The American Conservative Union (ACU) has named its inaugural “Conservative in the Spotlight,” a distinction awarded when an elected official acts boldly to defend conservative principles.
(from June 3, 2016, American Conservative Union press release)
The American Conservative Union (ACU) has named its inaugural “Conservative in the Spotlight,” a distinction awarded when an elected official acts boldly to defend conservative principles.
Congressman Paul Gosar (R-AZ-04, 2015 ACU Score: 96%), has been a thorn in the side of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and is an all-around government watchdog on important conservative issues.
“Congressman Gosar fights relentlessly against the unlawful EPA and for limiting the growth of government,” said ACU Chairman Matt Schlapp. “We are proud of Congressman Gosar’s leadership and how he identifies misconduct, pushes back against it, and defends Americans from government overreach.”
At a hearing in March, Gosar raked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy over the coals for repeatedly ignoring the warnings she received of problems with the water in Flint, Michigan. He further cited her for refusing to hold EPA executives responsible for exacerbating the Flint crisis and, in earlier hearings, for their disastrous response to the destructive wastewater spill in Colorado’s Animus River. He showed how McCarthy has been lying to both Congress and the American people.
Then on May 18, Gosar helped chair a hearing on misconduct at the EPA, which was first exposed by Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan. At the hearing, Sullivan presented a long list of employee transgressions, in one case showing the EPA paid $55,000 to an employee (a registered sex offender) to quietly go away. Gosar also notably questioned the fitness of EPA’s Acting Deputy Administrator Stanley Meiburg, calling his incompetence unsurprising “because EPA under this president has a long history of blatant disregard for the law.”
For his strength in the face of regulatory misconduct, Gosar is the current ACU “Conservative in the Spotlight.”
