Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, the self-described electoral bigfoot that specializes in direct mail hit jobs, came a cropper in Greenfield this weekend after residents of that town received postcards it had sent urging them to denounce their State Representative, Paul Mark.
Representative Mark is one of many legislative sponsors of the Safe Communities Act, which would ensure that state tax dollars not be used to fuel the Trump administration’s deportation machine, Muslim registry and other xenophobic initiatives. Although on most other questions involving state expenditures, Mass Fiscal is a reliable “no” vote, when it came to this opportunity to pander to nativist impulses, the organization reversed course and urged Representative Mark’s constituents to condemn this display of fiscal responsibility on his part.
The postcard utterly backfired, resulting in a demonstration against Mass Fiscal’s ugliness for promoting the notion “that immigrants are the cause of our problems here in the United States” and in the resignation of a Mass Fiscal officer, who claimed (inexplicably) to have been previously unaware of the organization’s longstanding hostility to immigrants.
More comeuppances please.
News report elucidating the final paragraph:
http://www.recorder.com/Protesters-denounce-anti-sanctuary-state-postcards-14244693
Thanks (I was adding the link to the post just at the same time you were adding it to the comments).
I got into a twitter feud I documented here awhile back with Pioneer over a similarly fiscally irresponsible proposal to bailout struggling parochial schools with taxpayer dollars. As a budding political historian, it’s fascinating time that we are moving away from an era with two classically liberal parties that differed in where they emphasized statist intervention (military budgets and social conservatism on the America right; a moderate welfare state on the America. left) to a closed vs. open paradigm that is a lot more identitarian than libertarian in its outlook. It’s very troubling for our politics going forward.
Even Reagan era conservatives were classically liberal on questions of trade, immigration, valuing civil liberties and internationalist foreign policies. Mass Fiscal Alliance and Pioneer were once avatars of the libertarian impulses of Barbara Anderson and the Weld-Cellucci administrations. These folks were hardly culture warriors. Baker is hardly a culture warrior today even quietly signed a bill undoing the Romney era bilingual education law.
It’s quite likely Baker gets re-elected, maybe easily. Yet it’s also likely he’s the last ‘Massachusetts Republican’ we’ll see for awhile as the Trump train continues to leave any form of liberalism in the GOP behind for a baser, cruder American Volksgemeinschaft.
Who are Mass Fiscal’s contributors? I’m guessing a lot of GOP committees and elected officials. They are clearly an arm of the Republican Party and probably ought to be investigated for campaign finance violations.
There’s a story in there. Before 2016, electioneering communications done by direct mail (Mass Fiscal’s M.O.) did not have to be accompanied by the disclosure of the top 5 contributors of amounts over $5000. In 2016, the law was changed to include direct mail electioneering among the categories for which disclosure was required (it joined television, internet and print advertising).
When the House voted on the change in the law, only half of the Republicans voted to preserve Mass Fiscal’s exemption.
Rather than disclose its donors in the last statewide election, Mass Fiscal elected not to conduct electioneering. A sister organization, the Jobs First Massachusetts PAC, took over that task.
Even if donors aren’t disclosed in the ads themselves aren’t they still supposed to be recorded with OCPF for people to look up?