August 4, 2022 at 11:35 a.m.
Primary election endorsements: Jarchow and Tiffany
Primary election endorsements: Jarchow and Tiffany
The Republican primary contest for attorney general features two major candidates who sharply contrast with each other, Fond du Lac district attorney Eric Toney and former lawmaker and attorney Adam Jarchow.
This one is a no-brainer: Conservatives should rally behind Jarchow's candidacy, and enthusiastically so.
Toney bases his campaign on a narrow view of the attorney general's office, saying he will be an aggressive prosecutor who will be tough on crime as the state's Top Cop. The problem is, Jarchow promises to be equally as tough, and we really can't imagine many Republicans who would be any less so. So that, at best, is a draw.
But Jarchow towers above Toney in other ways. Essentially, Toney believes the attorney general should be little more than a glorified district attorney, but the job entails so much more. The role of the attorney general is to direct, supervise, and control direct and special prosecutions in the field - and to set policy for prosecutions.
The "top cop" needs the skill set to manage the sprawling DOJ like a CEO manages a corporation, as an experienced leader who can set the direction and philosophy and policy goals of the Department of Justice - including the state's approach to prosecuting crime, setting bail, enforcing laws, and protecting victims - and make sure the DOJ's 700-plus member staff implements and executes those policies and prosecutorial approaches.
Not least, the attorney general is uniquely positioned to know what laws are needed to make sure serious crimes are seriously punished as well as to ensure that prosecutors actually prosecute crimes and are compelled to set appropriate bail.
Such an attorney general would adopt an aggressive approach not only within the agency and with county DAs when it comes to prosecution but with the legislature when it comes to passing the laws necessary to undertake those prosecutions. That would not only toughen up the state's approach to prosecuting crime but would help prevent crime from being committed in the first place.
That's Jarchow's approach, and, as a lawmaker, he excelled in all those areas. In the legislature, for example, he supported and voted for stronger victim intimidation statutes; he helped strengthen Wisconsin's extortion and blackmail laws; he helped create a Class I felony for terrorist threats; he supported the first consideration of a constitutional amendment that would allow judges to consider multiple factors, instead of just appearance in court, when determining the amount of bail; he would have expanded the definition of violent crime for the purposes of setting bail; he helped create new crimes for carjacking and to increase penalties for repeat carjacking offenders; he voted for expanding the definition of "serious violent crime." The list goes on and on.
Now Toney may well support all those things, and, to be fair, he hasn't been in the legislature to compile a record of such support. What's troubling is that his campaign and campaign website are silent on what is needed legislatively and procedurally to toughen up the state's statutory approach to crime. He appears to not understand that a statutory foundation for a tough-on-crime approach even exists. He only understands the back end of criminal justice - the need to prosecute crime after it is committed without any clue about front-end deterrence.
More than that, state attorneys general are needed to counter a prevailing trend among progressive Democratic AGs, who use their power illicitly to create undemocratic laws and to create new rights out of thin air - laws and rights that embrace a partisan economic agenda and promote the cultural preferences of favored but narrow identity groups.
Contrast that with Jarchow, who says the attorney general needs to stand up for individual liberty, especially when it is threatened by government. To that end Jarchow has said that he would create within the DOJ an office of civil and religious liberty. This is critically important because, while most progressive attorneys general pay lip service to the twin missions of civil liberties and civil rights, they tend to focus on civil rights violations, mostly discrimination cases that they expand exponentially as a way to enact the progressive equity agenda, while ignoring the civil liberties side of the equation, which most often pits the government against the individual.
Jarchow's pledge would elevate civil liberties to their proper parallel place, but Toney, again, is silent. Earlier this year, after failing to find any mention of the issue in any media, we asked him directly if he would likewise create such an office.
We received no response.
Of course, activist attorneys general also carry out and support efforts to subvert challenges to the unlawful authority of the administrative state, as Josh Kaul does. Conservative attorneys general are needed to counter these unconstitutional efforts, as 20 of them did last May 5 when they wrote a letter calling the Biden administration's Disinformation Governance Board unconstitutional and asking that the administration disband it forever, while saying they would take appropriate legal action if it remained intact.
Not surprisingly, Josh Kaul did not sign the letter. Adam Jarchow immediately said he would have. But Toney made no statement of support. He never responded when we asked him. Again, no response.
What about open records?
Well, after a citizen filed an open records request for Toney's records on February 16, according to The Cap Times, no response at all was received for almost a month, and months later - five months since the original request was submitted - the citizen had yet to receive any records from Toney's office. Toney said he was trying to balance priorities in an office with slim resources, but what it really shows is that Toney is not up to the job of running the DOJ, which houses an office of open government, the issue is considered so important.,
When a district attorney ignores a request, as Toney did, one recourse is to the attorney general, rather than to the courts, which are cost-prohibitive. But what chance do citizens have that Toney would do anything but ignore their requests, too?
