Republicans claimed there was voting fraud, so I looked for voting fraud, and found it here (Colorado GOP chairman convicted of voting his ex-wife’s ballot), here (Republican lawyer urged Florida residents to vote in George election), here (3 Pennsylvania Trump supporters charged with voting fraud), here (Nevada Republican voted his dead wife’s ballot), here (3 Florida Republicans voted in two states), here (Arizona Republican voted her dead mother’s ballot), here (New York Republican elections commissioner pleaded guilty to ballot harvesting), and here (Trump’s chief of staff registered to vote in North Carolina at an address where he never lived).
Many of these Republican voting criminals publicly railed against “voting fraud” before being caught; in a couple of these cases, they publicly held up their own crimes as evidence that dead people were voting. Rightwing hypocrisy has no limits, and that hypocrisy exists in relation to abortion, too (see, e.g., story here). Perhaps most prominently, defeated GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who noisily campaigned against abortion, secretly paid for his girlfriend’s abortion (see story here).
Joining him today in the GOP Abortion Hypocrisy Hall of Shame is Richard Holtorf (photo below), a GOP candidate in a Colorado primary against the infamous Rep. Lauren Boebert. Huffington Post says (here),
“Earlier this year, Holtorf revealed that he once provided financial support to a girlfriend amid her own abortion so she could ‘live her best life,’ despite also sponsoring a failed 2020 measure that would have banned the procedure in the state after 22 weeks. ‘I respected her rights and actually gave her money to help her through her important, critical time,’ Holtorf said in January.”
In a subsequent TV interview (see video here), Holtorf was asked, “If abortion was the best choice for your girlfriend, why try to deny that choice to other women?”
“Holtorf tried to wiggle out of a straight answer, saying he’s ‘a pro-life Catholic’ who believes that ‘everyone should choose life.’ But he eventually said that, yes, his girlfriend had made the choice to get an abortion. … Holtorf said that as ‘a pro-life person,’ he thinks ‘you should try to choose life every time. But there are exceptions.”
Yeah, when his girlfriend wants one. Welcome to the Hall of Shame, hypocrite. Leading by example isn’t something he does. Liberals have come up with a derisive phrase for people like him:
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
There’s another phrase for people like him, one invented by Texas Republicans, that goes like this: “All hat, no cattle.” (Holtorf is frequently photographed wearing a cowboy hat, even in the legislature, see e.g. photo here; it’s sort of his political trademark.) It’s a synonym for the phrase “empty suit” or the word “pretender.”
By the way, Holtorf is a Catholic, and as a lawmaker, he would impose Catholic Church doctrine on abortion on all Americans whether they’re Catholic or not. And in case you missed it, all 6 of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade are Catholics, and none of the three justices who voted against it are.
More than anything, tales like these reveal hypocrisy to be a fundamental Republican character trait: Do as we say, but we’ll do as we please.
There can be only one answer to that: The rules, whatever they are, must be the same for everybody. They will be the same for everyone, because if they won’t follow them, neither will anyone else.
