The 6th District deserves better: We endorse Josh Hicks for Congress

It would be hard to find a race with a more stark comparison between candidates than Kentucky’s 6th District race for the U.S House of Representatives: The Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep. Garland Hale “Andy” Barr IV, grew up in a patrician Lexington family that belonged to the Idle Hour Country Club while Democratic challenger Josh Hicks worked his family’s tobacco patch on a Fleming County farm.

They are both lawyers, it’s true, but Barr has spent most of his career in politics, first at the state level, then in Congress, while Hicks worked construction, joined the Marines, became a police officer and then worked his way through law school.

Those experiences have shaped two very different sets of values, making it clear that Hicks best represents the 6th District’s widely varied voters, from the streets of Lexington to the rural areas that encircle it.

Barr declined an interview with the editorial board, but the choice to endorse Hicks is an easy one based on his background, his temperament and his priorities for Kentucky’s working families on issues such as health care, education and taxes.

We offer our sincere condolences to Barr, who recently lost his wife, Carol.

And we congratulate him for his persistence in getting a successful House vote on a much-needed bill on racetrack safety. Barr also does an efficient job with constituent services and veterans’ issues.

But his passionate enabling of President Donald Trump, his embrace of tax cuts and COVID-19 relief for the richest and most powerful, and his continued attacks on the Affordable Care Act — which cut Kentucky’s uninsured rates in half — make Barr more suited to helping a few families in rich ZIP codes than the middle- and working-class families spread out across the 6th District.

By contrast, Hicks grew up on a farm, where he “scraped and shifted to get by.” Growing up and working in rural areas that have often been left behind, he’s seen why health care is so important, why we need more affordable avenues to higher education, and better infrastructure, including desperately needed broadband access across the deprived countryside. Like many rural Kentuckians, he grew up as a Republican but became a Democrat, as he explained last year: “Once somebody becomes the party exclusively of corporate special interests, that’s not what I believe government is intended to do.”

Hicks thinks government is still a force for good, but believes too many Kentucky voters are disenchanted and disengaged from the political system, which explains the low rate of voting in rural areas.

“They don’t believe either party is helping them,” he told the editorial board. “It’s an entire repudiation of the entire political system.”

In 2018, Barr beat back a tough challenge from Amy McGrath by painting her as too liberal. He’ll be hard-pressed to use that argument this time around; Hicks supports a public option for health care, rather than Medicare for All, and says that while we must stop climate change, he would not support a Green New Deal.

Unlike Barr, who often touts his support for coal, Hicks understands that coal is not actually a big presence in the 6th District, and noted that the “war on coal,” cited by Republicans during the Obama administration, was full of “empty rhetoric.” But he also supports coal as a continued presence to meet America’s future energy needs.

Hicks also understands the extraordinary political moment we are in right now. Unlike Barr, who recently denied there is systemic racism in policing, Hicks is a former police officer who knows how complicated the problem can be, and supports a decrease in congressional funding of military hardware and training for police.

Barr’s attack ads have been particularly crass this time around; he tried to paint Hicks as an enemy of health care providers who help COVID-19 patients, while failing to say that Hicks’ lawsuits against a hospital and a pharmaceutical company were filed in 2019, well before the pandemic began.

Under Kentucky’s senior U.S. Senator, the Republican Party pays lip service to working-class families while honoring only the rich, a tradition that Barr has happily joined. Hicks points out correctly that there just aren’t that many farm boys like him in Washington, D.C., and we agree there should be. We wholeheartedly endorse Josh Hicks for the 6th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This story was originally published October 9, 2020 at 10:34 AM.