost! A supporter list is no help in a lawsuit anyway, but it’s a big help in politics.
Diehl is no Mark Fisher (2014) or Scott Lively (2018). Diehl has won a contested Republican primary statewide, and successfully organized The Committee to Tank the Automatic Gas Tax Hikes in 2014. Lively got 36% of the vote against Baker in the 2018 Republican primary even though Lively is so extreme that the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “actively propagandizing against LGBT people since the early 1990s, but he’s perhaps best-known for co-writing the thoroughly discredited, Holocaust revisionist book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.” Also, Baker lost control of the state party so he can’t expect any help there.
The fund raising should be fun to watch. Baker has gotten a lot of dark and gray money in the past, funneled through the Republican Governors Association. That’s probably not an option in a primary, putting aside for a moment the issue of Donald Trump (who hates Baker). Thanks to OCPF the use of dark money could expose any pol to possible referral to the attorney general’s office. That leaves the Baker committee and the related Mass Majority PAC or something like it, so we could watch the big bucks coming in. As for Diehl, how about small dollar donors loyal to Trump and wanting to stick it to Baker? A word from Trump and Diehl would be awash in cash. Would Diehl be a weaker General Election candidate than Baker? Sure, but the immediate goal of the MassFiscal/Koch/radical right is to purge the GOP of moderates, not win the Corner Office.
The big story nationally is the supposed Republican schism between Trumpist white supremacists/QAnon and the “establishment” wing, though the so-called establishment are actually property supremacy extremists. That’s not the split in Massachusetts though, since we have only a small group of the truly nutty (see Super Happy Fun America and Reopen Massachusetts Facebook page). No, the split here is between a governor who believes that government can be used judiciously to better the lot of the people, and a far right economic fringe driven by Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and of course, by its hidden funders.
The good news is that Republicans are less than 10% of registered voters in Massachusetts so at least the casualty count should be low.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]