The fight for the late Sen. John McCain’s seat started to heat up with a big red billboard outside Phoenix.
“Mark Kelly silent as 3,471,500 Arizonans would lose their private health insurance,” it said.
Now the Democratic Senate hopeful and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which paid for the billboard, are trading barbs, and letters from lawyers, in what’s shaping up to be an expensive and combative fight in Arizona’s battleground Senate race. Kelly, a former Navy aviator and astronaut, hopes to take on incumbent Sen. Martha McSally, a Republican.
The billboard, put up in late April, knocked Kelly for what Republicans see as his pattern of avoiding answers on divisive public policy issues, like the Medicare for All plan being pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Not content with just releasing statements calling the billboard false, tweeting about it, and sending out fundraising emails based on it, Kelly went a step further and had his attorneys send the committee a cease and desist letter calling it defamatory and demanding its removal: “The billboard is defamatory under a clear application of U.S. Supreme Court precedent. We demand that it is immediately removed.”
“If the NRSC or Lamar Advertising ran even a single Internet search, they would have discovered the truth — that Mr. Kelly is not silent on the issue at all, but rather is on the record on live television opposing Medicare for All,” Kelly’s attorneys said.
Lawyers for the committee, which works to get Republicans elected to the Senate all over the country, sent a letter back Tuesday, dismissing the threats from the Kelly campaign and pointing to prior evasive answers on the topic from Kelly. The Washington Examiner has reviewed the dueling letters.
The Senatorial Committee’s lawyers responded that “it seems you do not have the full picture of your client’s comments regarding Medicare for All”, highlighting a number of articles which stated that Kelly had avoided giving a straight answer on Medicare for All and quoting Kelly telling a media outlet, “I don’t know … I’m going to have to figure this out over time.”
“Nevertheless, the NRSC is grateful that Mr. Kelly has now decided to hire legal counsel to explain his new position on Medicare for All,” the Senatorial Committee’s lawyers said.
And two more billboards went up today in Phoenix that will “publicize the fact that Kelly is also well-known for his silence on the Green New Deal, thus putting 242,810 Arizona jobs at risk,” the letter states.
It was not clear how much the billboards cost.
Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, while popular with the progressive base of the Democratic Party, have been targeted by Republicans as extreme proposals with exorbitant price tags that would harm the economy. Democrats have, in turn, criticized efforts by Republicans to roll back provisions of the Affordable Care Act and have said Republicans are ignoring the threat posed by climate change.
The committee claimed that the 3.4 million Arizonans with private health insurance would lose that option under Medicare For All, getting government-run healthcare instead. The Green New Deal, championed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., calls for ending greenhouse emissions in every sector of the economy, which the committee said would put the more than 240,000 manufacturing and automotive jobs in the state in jeopardy.
The letter from the Senatorial Committee also ended with this closing shot: “Although your client has enthusiastically taken a position on pyramid schemes, it is much less clear where he stands on the public policies that Arizonans care about most.”
That’s a reference to Kelly’s history as a paid speaker for Shaklee, a multi-level marketing company, where he pitched nutritional supplements in the United States and China. The CEO of Shaklee has given $5,600 to Kelly’s campaign.
Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally, who lost her race to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, to the Senate in late 2018 to fill Republican McCain’s term. Whoever wins the special election in 2020 will then be up for a full term in 2022.
