Democrat congressional candidate Betsy Rader has made a big deal out of her Republican opponent’s acceptance of PAC money indirectly related to Ohio’s opiod crisis.
She is running against incumbent Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, calling on the congressman to reject donations from three pharmaceutical companies caught up in the opiod crisis.
The donors include Cardinal Health of Dublin, McKesson Corp. of California and AmerisourceBergen Corp. of Pennsylvania. The three together have contributed about $40,000 to Joyce’s campaigns since 2013 and have been charged with fraud, negligence and unjust enrichment in a lawsuit filed in Ashtabula County late last year.
Rader, a first-time candidate and relative unknown, has been able to raise more than $1 million from progressive Democrat sources trying to flip Joyce’s seat from red to blue in the 2018 midterms. She announced in February she had signed a “No Corporate PAC Pledge.”
But only those without sin should cast stones. The Ohio Star’s investigation into Rader’s own sources of campaign cash shows her hands are deeply stained by special-interest PAC money.
Rader, a civil-rights attorney from Geauga County, has already violated her pledge by accepting her own PAC-related money, some of it flush with cash from the same opiod culprits — Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen — that she chastises Joyce for accepting money from.
According to a report in the Star Beacon of Ashtabula County, Rader accepted $7,500 from two PACs in March — Ohio’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s America Works PAC and Maryland’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer’s AMERIPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. These two PACs had received a combined $20,000 from Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.
FEC filings show Sherrod Brown has received $40,500 since 2013 from AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and a PAC operated by Teva Pharmaceuticals, which was also named in Ashtabula County’s opioid lawsuit.
Rader told the Star Beacon she was “unaware” of the opiod-related donations to the PACs supporting her campaign.
But it gets worse.
According to OpenSecrets.org, more than $80,000 of Rader’s contributions were made through ActBlue, an online funding platform for far-left Democrat candidates and causes. By donating through ActBlue, leftist donors are able to conceal their identities from the public. To date there is no Republican or conservative equivalent to ActBlue.
ActBlue solicits funding for candidates who support abortion-on-demand up to the ninth month of pregnancy, full taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, draconian gun-control measures, mass immigration and open borders policies up to and including the abolishment of ICE and nearly all enforcement of existing immigration laws.
See ActBlue’s solicitation for donations on behalf of Betsy Rader here.
Filings also show Rader is in bed with a multitude of labor unions, and has received donations from a plethora of PACs and groups pushing for pet progressive causes, including:
- AmeriPAC, [funded by Google, liberal law firms, insurance corporations], $10,000
- America Works PAC [funded by Cardinal Health, Google, Mortgage Bankers Association and myriad labor unions], $2,500
- MoveOn.org, $2,000
- National Union of Healthcare Workers, $2,000
- Progressive Choices PAC, $1,000
- Fair Shot PAC, $1,000
- National Farmers Union, $1,000
- International Federation of Professors and Engineers, $1,000
- Penguin PAC, $1,000
- LOIS PAC, $1,000
- HECK PAC, $1,000
Rader has rebuked Joyce for accepting corporate dollars but her own hands are far from lily white.
She says on her website: “I believe that government should represent the interests of people, not narrow corporate special interests.”
Add lying to the list of sins Rader has committed.
Meanwhile, the $40,000 Joyce has received from the three Pharmaceutical-backed PACs since 2013 makes up less than 1 percent of his overall contributions.
“As a former prosecutor, Dave Joyce has never voted or acted based on contributions received,” said Joyce’s campaign manager, Josh Weemhoff, in a prepared statement. He called Rader’s pledge a “political stunt.”
“Dave has a proven track record of standing up and doing what is right. Whether it was standing up to his own party to protect people with pre-existing conditions when they wanted to take those protections away or fighting to stop this administration from defunding our Great Lakes.
“Reinforcing this political stunt is the fact she wasn’t willing to ask her own Democratic Senator (Sherrod Brown), who has received more than $600,000 from the pharmaceutical industry, to give the money back,” Weemhoff continued. “This just goes to show she is incapable of standing up to her own party, which should be a red flag to all voters.”
