It hit me while I was doing some research on Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss in advance of next week's run-off election in Georgia. Chambliss is now the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, as well as a staunch opponent of immigration and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Wow, I thought to myself. This guy is just like Jesse Helms.
And apparently, I wasn't the first to make the analogy. I stumbled across an excellent article from 2002, when The Nation's Jason Vest compared Chambliss to Jesse Helms.
More after the jump...
A lot has been made of the fact that Senator Chambliss is a draft-dodging chicken-hawk who claimed to have a bad knee which kept him out of Vietnam. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Chambliss is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but his approach to protecting the civil rights of Americans is to "arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line."
According to the story in The Nation, Chambliss not only tried to deny his remarks, but then engaged in intimidation of the press and even brought in law enforcement to stifle the story.
Such an attempt to mobilize law enforcement in the service of stifling free expression is, sadly, par for the course with Chambliss---who has yet to encounter a piece of legislation that gives greater powers to federal law enforcement or big business that he doesn't like (tax legislation, of course, excepted). An opponent of measures that would compel banks to cease prying into their customers' lives and force law enforcement adherence to a higher standard of proof when engaging in asset forfeiture, Chambliss was also an enthusiastic champion of the USA Patriot Act (hardly surprising for the chair of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security) as well as the Bush Administration's steroidal version of Homeland Security Department legislation. Also in the name of "homeland security," he co-sponsored a House bill that would allow federal law enforcement to share all manner of federal investigative information with state and local authorities "not restrict[ed] to terrorism and national security investigations," which, according to the ACLU, "means that sensitive foreign intelligence information can be shared with local law enforcement agents even if they are only investigating petty crimes."
Of course, when it comes to probing federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Chambliss is the quintessence of deferential, having fought against 9/11-related public post-mortems. Like the departing Helms, he's positively jihadist on issues of gay rights and reproduction: Carrying on the long tradition of Southern Congressmen hellbent on preventing the District of Columbia's citizens from enacting progressive measures, Chambliss wanted to keep DC from providing benefits to same-sex couples, and he supported the draconian antichoice measures that withhold federal aid from overseas NGOs if they so much as mention abortion, and that disallow abortions on US military bases. The League of Conservation Voters has put him on its "Dirty Dozen" list of legislators with the worst environmental voting records, and he's recently proven himself a shamelessly dirty campaigner as well
Chambliss, with just a few days left before the December 2 run-off, has decided to pull out all the stops. His ads have attacked Jim Martin using the Jesse Helms playbook, attacking Martin as weak on crime, a socialist on economic policy, and a sympathizer with terrorists.
Folks, this is a situation where a decent man is being attacked by a man who has no positive accomplishments to speak of. With nothing left to run on, Saxby Chambliss is running negative ads to suppress voter turnout among undecided voters and drive up turnout among the racists, the xenophobes, and the fundamentalists.
It's up to us.
In the 11th hour, we can make a difference.
It's so easy to make phone calls for Jim Martin - and with this election running within 2-3 points, the Get Out the Vote efforts will be the key.
We can do this!
Please take a few minutes and make some calls today.