It was one year ago on this day that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” had its original profile to discuss Tommy Benton, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives who has held office since 2004, and has not faced a Democratic challenger for his seat since 2006. There was some doubt if he was going to be re-elected to a seventh term in 2016, though, after the uproar he caused (more on that in a second), but he lucked out the same way most state legislators do when nobody failed to register to run against him before the deadline to enter the race, and he was allowed to run unopposed. Which is a real shame, considering that only a few weeks before the deadline for other candidates to register to challenge him, he decided, during an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution to discuss his support of Confederate landmarks, whose removal he considered “cultural terrorism” that the topic turned to the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. At that point, Benton decided to pontificate on the positive things that the Ku Klux Klan did for this country:
”The Klan was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order. It made a lot of people straighten up. I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”
Benton was just warming up, as he continued on, comparing a Democratic colleague, Vincent Fort, who sponsored a bill to remove Confederate monuments to ISIS:
This came, of course, on the heels of Benton having sponsored his own opposing bill to preserve Confederate monuments, as well as one to celebrate General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, as well as Confederate Memorial Day. Oh, and he sponsored a third bill that would revert street names that honored Confederate war heroes back to their original names, which would turn Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Blvd. back into Gordon Road, named after former Confederate officer John B. Gordon, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Over Benton’s career, there are more than a few conservative votes, and a few that would seem to fit into the mindset of a guy who likes to look on the bright side of the KKK, what with his support for stricter Voter ID laws that disproportionately suppress the votes of minorities, the time he sponsored multiple unconstitutional bills to make English the official language of the state of Georgia, as well as his support of Georgia’s disastrous anti-immigrant bill, HB 87, which ended up decimating the population of immigrant farmers in the state enough that crops were left to rot in the fields, unpicked, to the cost of $140 million in lost revenue for the industry. He also voted for a monument of the Ten Commandments to be built at the state capitol building (which have been overturned as violations of the First Amendment in previous rulings like in the Roy Moore case in Alabama), and the failed conservative policy to drug test welfare recipients.
Since we last profiled Tommy Benton, his deep affection for the Confederacy again reared its ugly head, this time when he sent out a campaign mailer that denied that the Civil War started over slavery. If Benton would pull his head out of his ***, he would know that five Confederate states, GEORGIA AMONG THEM, literally wrote letters to the Union stating, plainly, that they were fighting a war against the federal government because they refused to keep slaves. So… yeah, Benton is full of s***, and we’re glad that the Georgia GOP stripped him of all of his placements on Committees in the legislature for being a deranged bigot.
Tommy Benton is up for re-election again in 2018, and the Georgia GOP are tired enough of his Neo-Confederate antics from the past few years that they found a challenger, Samuel Thomas, in the primary to take a crack at him. Anyone in office who can, virtually unprompted, speak highly of the achievements of the Ku Klux Klan should be considered “vulnerable”, even in rural Georgia. And we’d like to think that voters will recognize that Samuel Thomas is a better pick ,what with him not revisiting a failed revolution fought for the right to keep slave labor over a century and a half ago.
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One Year Ago, May 13th, 2017: Tommy Benton (GA)… Original Profile
Two Years Ago, May 13th, 2016: Drew Turiano (MT)
Three Years Ago, May 13th, 2015: Nan Hayworth (NY)