ARMENIAN AMERICANS BACK REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN FROM TEXAS WHO OPPOSED PRESIDENT BUSH ON GENOCIDE BILL

armradio.am
03.11.2008 10:36

Despite a personal phone call from President Bush in October of 2007
urging him to participate in Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide,
Congressman Michael McCaul politely refused. In fact, days later
he would vote, as a member of the powerful House Foreign Affairs
Committee, to pass the Armenian Genocide resolution (H.Res.106). The
Armenian National Committee – Political Action Committee (ANC-PAC)
has endorsed Congressman McCaul’s reelection campaign.

Congressman McCaul, a conservative Lone Star State Republican,
is now locked in a close race against Democratic lawyer Larry Joe
Doherty. According to Congressional Quarterly Politics, the latest
polls in the race show that McCaul is only narrowly ahead of Doherty,
despite the fact that President Bush carried his congressional district
with 61 percent of the vote in 2004.

"We are pleased that a number of ANC-PAC supporters are providing
financial support and assistance on the ground for Congressman McCaul
in Texas’ 10th District," remarked an ANC-PAC spokesperson. "The
Armenian American community in and around Austin understands that
Congressman McCaul is a principled leader on human rights issues
and look forward to voting for him on November 4th," added the
spokesperson.

According to a report required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act
(FARA), a lobbying company hired by a foreign government, the Republic
of Turkey, has consistently sought to urge the Congressman to deny
the Armenian Genocide. Led by the former House Democratic Leader
Dick Gephardt, the DLA Piper lobbying firm has repeatedly sought
to encourage McCaul to ignore the murder of 1.5 million Armenian
Christians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Impressively, Congressman McCaul has rejected all efforts by Turkish
lobbying firms to deny the reality of the Armenian Genocide. FARA
was enacted in 1938 and is a disclosure statute that requires
persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or
quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their
relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities,
receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.

Congressman McCaul is currently serving his second term representing
Texas’ 10th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The 10th
Congressional District in the Lone Star State stretches across 8
counties from Austin to the Houston suburbs, and includes Austin,
Bastrop, Burleson, Harris, Lee, Travis, Washington and Waller
Counties. Prior to coming to Congress, Michael McCaul served as Chief
of Terrorism and National Security in the U.S. Attorney’s office in
Texas, and led the Joint Terrorism Task Force charged with detecting,
deterring and preventing terrorist activity. Congressman McCaul also
served as Texas Deputy Attorney General under current U.S. Senator
John Cornyn, and served as a federal prosecutor in the Department of
Justice’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C.