Mark DeVol has been a lifelong Republican, but when the 52-year-old businessman decided to run for Congress, he filed as an independent.
“I realized that the ruling class of the establishment party is not interested in the values and principles that I am interested in and what the Republican Party used to stand for,” DeVol said Thursday in a meeting with the editorial board of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “Unfortunately, I think both major parties have been hijacked.”
DeVol, owner of DeVol Millwork in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and a candidate in Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District, calls himself a constitutional conservative who “is one of us.”
He said he wants to limit the size of the federal government by getting it out of education, energy and health care, which he said it has no constitutional authority to take over from the states.
“It’s taken us 80 years to get here but, quite frankly, the grand social experiment has failed,” he said. “We’re $13 trillion in debt. This just isn’t working and, plain and simple. We need to get back to states’ rights.”
The federal government needs to meet its promises for Social Security, veterans benefits and Medicare, he said, but in the future such programs should be abolished and replaced with health savings and individual retirement accounts. DeVol said he favors a consumption-based tax to replace the federal income tax and other federal taxes.
“It’s called personal responsibility,” he said. “We are going to have to wean ourselves off of government.”
As a resident of Oak Ridge, DeVol said he sees the value of the work of the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But he said such research should continue “but without the 24,000 DOE bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”
As a businessman, DeVol said he will be a citizen legislator who will serve no more than six years.
“If I attempt to run for a fourth term, I will owe the Anderson County Volunteer Fire Department $1 million [under a bonded pledge with the Alliance for Bonded Term Limits],” he said. The alliance is a nonpartisan organization seeking federal 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit, according to its website.
DeVol blasted Republican candidate and 3rd District front-runner Chuck Fleischmann, a Chattanooga attorney, for not agreeing to such a term limit.
“Mr. Fleischmann spent more than $700,000 of his own money, barely won the primary and is clearly aligning himself with the moderate, centrist part of the Republican Party, and that’s not what the mainstream majority wants,” he said. “The way Mr. Fleischmann won his primary and conducted his business was disgusting. He simply lied.”
Fleischmann campaign spokesman Jordan Powell declined to respond to the criticism.
DeVol said he is spending more than $20,000 of his own money “and we hope to raise another $30,000 to $40,000” to supplement the work of more than 100 volunteers.
Chattanooga businessman Tim Price, a conservative activist, said he is supporting DeVol “because he’s a businessman who is competent and principled, rather than another lawyer like Chuck Fleischmann.”
Other candidates in the race are Democrat John Wolfe and independents Don Barkman, Gregory C. Goodwin, Robert Humphries, Mo Kiah and Savas T. Kyriakidis.
KEY DATES
* Wednesday-Oct. 28: Early voting
* Nov. 2: Election Day
Source: Tennessee Division of Elections