On the very top of his campaign website, Nick Begich III claims he’s a “commonsense leader.” There aren’t many of those left in today’s Republican Party. Most are timid followers of a “vicious and vile would-be tyrant” named Donald Trump. And Begich has shown us he won’t be any different.
The above quote about Trump came from a recent newsletter by Kevin Williamson. A 15-year columnist for the National Review, he is now the national correspondent for The Dispatch. Launched in 2019, its goal is to provide “engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy, and culture — informed by conservative principles.”
However, it’s not a Trump-friendly publication. So it’s probably not on Begich’s reading list.
This is his third campaign for Congress. Back in October 2021 he announced he was challenging Rep. Don Young who had been in office since 1973.
“I would say I’m probably a little to the right of Don,” Begich said, “but at the end of the day it’s conservative principles that I hold.”
So why has he endorsed Trump? As Nick Cattagio wrote in The Dispatch this week, the 45th president has “repudiated every policy and civic virtue that conservatives once claimed to stand for.”
Fiscal responsibility is one such policy cast aside under Trump. The 2016 Republican Party platform called for imposing “firm caps on future debt” and accelerating repayment the national debt. That and the budget deficit aren’t even mentioned in the party’s current platform.
In fact, even before federal spending on COVID-19, Trump’s 2020 budget projected the federal debt would rise to almost $23 trillion in 10 years. It was $14.7 trillion when he took office.
That doesn’t seem to bother Begich. But the 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden did.
“Don Young has rarely seen a spending program that he doesn’t like,” Begich said before criticizing that bill as wasteful spending. “There’s just been no fiscal discipline.”
But despite the fact Alaska would get more funding per capita than any other state, he also complained that we “got shortchanged” on a per-acre basis.
Setting aside such contradictions, the more plausible explanation for his complaints about the bill is that he simply followed Trump’s lead.
“This will be a victory for the Biden administration and Democrats, and will be heavily used in the 2022 election,” he said before it was passed by the Senate. “It is a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb.” A week later, he warned them that “anyone foolish enough to vote in favor of this deal” risked losing his endorsement.
Then after the bill was passed by the House, Trump said the 13 Republicans who supported it “should be ashamed of themselves.” Young was one of them. But he died before he faced off with Begich.
The infrastructure bill was of the few disagreements Young had with Trump. The most memorable is the day that Joe Biden was projected the winner of the 2020 election. While Trump was just starting his months-long, baseless claims about widespread voter fraud, Young publicly wished “the president-elect well” and called for Americans “to put the election behind us, and come together to work for a better tomorrow for our nation.”
Young then said he was “respecting the will of voters in the states” by voting to certify the electoral college count on Jan. 6.
In his debate with Rep. Mary Peltola this week, Begich sounded that refrain in defense of his opposition to ranked choice voting. “I think we need to make sure that the system that we have best reflects the will of the people, and I think the system that does that best is our traditional voting system.”
One irony that Begich seems blind to is ranked choice reflected the will of Alaskans who voted in the 2020 election.
The other is his inability to admit that American voters decided Trump didn’t deserve to be reelected four years ago. On that question, the best the self-proclaimed commonsense leader can do is join the herd of congressional Republicans who are so afraid of crossing Trump that they’d follow him off a cliff rather than tell the truth.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
