Jack Wilson: Ralph Northam Has No ‘Moral Authority’ to Lead Virginia

Virginia Republican Party Chairman Jack Wilson told Breitbart News’s Amanda House that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has no “moral authority” to lead the state.

Wilson spoke with Breitbart News Sunday host Amanda House regarding the series of scandals facing the Virginia Democratic leadership. Gov. Northam faces continued calls to resign amidst his admission that he wore blackface in the 1980s, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax faces two separate accusations of sexual misconduct, and Attorney General Mark Herring revealed that he too wore blackface in the 1980s.

Wilson said that the Republican Party of Virginia has called on Northam, Fairfax, and Herring to resign.

The party chairman said that Northam “has no moral authority to lead Virginia” and that Herring showed the “greatest sense of hypocrisy yet” by calling on Northam to resign for his blackface scandal when he later admitted to wearing blackface yet has not offered his own resignation.

“The first step that Governor Northam can do if he actually wants to move towards racial healing is to utter two simple words, ‘I resign,’” Wilson added.

Breitbart News has reported that it remains possible that if Northam, Fairfax, and Herring were to resign, Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates Kirk Cox could take over as governor. Wilson described Cox as a “principled conservative,” a gentleman, as well as someone whom “all Virginians could be proud of in the” governor’s mansion.

Republicans in Virginia maintain a one-seat majority in the House of Delegates and a slim majority in the state Senate and hope to maintain their majority as they approach the 2019 state elections.

Wilson said their focus “right now is that we preserve those majorities because a lot of this started when the delegate Tran, a freshman delegate from Northern Virginia, introduced her bill to allow for late third trimester abortions and that bill was defeated because Republicans had those slimmest of majorities. We’re focused on November to make sure that the Democrats don’t take control of the general assembly because that bill” would be passed by the House of Delegates and then move to the governor’s mansion if the Democrats retake the state House.

Wilson asked rhetorically, “Are we going to become like California or New York with these far-left wing progressive ideas on the economy and on abortion or are we going to return to a more center-right view on those issues in Virginia?”

The Republican party of Virginia noted that although northern Virginia has helped shift the state towards Democrats, they can “counteract” the region by registering more of Virginia’s more conservative, rural base.

“To make sure that our people in the more conservative rural areas of Virginia get registered to vote so that we can offset northern Virginia,” Wilson concluded. “We can counteract that with more conservative registration elsewhere in the state.”