Highlands lawyer John Armor, who waged a failed bid in 2006 to wrest the GOP nomination for the 11th Congressional District seat from then-incumbent Charles Taylor, announced last week that he will try again.
Armor may have an easier time of it than he did in 2006, when he lost to Taylor in the GOP primary, garnering nearly 20 percent of the vote. So far Taylor has not announced whether he will seek to regain his seat from Democrat Heath Shuler. Armor’s competition at the moment remains Asheville City Council member Carl Mumpower and Henderson County GOP chairman Spence Campbell.
Armor has not yet responded to an interview request from Xpress, but his campaign Web site outlines his extensive experience as a lawyer who often argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as his work with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of some 2,500 conservative state legislators. That experience, he says, makes him better qualified than Shuler, whom he still refers to as too inexperienced for the job. “I had my first case in the U.S. Supreme Court before Heath Shuler was born,” he writes.
“I have experience at every level of government in the United States—local, state and federal. I also have experience in all three branches of the federal government—Executive, Judicial and Legislative. My primary areas of experience are 33 years practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, and 35 years experience working with and for thousands of state legislators from across the county.”
If elected, Armor says his priorities can be boiled down to their essence: education and protection of the Constitution.
“Our federal government is on its way to failure, to the extent that judges continue to decide cases contrary to the Constitution, and contrary to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives,” he writes. “Concerning education, many philosophers have noted that every civilization is exactly one generation away from barbarity. To the extent that we do not educate our children and then our grandchildren in what it means to be an American, the core of this nation will be lost by degrees, and by generations, until there is nothing worth saving.”
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