Congresswoman Claudia Tenney paid a visit to Lockport last week to talk to local voters. Tenney is a Republican who currently represents a district east of Syracuse. After the release of New York’s new Congressional District maps, she decided to seek election this November in a new seat that includes parts of Niagara County.
On Friday afternoon I pedaled my bicycle over to the Kenan Center to hear what she had to say.
Tenney’s personal story, as she tells it, is a compelling one. She’s a lawyer who for many years helped run a family newspaper and printing business. As a divorced single mother she raised a son who became a U.S. Marine. She cared for her aging parents. As a girl, she said, her family always volunteered on holidays in local soup kitchens serving the poor.
Tenney presents herself as a common sense problem solver committed to bipartisanship and cooperation. “I really thought I’d never be in politics,” she said.
But if you look deeper, the story you find is a different one — a politician who is one of the most extreme and hyper-partisan members of Congress in either party. A few months ago I put myself on Ms. Tenney’s supporter list to see what she is saying, not in public. Now almost every day I receive emails like this one:
“I know what’s wrong with Liz Cheney.
She’s got a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
She’s so OBSESSED with President Trump that it’s all she can think about. That’s why she joined this insane witch-hunt committee to begin with!”
Most of us looked on in horror last year as a violent mob dispatched by President Trump assaulted our nation’s Capitol, seeking to block the certification of his loss in the election. That mob also aimed to hang the Vice President from a gallows after he refused to cooperate. Cheney, a Republican, has sacrificed her political career to help lead an investigation into that attack, hearing sworn, public testimony from Trump’s top aides.
In the eyes of Tenney that investigation is a sin. In another of her emails she writes, {em}“Have you seen the video of Claudia ripping Liz Cheney to absolute SHREDS on Newsmax? and she totally OBLITERATED her! You’ve got to see it.”
For most Americans what is important is to get to the truth. For Tenney what is important is to get on Fox News and Newsmax.
Here in Lockport last week Tenney told listeners, “I believe in our Constitution.” How can you believe in the Constitution and have so little concern about an armed insurrection against our democracy? How can a mother who expresses pride for her son in uniform care so little for the men and women in uniform who were attacked that January day at the Capitol, men and women there to protect her?
Her obsession with Cheney is not the only example of Tenney’s political extremism.
In 2016, when 14 students and three staff members were brutally killed at Parkland High School in Florida, what was Tenney’s response? “It’s interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats,” she told an interviewer. Perhaps she should repeat that to the mourning Black families who lost their loved ones to a White racist who drove across the state to kill Black people at a Tops market in Buffalo.
Where others might express empathy and support changes to keep us safer, Tenney sees only partisan lines. After the Buffalo shooting our current Congressman, Chris Jacobs, also a Republican and a conservative, sacrificed his political career by supporting a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons, like those used in these massacres. Tenney voted to keep the sale of those weapons going full speed.
Last month Tenney was also the only Republican member of Congress from New York to vote against a bipartisan bill protecting gay marriages in federal law. The bill is a response to threats from the U.S. Supreme Court to repeal that right as it recently did with abortion. Tenney would happily see thousands of loving couples lose their right to marry in the same way.
On the Big Lie that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential vote, Tenney still uses her public position to fan the flames of conspiracy. She told CNN just last May, “No one knows about what happened in the election. We don’t know if it was stolen or not.”
None of these facts are things Tenney is likely to share with us as she roams our communities in the coming months seeking our votes and pretending moderation. But the examples of her extremism are clear.
Most people here, regardless of political party, are practical and smart and want leaders with common sense — not hyped-up partisans who think the most important thing in the world is to ‘OBLITERATE Liz Cheney to SHREDS’ on FOX News.
We live in a time in which the fabric of our country’s democracy is being pulled apart by politicians who pretend that facts don’t matter and that those seeking the truth are enemies of the people. We are being overrun by office-seekers who think that government is about partisan warfare, not solving the actual problems we face as a people.
The last thing we need to do here is elect another politician to Congress who wants to play that game.
Jim Shultz is a father and grandfather in Lockport. He can be emailed at jimshultzthewriter@gmail.com.
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