Beto O’Rourke once supported taking homes away from low income families because his family benefited from the plan

The Democratic party is desperately trying to find some young blood it can rally behind as the future of the party and they have hitched their wagons to a couple of candidates. These candidates would be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke.

 And speaking of Beto O’Rourke it has just come to light that while he was a United States Representative he once supported a plan put forward by a billionaire real estate investor to seize the property of poor people through eminent domain so he could build businesses on the properties. But it gets worse because it turns out that he was married to the man’s daughter, making the billionaire his father-in-law. So he obviously had a vested interest in seeing the project through.

    Here is more, surprisingly enough, from the New York Times:

At a special City Council meeting in 2006, a billionaire real estate investor unveiled his vision for redeveloping downtown El Paso. To replace tenements and boarded-up buildings, he proposed restaurants, shops and an arts walk rivaling San Antonio’s River Walk.

Representative Beto O’Rourke, one of hundreds attending, wasn’t exactly a disinterested party.

Not only had he married the investor’s daughter, but as a member of City Council, he represented the targeted area, including a historic Mexican-American neighborhood.

Calling downtown “one piece of El Paso that was missing on the road back to greatness,” Mr. O’Rourke, now a congressman and the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, voted to take the first step forward with the plan.

Over the next two years, Mr. O’Rourke would defend the plan before angry barrio residents and vote to advance it. At other times, he would abstain. Business owners who opposed the plan accused Mr. O’Rourke of a conflict, citing the involvement of his father-in-law, the billionaire developer William D. Sanders.

Here is more from some people who remember it well:

Mr. O’Rourke was perceived by many as siding with the moneyed elite against angry barrio residents, small business owners and even the Jesuit priests who ministered to the immigrant community at Sacred Heart Church.

“Mr. O’Rourke was basically the pretty face of this very ugly plan against our most vulnerable neighborhoods,” said David Dorado Romo, a local historian who added that the episode had resurrected longstanding race and class divisions in the city.

Barrio residents feared that they would lose their homes through eminent domain, and a city-funded branding study suggested that the residents of El Paso were perceived as “dirty” and “lazy.’’ Among some constituents, the hurt feelings have lingered.

One of them is Guadalupe Ochoa, 75, who owns a home near the redevelopment area. “We had voted for Mr. Beto, and now that he got to the top, and close to the power, he turned things around on us,” Ms. Ochoa said through an interpreter, Dr. Romo.

  So it turns out Beto O’Rourke is not the person he claims to be now, and yet he still has the support of the Democratic voters because the party has put itself in that weird position where they have to vote for a person who supported taking homes from the poor and giving them to the rich because his family benefited from it. And they are doing it simply because he is anti-Trump, and that is because in the end–just like Beto O’Rourke–they really only care about themselves despite their protestations that it is the Republican party which cares not for the poor.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium