Candidate profile: Cathy Brewer Hinson

The contest for North Carolina's 6th Congressional District seat, in which Republican incumbent Howard Coble is fending off a handful of challengers, has gotten ugly.

The field of challengers narrowed from five to four today with Jon Mangin’s decision to withdraw and endorse Dr. James Taylor. I visited with candidate Cathy Brewer Hinson in her office on the first floor of the Union Square furniture showroom, where she is the building manager. Hinson told me she wouldn’t be surprised if Taylor had paid Mangin to get out of the race. (Mangin told me in an e-mail earlier today that no money was offered or accepted.)

“This is what I mean about the ‘good old boy network,’” Hinson said. “They make their deals, and you don’t talk about it. Not to me. That’s what we’ve got in Washington. They are so afraid of calling their constituents out. Yes, Jim Taylor offered me money if I would drop out and back him. That’s the way I am: I have to be honest.”

Hinson and Taylor are the two candidates who are most closely aligned with the Tea Party movement, although Coble and Billy Yow have both garnered significant support from voters who identify with the movement, and Jeff Phillips has expressed appreciation for it.

Between Hinson and Taylor there is no pretense of friendship.

“I don’t like Jim Taylor,” Hinson said. “It’s out there. He’s tried to buy me off.”

Hinson said that after declaring her candidacy in November, Taylor came to her office in January and asked her to step aside. She and her husband went down to Moore County, where Taylor lives, later that month for a Tea Party event. Afterwards, Hinson said, she and her husband went out to dinner with Taylor and his wife. She now believes that he was mining her for ideas all along.

“The man wouldn’t know an original idea if it hit him in the face,” she said.

For example, Hinson said that she painted her trailer with the words “we the people” in October, and Taylor states in his primary campaign video: “We the people must take our government back.”

Hinson also said that she was the first to call herself a “constitutional conservative.” In Taylor’s defense, it’s hard to find a Republican candidate or supporter of the Tea Party movement who doesn’t consider himself a constitutional conservative.

Hinson said that Taylor made what she considered a veiled threat on Monday to start a whisper campaign about some of her health issues. She told me that she once had surgery to treat Sinonasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma, which involved doctors pushing her brain aside so they could work on her sinus passages. If that’s the plan, Hinson said, she doesn’t consider the fact that she’s a cancer survivor to be a liability.

“If he wants to attack me,” she said, “he can bring it on.”

In some ways, Hinson is running against the Republican Party.

“I know the Republican Party doesn’t like me,” she said, “because I’m for term limits and the Tea Party.”

On a campaign flier that Hinson passes out she says, “If you want to get a job done right, you get a woman to do it!” and “The good old boy network has a reason but no platform!”

Knowing that the legislative agenda of President Obama and the congressional Democrats is the object of ire for Hinson and her fellow candidates in the 6th District race, I steered the conversation to a statement that Hinson made during a candidate forum in Greensboro on Monday evening.

“The First, the Second, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Ninth and the Tenth amendments right now are under attack,” Hinson said. “We have got to fight to keep those rights. I have read the Constitution. I have read certain bills where they try to attack these. They’ve got these little things in these bills that they write that they try to maneuver money away from us.”

I asked Hinson to explain why she believes some of the amendments in the Bill of Rights are under threat by pending legislation in the current Congress, and she ticked them off one by one.

The First Amendment: “If you get real vocal against the government, they can come down on you. My husband is scared half to death that we’re going to be audited because I speak my mind.” She also brought up the news media, noting that one can find a difference in biases between Fox News on one hand, and local newspapers, television news organizations and even the local Fox affiliate on the other hand.

The Second Amendment: “The UN is trying so hard to get guns taken away from all countries. Obama signed an executive order agreeing with the UN.”

The Fourth Amendment: “Our rights of privacy. The healthcare bill because information that you have with your doctor and your employer, it’s going to be opened up.”

The Fifth Amendment: “Forced annexation without due process of law. What you think is just compensation and what the government thinks is just compensation are two different things.”

The Sixth Amendment: “It says that you have the right to a speedy trial. They never give you a speedy trial.”

The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

“The people that we have elected call us Nazis and make fun of us in the Tea Party movement,” Hinson said. “These are senators and congressmen that are elected by us. Nancy Pelosi comes to my mind. She’s just like the wicked witch of the west.”

