The Romeo Area Tea Party offers Harry Veryser as its featured speaker at the RATP quarterly dinner meeting on Monday, Jan. 23.
Veryser is a well-known figure to longtime political activists though he withdrew from high-profile Republican politics two decades ago. The RATP invitation to hear Veryser speak on the topic, “The Rise and Fall of Great Empires,” oddly ignores Veryser’s GOP past.
Veryser rose to prominence in the 1980s as the president of the Michigan Conservative Union and soon became a major player in Macomb County and Michigan GOP politics.
A staunch Catholic, Veryser nonetheless backed TV evangelist Pat Robertson for president in 1988 and led the move in Michigan toward a separate “rump” convention after backers of George H.W. Bush were accused of trying to steal delegates at that year’s Grand Rapids conclave.
The bizarre result was that two separate sets of Michigan delegates were ready to head to the national convention, which led to a messy court fight followed by a “cease fire” compromise.  As a result, the coalition of Robertson backers and a maverick group of Jack Kemp supporters created a major split in the state party that took a few years to heal.
In 1994, Veryser ran for Macomb County commissioner in an interesting Republican primary year that included Nicki Brandenburg, Jim Biernat and Janet Ausilio. Brandenburg was an incumbent commissioner who first latched onto the Robertson bandwagon in 1986 and took control of the Macomb GOP. Ausilio was the wife of Dean Ausilio, who led the fight on behalf of the Bush camp in that bloody ’88 skirmish.
Veryser fell short in the November election while the ’94 winners included Brandenburg and Biernat, then a 26-year-old political rookie. He went on to serve several years as a commissioner before becoming a county assistant prosecutor and, now, a Macomb circuit court judge.
The other half of Veryser’s resume, as summarized in the RATP invitation, is that of a former small business owner and longtime economics professor at Walsh College who has also held prominent positions at Hillsdale College and University of Detroit Mercy.
It’s nice to see Veryser back in the public spotlight, though I wonder if he has much in common with the vibe of the tea party movement. Unlike the loud, brash, hyper-partisan approach taken by many tea party groups, Veryser was always a very thoughtful, gentlemanly, mild-mannered spokesman for conservative causes.  
The dinner will be held at The Palazzo Grande banquet hall, 54660 Van Dyke, just south of 25 Mile Road, in Shelby Township. Doors open at 6 a.m. and tickets are $20 each.To purchase tickets in advance, click here.

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