GOP STRONG

“The real bottom line,” says GOP  Strong Co-Chair Michael Ramaglia, “is that neither assemblyman is showing leadership by calling for audits or investigation of audits. Audits aren’t leadership  

“Driving is a privilege reserved for legal citizens in good standing. It is not a basic right. Now liberal Democrats want to give that privilege to people who broke the law to get here. That’s just crazy,”

More importantly however, for Mr. DeCroce to point a gun to the head of Bob Yudin and threaten to withhold money for Assembly races in Districts 36 and 38 is a self-defeating threat and demonstrates that the minority leader is more intent on incumbency protection for the minor party than he is on trying to make the Republican Party a majority party in New Jersey.   

“This latest development highlights the problem a lot of us see with Mr. Rumana as chairman: he is reactive, not proactive. He is not spending his time building the party or showing true opposition to the Democrats. Instead he spends most of his time worrying about his own political future.”  

“The state needs to take a hard line with education costs and make sure more money goes to the children, not to bureaucrats and buildings.”

“The key question is what in God’s name has Rumana been waiting for? He should have been condemning the plan the moment it was introduced in February. It sounds to me that he is just trying to save his political career by finally responding to the public’s outrage.” ROBERT  FASS 

“Why can’t Mr. Rumana just come out and say that COAH is wrong;  that the entire concept of the affordable housing  mandate is an insult to the people in this state who worked hard to afford a home without making other people pay for it?”

One reason that I and others formed GOP Strong is to create an organization that will forcefully advocate for Republican positions. We have to do, what the chairman will not do – fight for Republicanism.    We need to create a party that acts like a party that wants to win – not one that just goes through the motions

The internal fight in the Passaic County Regular Republican Organization took an amusing turn today.

First, a splinter Republican group called GOP Strong -- which has been highly critical of Assemblyman and Passaic County Republican Chairman Scott Rumana (R-Wayne) -- issued a press release casting doubt on Rumana’s effectiveness and earnestness in his fight against Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) regulations.

Half an hour later, Rumana issued a press release announcing that he had been named “Legislator of the Year” by the Building Officials Association of New Jersey because of his opposition to the new COAH rules.

That drew a follow-up press release from GOP Strong, claiming that Rumana was touting the award as a “desperate attempt to demonstrate the he actually matters in Trenton,” and that the organization is “made up of a handful of bureaucrats who enforce onerous building codes in New Jersey.”

“Assemblyman Rumana knows he has done nothing meaningful to fight the state’s ridiculously harmful affordable housing regulations, so he gets some organization no one has ever heard of to give him an award while he is at a convention in Atlantic City. It is really a pathetic attempt to cover up his miserable record of accomplishment,” said Ramaglia