Dick Wadhams
Don’t bother seeking “endorsement” from the corrupt regime that runs the Colorado Republican Party if you actually spent your life living and working in the district where you are running for Congress.
On the contrary, personally profiting from a company that imported millions of pounds of cheap Chinese goods into the United States guarantees an “endorsement” from the regime.
The Colorado Republican Party has violated more than 100 years of strict neutrality in primary elections by endorsing three adventurers who recently moved into congressional districts to run for Congress. None have current personal or professional ties to their new districts. Only his personal ambition led them to run in a new district.
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The nickname “rug runner” arose during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, when corrupt northern speculators carrying bags of rugs moved south to take advantage of a weak postwar economy.
Here are today’s Colorado Republican adventurers who have moved to congressional districts, where they have not lived, to run for Congress and who have been endorsed by the state GOP:
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was facing near-certain defeat in the Third Congressional District in 2024 after being reelected by just 564 votes in 2022 in a district that had a 9-point Republican performance advantage. Third CD voters clearly tired of her antics, which included joining her equally behaviorally challenged ally, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, in yelling at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address in 2022.
Desperate to get out of an untenable political situation, Rep. Boebert announced that she would leave the Western-dominated 3rd CD and move across the state to the predominantly Republican Fourth Congressional District (4th CD). Since then, Boebert has spent most of her time running in the new district while she continues to collect her $174,000-a-year salary in Congress, paid for by taxpayers.
But his bad behavior hasn’t diminished. Boebert and a date were escorted out of the Denver Performing Arts Center during a performance of “Beetlejuice” due to their inappropriate and lewd actions that were disrespectful toward other theater patrons.
The stolen election conspirator, Ron Hanks, was a state representative who lived in Fremont County, which is located in the Seventh Congressional District (7th CD) on the eastern slope. But when his ideological soulmate, Boebert, fled the third CD, Hanks filled the void by moving to Grand Junction.
Hanks previously ran a losing race for Congress in California and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Colorado in 2022. Hanks believes the Chinese stole Colorado’s electoral votes from Donald Trump in 2020, when Trump lost by 14 points to Joe Biden.
Laughably, the state party said Hanks, who is essentially a Boebert clone without the charm, was the party’s strongest candidate to win the 3rd District.
The state party endorsed Janak Joshi in the 8th Congressional District (8th CD), which is located in the northern suburbs of Denver and Greeley in Weld County.
Joshi was a state representative from Colorado Springs from 2011 to 2017 before losing his state Senate primary. He gave up his medical license more than 10 years ago, but in a recent ad he presents himself as a doctor. He moved into an apartment in 8th CD just a few months ago.
But Dave Williams’ stunning hypocrisy in the 5th Congressional District (5th CD) makes blowhards Boebert, Hanks and Joshi look like shameless amateurs in shameless political opportunism.
Williams was narrowly elected chairman of the 400-member Colorado Republican State Central Committee in 2023 after getting criminally charged former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to drop out of the race and endorse him. He has refused to resign while running for the 5th Congressional District (5th CD), which is centered in El Paso County.
Williams, a self-declared “America First” candidate, has unethically used state party funds to attack his primary opponent, Jeff Crank, as a tool of China.
But it is Williams who personally benefited from the Chinese as an executive at MKW Global Sourcing, which imported cheap Chinese goods into the United States.
Official U.S. Customs Service records show MKW imported 12 million pounds of plastic products from China in 1,000 separate imports between 2008 and 2020. Williams was the company’s registered agent and vice president of logistics.
Last week, Williams violated the Trump presidential campaign’s demand that Republican candidates not try to raise money from Trump’s convictions in New York. Despite this, within minutes of the convictions being announced, Williams sent out a fundraising email asking donors to “support Trump and Dave” and for donations to go to his congressional campaign, not to Trump’s campaign.
There are commonalities that run through the candidacies of Boebert, Hanks, Joshi and Williams. They are obsessed with conspiracies to steal elections and still want to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They defend the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol and want those convicted to be pardoned. They want to steal the right of unaffiliated voters to participate in primary elections.
Adventurers Boebert, Hanks and Joshi, and enabler China Williams continue the Colorado Republican Party’s downward spiral toward irrelevance.
Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who worked for U.S. Senator Bill Armstrong for nine years before running the campaigns of U.S. Senators Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Governor Bill Owens.
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