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In a year in which Republican primary voters have nominated some extraordinarily radical gubernatorial candidates, Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano stands out as among the most extreme.
As regular readers know, the GOP nominee is a climate denier. Mastriano is also an election denier who appears to have breached Capitol barriers on Jan. 6 and took the lead in Pennsylvania trying to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the state — including playing a role in the fake electors scheme. The Republican is also an anti-gay, anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist with ties to QAnon and antisemites that cannot be easily explained away.
Mastriano is so extreme that “panicked“ GOP officials in the state desperately tried to prevent him from winning the party’s gubernatorial nomination, convinced that the right-wing state senator’s radicalism was so over the top that he simply couldn’t run a credible race for the commonwealth’s top job.
We’re occasionally reminded why Republicans were right to be concerned. NBC News reported:
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, said in 2019 that women should be charged with murder if they violated his proposed abortion ban. In an interview with Pennsylvania radio station WITF, Mastriano was pressed about a bill he sponsored that would generally bar abortions when a fetal heartbeat could first be detected, usually around six weeks. Mastriano’s remarks in that interview were previously unreported.
The right-wing legislator proposed an abortion ban, leading to inevitable questions about, among other things, potential legal consequences.
“OK, let’s go back to the basic question there,” Mastriano said. “Is that a human being? Is that a little boy or girl? If it is, it deserves equal protection under the law.”
Asked if he was saying yes, they should be charged with murder, Mastriano responded: “Yes, I am.”
Sometimes, news doesn’t have to be surprising to be shocking.
I’m reminded of talking points the National Republican Senatorial Committee distributed in early May, the day after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked and the world learned that the Supreme Court would soon overturn Roe v. Wade.
As regular readers may recall, the rhetorical suggestions were defensive, not celebratory. GOP leaders seemed to realize that most of the country wanted to leave the Roe precedent intact, so the National Republican Senatorial Committee advised incumbents and candidates to tell voters, among other things, “Republicans DO NOT want to throw doctors and women in jail.”
As a matter of rhetorical strategy, the recommendations made sense: Many Americans would be repulsed by the idea of Republican policies leading to the criminal prosecution of physicians and women seeking reproductive care.
The problem, of course, is that politicians like Mastriano discredit his party’s own pitch: Too many GOP policymakers and candidates are eager to charge doctors — Sen. Lindsey Graham’s national abortion ban, for example, would subject physicians who perform certain abortion to possible five-year prison sentences — while folks like Mastriano have endorsed murder charges.
The Pennsylvania nominee is already the underdog in the Keystone State. This seems unlikely to help.