Geoffrey Ritter
Carbondale Times
Vying for a U.S. House seat suddenly in play on the 2012 map, three Republican candidates hoping to represent Carbondale and southwestern Illinois in Congress met Jan. 21 for a forum aimed squarely at tried-and-true conservatives.
In the hour-long forum Saturday evening at the Pavilion in Marion, Rodger Cook, Theresa Kormos and Jason Plummer all struck similar tones on issues of reducing the federal deficit, loosening business regulations imposed by agencies including the EPA and overturning “Obamacare,” the sweeping health care mandate championed by President Barack Obama and passed into law against vociferous Republican opposition. A fourth Republican candidate, Teri Newman, did not attend the forum.
Sponsored by the Shawnee Tea Party Patriots, the event served as a stage for candidates hoping to win back a Southern Illinois congressional district long held securely by Democratic Rep. Jerry Costello, who has represented the district since 1993 and announced late last year that he would not seek reelection.
Three Democrats also are running for the seat in the March 20 primary election, including Chris Miller of Carbondale, Kenneth Wiezer of Granite City and Brad Harriman of O’Fallon. In addition, Retha Daugherty of Carbondale is seeking the seat as an independent.
The event was an undiluted dose of tea party politics. Rodger Cook, a former mayor of Belleville, law enforcement officer and player for the former St. Louis Cardinals football team, repeatedly claimed ground as the most conservative choice in the race.
“I’m fed up,” Cook told the crowd of gathered voters. “I’m worried about my kids. I’m worried about my grandchildren. We need to send people to Washington to represent the people of the 12th District, not a party.”
Theresa Kormos of O’Fallon, a longtime nurse, is making her second run at the 12th District seat and stressed that reorganizing the nation’s tax code is one of her top priorities if she wins the seat. She said reducing the role of the federal government is imperative in maintaining personal freedoms.
“The federal government is growing too big, and they are becoming too powerful,” Kormos said.
Plummer, a product of Fairview Heights who serves as vice president of his family’s lumber business and ran for state lieutenant governor in 2010, said residents of Southern Illinois have a lot at stake in the coming election cycle.
“We’re struggling as a whole nationally, but Illinois has been struggling a lot longer than just the recession we’ve been going through lately,” Plummer said. “Illinois is struggling because of poor public policy.”
On the issues
During the forum, which lasted just short of an hour, the candidates touched on a range of topics, although there were few contrasts offered among a field vying for conservative votes in a partisan primary.
Not surprisingly, economic issues took center stage, with the candidates arguing in favor reduced funding to public agencies and programs, loosened restrictions on environmental regulations and a rewritten tax code as means toward reviving the sluggish economy and confronting the substantial federal deficit. Most of all, they agreed, government needs to get out of the way of recovery.
“The government is never responsible for job creation, but they do need to change the environment to allow businesses to grow and entrepreneurs to create new jobs, such as changing the tax code, getting rid of overregulation from the EPA, getting the government out of the way,” Kormos said. “The federal government always makes things worse.”
The government made the recent economic downturn worse, the candidates argued, by issuing bailouts to the auto industry and economic institutions. Cook, who made strides to define himself as the most purely conservative candidate on the stage, called the bailouts “absolutely crazy” and said the marketplace needs to be free for businesses to rise and fall on their own merits.
“The bailouts to the large Wall Street banks, the bailout of the auto companies is absolutely crazy,” Cook said. “This is a free-market economy. It depends who you are in this administration, who they’re going to take care of. We need to get government out of the free market and let businesses rise and fall on their own.”
Cook also called the EPA “out of control” and contended the federal government currently is being run by “left-wing wackos.” Plummer struck a similar tone, saying that environmental regulations imposed by the EPA makes it more difficult for American businesses to compete globally. In fact, he said, the EPA now far exceeds its mandate.
“This administration makes it harder to compete with folks,” Plummer said. “When you tell farmers you’re going to regulate how much dust their tractors can kick up when they’re combining a field, I think clearly they’ve gotten a little too big for their britches, and we need politicians who can rein them in. I aim to do that.”
The candidates all expressed support for expanding domestic oil production as a way of increasing American jobs and providing support to the economy, and all said that increased coal mining in Southern Illinois and further development of “clean-coal” technology could pay myriad dividends for the region.
“I would do all I can to support energy independence and repealing and fighting the EPA,” Kormos said.
The candidates touched on themes touted by Republicans on the national stage, including cutting illegal immigration and maintaining the integrity of gun rights.
“We have to enforce the federal laws we have on the books,” Cook said of immigration problems. “No amnesty. I don’t think that people who are here illegally that we ought to give them benefits.”
The candidates also sounded off on “Obamacare,” the sweeping health care overhaul proposed by Obama and ushered into law by a narrow Democratic majority that is expected to continue as a lightning rod in this year’s presidential and congressional elections. All the candidates said they opposed its passage and would make repealing the entire package a priority if elected.
“It’s unconstitutional what they’re doing, and if elected to Congress, I will go to Washington and repeal Obamacare because it is an infringement upon our states’ powers and us as people, our rights,” Cook said.
Kormos, citing her decades spent in the nursing profession, said the law has little to do with expanding health care coverage and more to do with consolidating liberal power.
“(Obamacare) is the worst piece of legislation ever in history,” Kormos said. “As a nurse for 34 years, I’ve seen a lot of changes, and it has nothing to do with patient care. It has everything to do with taking away power.”
Plummer contended that the continuing health care debate speaks to the theme that the federal government has grown far too large to be properly responsive to its citizens.
“We have to take government away from Washington, D.C., and we have to make it more local,” Plummer said. “I’d like to take more power from Springfield and bring it home to Williamson County, or Jackson County. The closer to you power is, the more responsive it will be.”
The road forward
Illinois, long considered a Democratic stronghold on the national stage, has showed cracks in its façade ever since Republican Mark Kirk won election to Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat in 2010. Now, with Costello stepping down after about 25 years in the House, a usually sleepy congressional district could attract some national media attention.
Organizers of last weekend’s event indicated another similar forum was in the works for the three Democratic candidates for the seat, but no concrete detail have been announced. So far in that race, Brad Harriman has garnered the endorsements of both Costello and the powerful union AFL-CIO.
The primary election to select one Democrat and one Republican for this fall’s election will be held March 20.
