Zimmer and Lance tag team in Summit

Sen. Leonard Lance (R-Hunterdon) in Summit on Friday.: Politicker photoSUMMIT - Coming off a train station rally here for presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former U.S. Rep. Dick Zimmer and state Sen. Leonard Lance (R-Hunterdon) convened a town hall meeting at the high school, where they brandished their fiscally conservative credentials in a room of about 50 voters.

Now in a race with Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Fanwood) to represent the 7th Congressional District, Lance the veteran legislator underscored his tenacity fighting bloated government, including the administration of disgraced former Gov. Jim McGreevey.Former U.S. Rep. Dick Zimmer addresses voters in the Summit High School Library as GOP organizer Kelly Hatfield looks on: Politicker photo

"I am the ‘Lance’ of Lance versus McGreevey," the senator said of his suit against the former administration to curb borrowing to balance the state budget.

The New Jersey Supreme Court in 2004 allowed McGreevey to borrow $1.9 billion, or nearly 7 percent of what was then a $28 billion budget, but forbade the governor from borrowing in the future.

Talking to Summit voters Friday evening in the high school library, Lance took pride too in noting how his proposed Constitutional amendment to ban borrowing without voter approval will appear on the Nov. 4th ballot.

"Never again," Lance said of the state budget practice.

Zimmer picked up on that point when he condemned the Wall Street bailout package Congress passed last week. A former U.S. Congressman who’s now challenging U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-Cliffside Park), Zimmer said he failed to find specific provisions in the package that protect taxpayers. 

Deriding the entire Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac home mortgage nexus with government, he also pulled a copy of the U.S. Constitution out of his pocket and told his audience that no where in the document does it guarantee people home ownership. 

Lautenberg voted for the Wall Street bailout last Wednesday evening.

"I challenged him to debate this next week, but he has not taken me up on this," Zimmer said. "All he has done is issue very perfunctory statements, blaming George Bush, John McCain and me. Our incumbent senator is in hiding and cannot face it."

Tackling the same issue, Lance said on a recent trip he took to Washington, D.C. he learned that Caterpillar, the country’s leading producer of construction and mining equipment, could not borrow owing to the instability of the financial market. But the state senator expressed misgivings about the $700 billion bailout package as ultimately passed by the U.S. House and Senate.

"My whole philosophy of government is caution," said Lance, who took the opportunity to recall the fight he undertook with his own party in 1997, when then-Gov. Christie Todd Whitman borrowed $3 billion without voter approval to close gaps in the state pension system and in the state budget "over my very vigorous objection," Lance said.

He admitted to the small crowd here that the financial crisis came as a surprise, saying if he had submitted a novel a year ago in New York in which the plot detailed the collapse of five major banks, no publisher would find it believable.

Former Summit Councilwoman Kelly Hatfield hosted the candidates, and Sen. Tom Kean, Jr. (R-Union) stood in the audience.

The rally for McCain at the Summit train station earlier in the evening was small, and attended by Lance, Zimmer, Kean, Hatfield, Assemblyman Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield), Assemblyman Eric Munoz (R-Summit), Union County GOP Chairman Phil Morin, McCain campaign county coordinator Thomas Roughneen and others.