Larry Holmquist can remember the time he decided to wage his first political campaign and challenge two-term Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr in the March 15 primary.
“It was Sept. 27, 2013, and it was at 2 o’clock that afternoon” while he was driving from his home in Greensboro to Florida to meet his mother after his aunt had died, Holmquist said.
“The news came over the radio that the Senate had voted to fully fund Obamacare, and Sen. Burr had voted to fully fund Obamacare,” he said. “And I said that’s it. I’m going to run against this guy. We each have our breaking point. And that was my breaking point.”
That is among numerous grievances and differences Holmquist, a self-described “pure conservative,” has with Burr’s record in the Senate. His chief complaint is that Burr, of Winston-Salem, has been in Washington too long.
“At this point he is completely a creature of Washington, D.C. He is very, very disconnected” from the people who have voted him into office, Holmquist said, a sentiment he said he has heard from other conservatives across the state.
Despite repeated requests to Burr’s campaign for an interview with the senator, Carolina Journal was unable to speak with him.
Holmquist, who has been a small business owner and worked in the commercial banking and savings and loan industry, is one of three long-shot challengers to the two-term incumbent senator. Also seeking the GOP nomination are Dr. Greg Brannon, a Cary obstetrician, and Mount Olive attorney Paul Wright. Brannon lost in the GOP primary in 2014 to Thom Tillis, who went on to unseat first-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan.
A Tea Party favorite, Holmquist beat all three primary opponents in last October’s North Carolina TEA Party Constitutional Caucuses, garnering 58 percent of the vote to their combined 37 percent.
He said he would be strong on national defense. “If we can’t defend the country from terrorism and other forms of attack, including nuclear, then everything else is a moot point,” he said. The U.S. military needs the training and equipment necessary to do its job, he said. Similarly, Kurds and other U.S.-friendly groups who would battle Islamic State terrorists need training, equipment, and other support from the U.S.
Burr is chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, but Holmquist called him “our invisible man” in the Senate. “All of a sudden a lot of people want to talk to him about the threat from ISIS, and other terrorist groups, so it fits very nicely into his re-election campaign. Kind of a lucky coincidence.”
Holmquist would vote to repeal Obamacare “because if we don’t eventually it’s going to collapse the economy.” Allowing insurers to compete across state lines, expanding the use of health savings accounts, and other steps should be implemented to replace it incrementally, he said.
Regarding the Veterans Administration scandal, he said he would “clean house first of all.” The IRS “needs to be done away with,” the Department of Education should be eliminated, and the Environmental Protection Agency should be reduced.
Burr’s website includes numerous statements and video clips on his positions. Too many government regulations punish work and savings, and impede job creation, he said. He wants to simplify the tax code. He believes Washington should maintain a role, though less expansive, in state education matters. He said he supports military veterans’ access to resources and support.
Burr, who served five terms in the U.S. House before being elected to the Senate in 2004, said Washington does not live within its budgets, and must prioritize spending. Obamacare is taking the country in the wrong direction, he said, and he helped to craft the Patient CARE Act as an alternative to the president’s signature health care law.
He called the Islamic State “the biggest threat in my lifetime” to the American way of life, and to every other developed country in the world. “The defeat of ISIS will take every bit the global commitment that countries made to the Second World War.”
Regarding gun control and the Second Amendment, Burr said: “Make no mistake. I think now’s the time to have the debate on whether it does need to be tweaked,” but that needs to be done carefully.
Like Burr, Brannon did not grant an interview to CJ, even though requests were made through his campaign and with the candidate directly. But he introduced several election themes in a speech on March 5 in Cary at the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference.
“I’m running for United States senator to be our ambassador, to chain the federal government so the laboratory of the experiment in liberty in North Carolina can deal with education, health care, free markets, private property,” Brannon said. “There is no constitutional oath for OSHA, for EPA, the Bureau of Land Management” bureaucrats who write laws through regulation.
Brannon cited several votes from Burr that the challenger considered an abandonment of conservative principles, including raising the federal debt ceiling, agreeing to omnibus budget bills with funding for the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, and refusing to support closing the borders.
“Our founders in North Carolina were first in freedom. We went to war because the tax burden was so overbearing from a centralized government in London it was worth risking everything,” he said. “The tax burden was 1 percent” at the time of the American Revolution.
Brannon, who has delivered 9,000 babies, said life begins at conception, and is deserving of protection at all stages.
Contacted through his campaign, Wright declined numerous requests to be interviewed.
Wright’s campaign website says, “Attempts to disarm America must end.” He advocates defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Act, and said Congress must reverse the funding for Obamacare and Planned Parenthood.
It is time to end “this American nightmare” of abortion, which Congress can do constitutionally, he said, by limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts.
Immigration laws must be enforced, and spying on Americans must stop, he said. The current tax system is “a Marxist structure penalizing work,” and it should be replaced with a flat tax to “unshackle American capital and workers” to let American ingenuity and enterprise to explode.