Bell: Strongly Agree.
Question topic: Should abortion be allowed under extenuating circumstances? If so, what circumstances?
Bell: No.
Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.
Bell: Applying the 14th Amendment's protection of life to the unborn
Bell: Strongly Agree.
Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.
Bell: Giving back control of our money from the Federal Reserve to the people by restoring the gold standard.
Bell: Strongly Agree
Bell: Strongly Disagree.
Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.
Bell: Ending the federal government's involvement in education, starting with Common Core
Bell: Strongly Disagree
Bell: Strongly Disagree
Bell: Strongly Disagree
Bell: Strongly Disagree
Question topic: The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) should be repealed by Congress.
Bell: Strongly Agree
Bell: Strongly Agree
Bell: Strongly Agree
Bell: Strongly Disagree.
Question topic: Judeo-Christian values established a framework of morality which permitted our system of limited government.
Bell: Strongly Agree.
Question topic: Briefly describe your spiritual beliefs and values.
Bell: I am a devoted Catholic and attend Mass daily.
The nation's highest court voted 5-4 that companies with religious objections can dodge the requirement to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under ObamaCare, saying it violates a federal law protecting religious freedom. The ruling favored art-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby, among about 50 companies to sue over the ObamaCare requirement.
Booker is running for re-election this year against Republican challenger Jeff Bell, who--like other GOP leaders--praised Monday's ruling. "This is a great assurance to the American people and to New Jerseyans that their religious freedoms will not be stripped away by government mandates forcing people to pay for and buy into practices they believe violates their religious conviction," Bell said in a statement.
"I offered an answer to that problem," he added. At the center of the economy's lackluster recovery, he said, is the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy, which he blames for the lack of job creation and for denying people the ability to save. The U.S. needs to undergo a "fundamental monetary reform," he said.
That belief is what prompted Bell to run again in the first place, he said. Since 1982, he has continued working on tax and monetary reform at a series of Washington DC-based think tanks and consultancies. "It just struck me that the whole cycle was going to go forward with no further debate on Fed policy unless I decided to come back to New Jersey and run," he said.
He's not wrong. After winning Tuesday night's four-way Republican primary, Bell, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, will now face Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, the former Newark mayor whose rise to national prominence was in part fueled by his high-volume tweeting. Booker has a whopping 1.47 million followers. Bell has 237.
His lower number isn't surprising--Bell, who is 70 years old, has been out of the game for decades. His last Senate campaign was in 1982, when he lost the Republican primary to former Rep. Millicent Fenwick. Prior to that, he ousted then-Sen. Clifford Case in New Jersey's GOP primary but lost the general election to Bill Bradley.
Bell acknowledges that he faces an uphill battle against Booker, in part due to Booker's hefty financial advantage. Booker has $2.9 million in the bank, compared with Bell's $3,976. Still, Bell said, "This was a cause campaign," he said. "So far, at least it's alive."
Competitive primaries tend to attract a party's most hard-core supporters, and the Republican candidates debated who was most supportive of gun owners' rights. Booker, meanwhile, advocates for stronger gun control measures and was active in the Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
"It isn't profitable for them to lend to a business with a certain amount of risk with very low interest rates, so a lot of the lending that would normally set up lines of credit for small business are on the sidelines." Because small businesses are the biggest job creators, the lack of available credit hurts the labor market, he said.
Bell's proposed solution is to return the country to a gold standard, in which a large percentage of the US dollars in circulation are required to be backed by the corresponding value of gold in reserve. He believes doing so will cause interest rates to rise but provide greater long-term economic stability.
But on Tuesday, Bell defeated three other Republican challengers, winning 29.5% of the vote. All Bell, 70, has to do now is defeat Democratic incumbent and social media favorite Cory Booker.
Bell welcomes debates with Booker, saying, "I debated Bill Bradley 21 times in 1978, and I think I would be a good debater. I do have that reputation from the past."
Bell won that 1978 Republican Senate primary by defeating a 4-term incumbent, Clifford Case. Bell won the race by 1.5 percentage points, and called the victory "the major shocker to date of this political year." Almost nobody in politics gave Bell a chance to win, including his fellow Republican conservatives.
"I'm a one-issue candidate," he says. "I don't really want to get into state issues. With no money, my only real opportunity is to be known for just one thing." So Bell, an eloquent and ardent pro-lifer, defense hawk, and foreign-policy interventionist, ties nearly every issue he's asked about back to the destructive power of paper money.
"Why is it so important to return to gold-dollar convertibility now?" his letter asked the unsuspecting Republican voters of New Jersey. "Things have gone too far for limited half measures to work." A return to the gold standard, he concedes, would of course result in higher interest rates, as the dollar sought its own level of value without direction from the Fed.
A: Reagan believed a strong and stable dollar is the keystone of an integrated world economy. The dollar's universal acceptance since the 1940s as the world's final money has in fact been the single biggest force for globalization. This legacy is now under pervasive assault. The generation-long capitalist boom is over. Global trade talks have little if any traction, while bilateral agreements negotiated with such allies as Colombia and South Korea languish in Congress, unacted on year after year. It would be hard to find a major trading partner that hasn't expressed public dissatisfaction with US monetary policy, particularly in regard to our management of the dollar. If he were alive and politically active today, where would Reagan be? My own guess is that Ronald Reagan, never one to demonize a policy debate, would identify the problem as systemic and would be barnstorming for yet another big change in the way the world works.
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The above quotations are from 2014 New Jersey Senate debates.
Click here for other excerpts from 2014 New Jersey Senate debates. Click here for other excerpts by Jeff Bell. Click here for a profile of Jeff Bell.
Jeff Bell on other issues: |
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