David Boosie, president of the non-profit group Citizens United-lead plaintiff in Citizens United v. FEC-delivered a fiery condemnation of what he referred to as the Republican “Establishment,” former President George W. Bush, adviser Karl Rove, and 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He attacked forces he condemned as trying to “divide” and “marginalize and hijack conservative movement.”
“I like Karl Rove,” Boosie insisted, but said he’s “no movement conservative.” He issued a strident assault on former president Bush, charging him with “policy disasters,” and charged that Rove and Bush for “brought us Barack Obama,” by hurting GOP brand.
Boosie’s speech was a direct response to Rove’s recent announcement of an offshsot of his American Crossroad Super-PAC to elected “electable” conservatives. This was a drawing of “battle lines,” Boosie railed, taking issue that “Karl Rove & Company announced in the New York Times, of all places,” a reliable line to illicit booing from a CPAC audience, but the audience response was much more muted.
A smattering of applause flowed when Boosie said of Rove’s new project, “calling it the Conservative Victory project, is like Mitt Romney coming to CPAC last year and calling himself ‘severely’ conservative.” Boosie surely misjudged the appetite of an audience when just our two hours ago gave Romney multiple rousing standing ovations.
Republican lost last year, Boosie insisted, for failure to run “strong conservative campaigns,” more than “huge mistakes” he conceded candidates made by candidate, and implicit reference to Todd Akin and Richard Murdock.
Boosie upbraided “Karl [Rove] and Company” for “thinking they have a monopoly on wanting to win.” He jabbed Rove’s super PAC for not having a good record winning 2012 races, saying “those in the Establishment who know how to win are simply living a lie.”
Boosie called for adherence to Reagan’s “three-legged stool” of social, economic, and foreign policy conservatism. Yet Boosie seemed uninterested in upholding Regan’s famed 11th Commandment: “thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Instead, Boosie through around the acronym “RINO” liberally: Republican In Name Only.
Boosie, however, did reserve some of his firepower for lambasting the Obama Administration, accusing the president of pushing “financial laws of Greece not the gun laws of China.” Yet Obama and the so-called GOP establishment were equal objects of Boosie ire, saying the threat for conservatives was to not “concede” values to Obama or the establishment.
Boosie’s group, Citizen’s United produced 2008′s Hillary: The Movie — about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — which earned them a lawsuit for violating the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Boosie’s group in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. FEC, in a 5-4 decision which snowballed into an unprecedented breach of decorum between the Court and the president. President Obama rebuked the decision in front of justices at his 2011 State of the Union, Justice Alito mouthing “not true” back to the president, and Chief Justice Roberts publicly ruminating perhaps justices should stop attending presidential speeches altogether.