Hinson seemed to be fixated on the word “disparage.” I didn’t bother to raise the point that, if in fact, Pelosi had said those terrible things, her speech would likely be protected by the First Amendment, just as Hinson is within her rights to call the speaker of the House “the wicked witch of the west.”

The FindLaw website, which I consider to be as close to non-ideological as possible, provides this background on the Ninth Amendment: “Aside from contending that a bill of rights was unnecessary, the Federalists responded to those opposing ratification of the Constitution because of a lack of declaration of fundamental rights by arguing that inasmuch as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be dangerous to list some because there would be those who would seize on the absence of the omitted rights to assert that government was unrestrained as to those. Madison adverted to this argument in presenting his proposed amendments to the House of Representatives. ‘It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of the bill of rights into this system; but I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.’”

Hinson also cited the Tenth Amendment to me, although we didn’t discuss it. Several state attorneys general are suing to overturn the healthcare reform bill signed by President Obama on the grounds that it violates states’ rights by requiring states to increase payments for Medicaid without their consent and by mandating that citizens purchase healthcare insurance.

I couldn’t help but point out that one of Hinson’s proposals appears to violate the Tenth Amendment.

“I’d like to give North Carolina the option for a recall every two years because sometimes we get stuck with people that do not stick to their platforms,” she had told me.

I pressed her to specify exactly which elected officials would be subject to federal legislation providing for the option of a recall. It came down to US senators because, as Hinson noted, House members are “already on a two-year recall.”

Wouldn’t federal legislation providing for the recall of state officials constitute an overreach of the federal government, I asked?

“Point taken,” Hinson responded.

After her enumeration of constitutional violations, Hinson assailed the incumbents in Congress.

“They make agreements for illegal or secret purposes all the time,” she said.

She gestured to a copy of the Constitution laying on her desk.

“I want to go to Washington and take the floor and read this to them,” she said, becoming visibly emotional.

“This is a sacred document,” Hinson said. “These people get up there and everything they do, they make fun of it. They make sacrilege of this document. I don’t know that they don’t need to go to prison.”

Hinson’s policy positions are novel, detailed and not entirely coherent.

• She favors what is known as the FairTax, with the eventual outcome that the Internal Revenue Service would be dismantled. Under this plan, only consumed goods would be taxed, at 23 percent, and component parts and resources transferred business to business would go untaxed. Lower income people would receive a “prebate” based on income and family size to help pay for necessities and offset the burden of an increased sales tax.

• In the short term, the candidate favors granting businesses an incentive of $20,000 for each new worker they hire for up to three years, as long as they keep the new hires on the job for at least six months. When I asked how the federal government would find the revenue to cover such an expenditure, Hinson expressed confidence that businesses would hire additional employees beyond those subsidized by incentives, thereby expanding the tax base.

• She likes some of the provisions of the recently passed healthcare reform legislation prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions, and allowing college students to stay on their parents’ plans, but faults the bill for being written in a way that is difficult to comprehend, creating “death panels,” and imposing a burden on doctors.

• On the topic of immigration, she said the citizenship process needs to be expedited for people who are in the country illegally but are working and paying income tax without a prayer of ever receiving a refund. She favors making English the official language. She opposes foreign aid to Mexico to help the United States’ southern neighbor shore up its economy and legal system, and believes that US troops should be massed on the border to close it.

This point had come up earlier in our interview when Hinson had made a point about out-of-control spending.

“We’ve got to pull our military forces back and put them on the border,” she said. “We’ve got to stop being the policeman of the world.”

I asked her if she is in favor of speeding up the US military’s exit from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not exactly.

“I would let the generals talk to us as a House,” she said. “I would not like to make any one family feel like they sacrificed for nothing. I know we could win it and finish it.”

UPDATE: The Taylor campaign essays a general response to Hinson's allegations by e-mail: "It is very unfortunate she has resorted to saying things that are wildly untrue. The people of our community are more interested in solutions that address jobs, the economy, and a dysfunctional government. I would hope that she would stop the politics of mudslinging and join the people as we try to take our country back from those who don't have our best interests at heart."

Triad Elections ’10