Have you heard about the great conservative “purge” of 2012? Last week, outrage erupted among some activists on the right when a few Republican congressmen—Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, Justin Amash of Michigan, and Dave Schweikert of Arizona—lost their committee assignments. According to National Review’s John Fund, this action “clearly” represented a “purge of conservatives.”
“We’ve heard from multiple sources that someone walked in with a list of votes and said, ‘if you didn’t reach a particular scorecard on the ‘right’ votes—which by the way, in most cases, were not the conservative positions—we’re gonna remove you from committee,” Huelskamp said at a Heritage Foundation Bloggers Briefing. “It confirms, in my mind, Americans’ deepest suspicions about Washington. It’s petty, it’s vindictive, and if you have any conservative principles, you will be punished for it.”
