One month ago, U.S. Representative Thaddeus McCotter told a radio station in Detroit that he was considering running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. In response, the American people did nothing. Most people didn’t even hear about this statement, because McCotter isn’t a very prominent member of Congress.
Today, Congressman McCotter has let it be known that he will make a definite announcement tomorrow about whether he will run for President in 2012. So, people are curious about this McCotter fellow they’ve never heard of before, wondering what kind of politics he might bring to the 2012 Republican presidential contest.
Over at That’s My Congress, we’ve been following Thaddeus McCotter for a few years now, and here’s a summary of what we know:
McCotter is a lawyer from Livonia, Michigan. Livonia is a standard suburb of Detroit, with lots of congested roads, big box stores and slapdash development. The auto industry is the major employer of residents in McCotter’s congressional district, as is the case in all congressional districts in southeast Michigan.
Though McCotter is a balding lawyer, he fancies himself a rock-and-roller. He posts YouTube videos under the theme Rock Solid with Thaddeus McCotter, in which he plays guitar for a few seconds, wearing a shirt and tie, before having a discussion with another Republican member of Congress about why legislation should be passed to meet the demands of corporate executives.
McCotter doesn’t have a very long record in Congress. He’s been a member of the House of Representatives for only going on nine years now.
Though McCotter is a Republican, he voted with Democrats on two pieces of labor legislation this year. McCotter voted against amendments that would have scrapped the use of cost-saving Project Labor Agreements by the federal government and would have ended the David-Bacon rule that construction workers on federally-funded projects be paid the prevailing wage in their areas of expertise. However, McCotter voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which assists in the protection of workers from discrimination by employees on the basis of gender.
When a bill to increase the minimum wage came up a few years ago, Thaddeus McCotter was one of the few Republicans to vote for the wage increase. This position, if McCotter were to maintain it, would put him in opposition to Michele Bachmann, who has called for the total elimination of the minimum wage.
On constitutional rights, Thaddeus McCotter doesn’t have a great record. He voted for the FISA Amendments Act, giving telecommunications corporations retroactive immunity for their illegal gathering of information about American citizens, sharing that information about the government. The bill, paired with the Patriot Act, allows massive government electronic dragnets of Americans’ personal information. McCotter also voted for the Protect America Act, the predecessor of the FISA Amendments Act. The Protect America Act allowed astounding amounts of spying by the government against law-abiding Americans, including email searches, tracking of web habits, and even satellite surveillance. McCotter has also voted in favor of reauthorization of the Patriot Act without any reform, endorsing a regime of extreme, unconstitutional, unreasonable search and seizure in Americans’ homes and businesses. On the issue of torture, McCotter has voted to prevent the videotaping of interrogation of criminal suspects, allowing torture and other coercive methods to continue.
McCotter has claimed to value the American family, but in fact, he’s voted in favor of legislation to strip citizenship from American babies – infants who were born right here in the United States. Why? McCotter disapproves of where their parents come from. McCotter has tried to prevent the formation of new families, interfering with local legislation in Washington D.C. that expands marriage rights to same-sex couples. He has voted against funding for government programs to provide food to hungry children. McCotter also tried to interfere with Head Start early childhood education by allowing the managers of Head Start programs to fire teachers for no other reason than that the teachers don’t belong to the particular church that their managers prefer.
Thaddeus McCotter has taken other actions to position himself as an opponent of the separation of church and state. For example, he has voted for more than one bill that attempts to prevent the judicial system from protecting Americans whose local governments have engaged in acts of religious discrimination. McCotter has also voted to protect the power of government-funded organizations to hire only members of certain religious sects, making the unemployment problem a problem of religious liberty as well. Further, McCotter has voted in support of schemes to use federal, state, and local government money to create displays endorsing the practice of certain kinds of religion.
