Foley And McKinney Spar Days From GOP Primary For Governor

Foley, McKinney
Foley and McKinney squared off in Sunday morning debate.

Two days from Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor, Tom Foley and John McKinney battled Sunday morning in a debate on WTNH News 8.

The first question of the forum came from News 8 watcher James of Vernon, who wanted to know:

“If you are elected Governor, do you have any plans to modify or repeal the gun legislation that was pushed through this state’s government? If you plan to modify the legislation, what are those plans?”

“As governor, I’m not going to focus on repealing the gun bill or making modifications to that law,” said McKinney, whose district includes Newtown. “I’m going to focus on growing our economy, creating jobs. Dan Malloy is going to leave either one of us a $2.8 billion budget deficit.”

“I said at the time (of the Newtown School Shooting) that the governor should focus on only policy changes that would prevent another Newtown from happening, and he went way beyond that,” Foley said. “In some respects Sen. McKinney actually advocated for restrictions that the governor wasn’t advocating for. This was an overreaching bill.”

“If the legislature chose to revisit the bill, and that there were corrections of simplifications that they could make that would reduce some of the onerous provisions on law-abiding citizens, I would support that,” Foley said.

Taxes and spending, and reducing or cutting spending, brought out sharp exchanges between the candidates.

“You have repeatedly voted for tax increases,” Foley told McKinney. “You have repeatedly voted for budgets that resulted in very significant increase in spending, so you’ve had some kind of epiphany here in the past three weeks, and all of a sudden you are a fiscal conservative when I’ve been talking about these kind of changes needed for Connecticut government for over four years.”

“I’ve had ten budget votes over 16 years that increased taxes, and I voted against all of them except one,” McKinney said. “I had five budget votes that actually cut taxes. And I’ve voted to cut taxes, hundreds of millions of dollars that passed.”

“There will be no tax increases in our budget,” McKinney said.

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4 comments

  1. John McKinney has a big mouth. He kept interrupting and didn’t let Foley finish a complete sentence. I guess he thinks if he constantly talked it would overcome rudeness. A true professional politician!

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  2. You are right, charlie. However, Foley was ill-prepared and looked like a deer in the headlights. Not one mention by either candidate about an urban agenda. I guess they will for the general election to pander to the urban electorate!

    Nothing about the Tribal Nations! HOW?

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