In his House career starting in 1993, Nathan Deal worked against birthright citizenship and was a leader on issues like requiring English-only government services and excluding illegal aliens from Obamacare.
He supports Arizona’s tough enforcement approach. His career voting grade on immigration from NumbersUSA is A+.
In March of this year he quit the House to run for Governor of Georgia. True to his political history, he has campaigned on law and borders.
Immigration is focus of new Deal ad, Politico, July 7, 2010
Former Rep. Nathan Deal is putting illegal immigration front and center in his bid for governor of Georgia, targeting the issue in his first television ad unveiled just hours after the Justice Department filed suit against Arizona’s strict anti-illegal immigration law.
“Liberals won’t like it when I empower local law enforcement to help deport illegal aliens,” Deal says in the ad. “But it must be done, because the federal government has failed to secure our borders and illegal aliens are costing Georgia taxpayers over a billion dollars every single year.”
Deal has already made illegal immigration a theme of his primary campaign, inviting the White House in an earlier news release to “sue us too” over a proposed crackdown. In his debut commercial, Deal boasts that he “wrote the law to stop illegal aliens from receiving taxpayer-funded health care.”
Battling for second place in Republican primary polls, Deal is hoping to make it into a runoff with the current GOP front-runner, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine. A poll released last week showed Oxendine and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel tied for first place.
Meanwhile in the dreary California gubernatorial election, candidate “Checkbook Meg” Whitman is running even with well-worn Democrat Jerry Brown (see the Chron’s Poll: Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown in virtual tie).
Seen by comparison from California, Georgia voters look very fortunate to have a decent candidate for governor. But the Golden State suffers from a number of difficulties that impede the political process, including unwieldy size, demographic change, the nation’s worst adult illiteracy, poor reporting of state politics and the prohibitive cost of running for statewide office. The dysfunction is exemplified by the fact that the Republican candidate has never held office voted rarely at best, but is prepared to spend $150 million of her own money to become governor.
