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Tea Party Congressional Candidate Closes Home Health Business After Losing License

Michele Fiore’s 2016 calendar CREDIT: VOTEFIORE.COM
Michele Fiore’s 2016 calendar CREDIT: VOTEFIORE.COM

It’s been a busy week for Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R).

First, she filed as a Congressional candidate last Friday with the Federal Election Commission for the seat being left vacant by Republican Senate candidate Joe Heck (though she has said she is not certain if she will actually run).

On Monday, she released a “2016 Walk the Talk Second Amendment Calendar” featuring pictures of herself with large guns. A sample page shows her decked out in a white dress, diamonds, and holding an semi-automatic AR pistol, with the caption “Diamonds aren’t a girl’s only best friend.”

And on Tuesday, she announced she had terminated her home health care business due to a “never-ending barrage of government red tape and regulations” — after state Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance officials informed her that they were administratively closing her agency license as they had found her business closed during routine inspections. Fiore blamed “the army of regulators, bureaucrats, and inspectors, followed by the ever-increasing array of taxes and fees.” She previously chaired the assembly’s taxation committee.

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Fiore, who was selected Assembly Majority leader last year but was removed over allegations of more than $1 million in tax liens, has previously made national news for her unique views:

  • In February, Fiore told the New York Times that “hot little girls on campus” need to be armed with guns to prevent themselves from being raped and every citizen should “have the right to defend him or herself from sexual assault.” She was defending her bill to allow college students to carry concealed fire arms on campus.
  • Later that month, Fiore proposed that end-of-life patients should have more access to approved treatment options. “If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, salt water, sodium cardonate [sic], through that line, and flushing out the fungus,” she said, “These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.” The American Cancer Society has warned that while cancer patients whose immune systems are weakened by high doses of chemotherapy can sometimes contract fungal infections, “there is no evidence that antifungal treatment causes the patients’ tumors to shrink.”
  • In March, she defended a proposed voter ID law by suggesting that racism is over and opponents of the bill should no longer “use the race card.” At the same hearing, she identified her colleague Assemblyman Harvey Munford (D) as the first “colored man to graduate from his high school,” using an offensive racial term common in the 1960s.
  • In April, she filed a bill in support of outlaw rancher Cliven Bundy, proposing to authorize Nevada to seize U.S. public lands within its borders and prohibit the federal government from using any land without the state’s permission. When a Republican colleague noted that the state’s Legislative Council Bureau had deemed her proposal unconstitutional, Fiore demanded, “Could you sit your ass down and be quiet?”

Fiore’s libertarian views sometimes have put her at odds with her party’s orthodoxy. She was the only Republican in the legislature to vote to lift the state’s unconstitutional ban on same-sex marriage and in support of medical marijuana. But she also has boasted that she often carries guns even in gun-free zones.

She previously ran for U.S. House in 2010, coming in second in an eight-way GOP primary. Four other Republicans, including the state senate majority leader, are also seeking the open seat in 2016.