Again, as in the case of his foot soldiering for Evers's totalitarianism, actions - or inaction, as the case may be - tell the tale.
To sum it up in a word: Toney's candidacy is built upon a house of cards, each flimsier than the last. It is built to last until the day after Election Day, when it would fall in upon itself and implode under the withering attack of Josh Kaul, who will expose all this and more.
Toney's apparent belief that he would be just a district attorney with a larger geographical jurisdiction sets him up for failure in every the realm as Top Cop, for it is absolutely critical that the attorney general be able to see the big picture, rather merely individual prosecutions, to effect a statewide policy direction.
Toney's view of the attorney general's role is the prosecutorial equivalent of spot zoning, where a particular property is dwelled upon by county zoning overlords, while the overall oppressive direction of the comprehensive land plan remains unchanged.
Toney's own campaign message depicts him as a man who would be in over his head - unable to see the progressively diseased judicial forest for the individual criminal trees.
For Congress: Tom Tiffany
Through the years, long before he was in Congress, Tom Tiffany has worked hard to serve the people of northern Wisconsin, and he has served us well, as a businessman and family man, as a community volunteer and activist, as a state representative, as a state senator, and now as the 7th district U.S. representative for our area.
We urge voters to vote for him again on August 9 so that he can continue to serve us in the exceptional way that he does.
We don't have to expound too much about his record because most voters know where Tom Tiffany stands. In just a term in Congress, he has - if anything - become more conservative in his efforts to defend the constitutional ideals of the Founders and to preserve civil liberties.
Among other things, on the economic front, he has confronted Nancy Pelosi's and President Biden's embrace of socialism and their accompanying policies that have driven inflation and record trade deficits. He has called for policies to renew domestic energy production and end subsidies to so-called "green energy" industries.
As Tiffany likes to say, "Big government socialism always fails. Small government freedom always succeeds."
Tiffany also correctly points out that the U.S. has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. He has proposed a plan to balance the federal budget in five years while protecting Social Security and Medicare.
As always, too, Tiffany has continued to fight to protect the unborn and oppose taxpayer-funded abortions. He has especially devoted a lot of time to the crisis at the southern border, brought about by Biden's reckless policies.
"The results have been devastating," Tiffany says. "A tidal wave of illegal aliens streaming across our southern border from every corner of the world makes every state in the U.S. a border state."
If re-elected, Tiffany says he will work to restore the Trump administration's successful "Remain in Mexico" program, push to finish constructing the border wall, put a stop to the Biden's administration's destructive "catch and release" program, and put an end to illegal so-called "sanctuary" policies.
As always, too, Tiffany is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and also of lessening the regulatory burden on small businesses and farmers everywhere.
We also observe that Tiffany has, to his credit, refused to blindly follow the nation's warmongers and profiteers - centered in the Democratic Party - in supporting unsustainable aid to Ukraine. While he correctly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Tiffany was one of only 57 representatives to vote against a $40 billion supplemental funding bill for Ukraine because, as he said, "the federal government cannot continue to shell out billions for an overseas conflict when working-class Americans are struggling to find baby formula at their local grocery store and their paychecks are being wiped out by record gas prices and the worst inflation in 40 years. Spending tens of billions in foreign aid month after month while American families struggle to pay their bills is not what I was sent to Congress to do."
We absolutely agree, and even more so as Ukraine's corruption and authoritarian policies become clearer by the day.
Then there is Tiffany's opponent, David "Ty" Kunelius. A look at Kunelius's website would indicate that he's a pretty reasonable candidate. But a better barometer than believing what you read on a website - especially when that person has no voting record - is to judge the person by the company he keeps.
And Kunelius keeps close company with one of the most radical Democrats to ever grace - or disgrace, as the case may be - the Northwoods, Kirk Bangstad.
Here's what Bangstad wrote about Kunelius on the Minocqua Brewing Company website this past May:
"Ty is a friend of the Minocqua Brewing Company. We know him and can vouch for him. While we may not agree with all of his policy beliefs, we know he's a good Wisconsinite and a good American."
Bangstad invited his followers to check out Kunelius's campaign, and he wasn't shy about how he believes progressives can "demolish" the Republican Party:
"Well, one way is to find a Republican who isn't part of the Trump Cult and is willing to run against the 'Big Lie' - and support the hell out of him! And that's what we've done with David 'Ty' Kunelius who is an honest man running for Congress in Wisconsin's 7th District in the Republican primary against insurrectionist Congressman Tom Tiffany," Bangstad wrote.
So in the election, here's your choice: It's Tom Tiffany, friend to patriots, or Ty Kunelius, friend to Kirk Bangstad.
Enough said.
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