Quin Hillyer of the Mobile Register writes in response to today’s Doug Bandow piece:

Bandow is way off base here, as are so many other national conservatives who have NO CLUE what’s going on here on the ground in Alabama. But the really annoying thing is Bandow and others jumping all over Riley for the one line about “Christian ethics,” as if that is the sum total of Riley’s argument. Fact is, it was a sidelight argument, mainly IN RESPONSE to the state Christian Coalition (financed by one of the plan’s big-money opponents) spreading a lot of hooey about it being our Christian duty to OPPOSE the tax reform plan. The Bible isn’t a tax manual. Riley, unlike the state Christian Coalition, never said it was. (The National Christian Coalition, on the other hand, said the state group was way off base, and did endorse the Riley plan.) Why it’s wrong for Riley to respond to the rent-a-Coalition on the state level, but not wrong for the state group to make the Bible-based claims in the first place, is quite a logical conundrum.
There’s a good reason why only one leading, respected conservative past or present office-holder (a former state senator) here in Alabama has come out against the plan: Because this is precisely conservative reform. You can believe some outsider like Bandow, or you can believe me (a true Reagan-Kemp-DuPont supply-sider) and Bill Pryor and Jeremiah Denton and former U.S. Rep. Jack Edwards and current Rep. Spencer Bachus and former Lt. Gov. Steve Windom (who LOST to Riley in the GOP primary but has had the grace to say Riley is right on this plan) and….. on and on and on. Either the conservative are for it publicly, or they are for it but don’t have the guts to say so.
That’s the truth.
Sorry to be so angry, but I’ve had enough of the national groups applying a litmus test where the circumstances on the ground don’t warrant it.