Crude Dan Bishop seeks the NC office for which he is least qualified | Opinion

I’ve never met Dan Bishop, the Republican congressman who last week announced he’s running to be North Carolina’s next attorney general., but I did once receive an email from him.

In 2018, Bishop, then a state senator, was pushing a plan to redistrict judges in Mecklenburg County. It was another version of Republican gerrymandering, although Bishop was selling it as a democratizing reform. At one point during debate on the bill, Bishop said, “I suppose justice and fair play are in the eye of the beholder.”

That struck me as a perfect expression of the Republicans’ behavior since they took control of the General Assembly after the 2010 election. During their long years in the minority, Republicans opposed gerrymandering and complained about being left out of the legislative process. Once in power, they did exactly the same – except more extremely – to Democratic lawmakers, while also stripping power and staff from the Democratic governor and the Democratic attorney general.

What is just and fair, from the GOP perspective, clearly changed when power shifted.

I wrote a column making that point. In response, Bishop sent me an email. He said, “Somebody referred me to your latest. Your quote of me was literally accurate but, as you know, a gutter level lie.”

Bishop said he was speaking sarcastically about the hypocrisy of Democrats when he said justice and fair play are subjective.

Maybe it was sarcasm. If so, my bad for not noting that Bishop only inadvertently told the truth about Republicans in power. But what made a lasting impression on me was how Bishop closed his email: “Of course you know that. But you used the quote as you did. Because you are a lying sack of .... And everybody knows it, and nobody cares what you say. Enjoy oblivion, Sen. Dan Bishop.”

Apart from the merits of Bishop’s point, I was struck by the coarseness of his temperament. Why revert to crude name-calling in a written response to someone who criticized him?

Why? Because that’s Dan Bishop. He’s not bound by civility. He doesn’t even protect his own image. He goes directly from annoyed to nasty.

Bishop is a member of the House Freedom Caucus. Extremism is their thing. It accomplishes nothing but obstruction. But it does get attention, and that’s the whole point.

Bishop’s behavior in a 2022 hearing on abortion access was typical. He repeatedly asked successive witnesses, apropos of nothing, “What’s a woman?” He talked over them and badgered them. It was a form of mocking people who wanted to respect and acknowledge transgender people. For that bit of theater, Bishop got his two minutes on Fox News.

That taunting came from the man who, as a state senator, sponsored House Bill 2, the so-called Bathroom Bill. It led to boycotts of North Carolina and cast the state as codifying prejudice against transgender people.

Of course, Bishop’s extremism isn’t limited to exploiting gender issues. Despite the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he backed election deniers by voting against the certification of the 2020 presidential election. He supports conspiracy theories about the weaponization of the U.S. Justice Department. He wants to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Now he wants to bring his mean-spirited style of political performance home as North Carolina’s attorney general.

The Club for Growth, the billionaire-funded conservative group that backs any candidate who favors tax cuts for rich people and corporations, says it will spend millions of dollars to make Bishop attorney general, a common stepping stone to governor.

This story was originally published August 8, 2023 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Crude Dan Bishop seeks the NC office for which he is least qualified | Opinion."