Political Career
In 1974, McDonald ran for Congress against incumbent John W. Davis in the Democratic primary as a conservative who was opposed to mandatory federal school integration programs. McDonald successfully criticized Davis for being one of only two Georgia congressmen to vote in favor of busing. He was also effective in attacking Davis for receiving thousands of dollars in political donations from out-of-state groups, principally from New York City and Los Angeles. These groups favored mandatory federal programs that used busing to achieve school integration.
McDonald won the primary in a surprise upset and was elected in November 1974 to the 94th United States Congress, serving for Georgia's 7th congressional district, which included most of Atlanta's northwestern suburbs (including Marietta), where opposition to school busing was especially high. However, in the general election, J. Quincy Collins, Jr., an Air Force prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, running as a Republican, nearly defeated him, despite the poor performance of Republicans nationally that year due to the aftereffects of the Watergate scandal. McDonald, though, was re-elected four times with wide margins (including a 1976 rematch with Collins) and served from January 3, 1975, until his death, on September 1, 1983. His seat represented a contrast in political geography, as Republicans were successfully competing against moderate Democrats using the Southern strategy. Unlike many national Democrats, McDonald hewed to a consistently conservative line on issues such as foreign policy, defense spending, fiscal restraint, states rights, gun rights, and pro-life, while mounting a campaigns that successfully combined modern elements with a more traditional grassroots strategy. It paid off in the fall; while many of his fellow Democrats succumbed to Republican opponents or switched parties, McDonald managed to retain his seat.
McDonald, who considered himself a traditional Democrat "cut from the cloth of Jefferson and Jackson," was known for his conservative views, even by Southern standards. Given his Old Right and Southern views, he was more conservative than the Republican Party. In fact, one scoring method published in the American Journal of Political Science named him the second most conservative member of either chamber of Congress between 1937 and 2002 (behind only Ron Paul). The American Conservative Union gave him a perfect score of 100 every year he was in the House of Representatives, except in 1978, when he scored a 95. He also scored "perfect or near perfect ratings" on the congressional scorecards of the National Right to Life Committee, Gun Owners of America, and the American Security Council. Referred to by The New American as "the leading anti-Communist in Congress", McDonald admired Senator Joseph McCarthy and was a member of the Joseph McCarthy Foundation. He took the communist threat seriously and considered it an international conspiracy. An admirer of Austrian economics and a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he was an advocate of tight monetary policy in the late 1970s to get the economy out of stagflation, and advocated returning to the gold standard. McDonald called the welfare state a "disaster" and favored phasing control of the Great Society programs over to the states to operate and run. He also favored cuts to foreign aid, saying, "To me, foreign aid is an area that you not only can cut but you could take a chainsaw to in terms of reductions."
His staunch conservative views on social issues attracted controversy. For instance, McDonald sponsored amendments to stop government aid to homosexuals. McDonald also co-sponsored a bill "expressing the sense of the Congress that homosexual acts and the class of individuals who advocate such conduct shall never receive special consideration or a protected status under law". Simultaneously, in opposition to his conservative Republican opponents, he also supported programs to favor small proprietors, individuals, and small businesses, against big business. He advocated the use of the non-approved drug laetrile to treat patients in advanced stages of cancer despite medical opinion that the promotion of laetrile to treat cancer was a canonical example of quackery. McDonald also opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, saying the FBI had evidence that King "was associated with and being manipulated by communists and secret communist agents." It was reported that McDonald had "about 200" guns stockpiled in his official district residence.
In 1975, Tom Anderson mentioned McDonald's name as a potential 1976 presidential candidate for the American Party. McDonald dismissed the idea, saying "I have enough to do right now representing the Seventh District in Congress."
McDonald was frequently opposed by members of his own party, once remarking that "The national party is a bunch of kooks" but that he had "no problems" with Georgia or 7th District Democrats. However, in 1978, the Seventh District Democratic Committee voted, 10–8–1, to pass a resolution to "censure" McDonald "for the dishonorable and despicable act of calling himself a Democrat." The main reason for the censure was McDonald's membership in the John Birch Society. Other reasons included: McDonald's support for denying there were implied powers in the U.S. Constitution, the claim that McDonald did not favor anti-monopoly laws, McDonald's lack of support for Jimmy Carter, and the claim that McDonald ran misleading advertisements. McDonald's reply stated the censure was "illegal" under party rules, but that the action would probably help him at the polls: "It proves beyond any doubt to all my constituents in the Seventh District that I represent them and that I am not the puppet of a clique of liberal, disgruntled party bosses." He also felt the resolution would "badly split" the party and "make it much easier for other political parties to gain clout on the local level in future years."
In 1979, with John Rees and Major General John K. Singlaub, McDonald founded the Western Goals Foundation. According to The Spokesman-Review, it was intended to "blunt subversion, terrorism, and communism" by filling the gap "created by the disbanding of the House Un-American Activities Committee and what considered to be the crippling of the FBI during the 1970s." McDonald became the second president of the John Birch Society in 1983, succeeding Robert Welch.
In 1980, Larry McDonald introduced American Legion National Convention Resolution 773 to the House of Representatives calling for a comprehensive congressional investigation into the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission.
McDonald rarely spoke on the House floor, preferring to insert material into the Congressional Record. These insertions typically dealt with foreign policy issues relating to the Soviet Union and domestic issues centered on the growth of non-Soviet and Soviet sponsored leftist subversion. Of particular interest to McDonald was Soviet and other communist clandestine activities around the world. Reed Irvine, of Accuracy In Media, referred to McDonald's insertions as "high quality" and "extremely valuable". Domestically, a number of McDonald's insertions relating to the Socialist Workers Party were collected into a book, Trotskyism and Terror: The Strategy of Revolution, published in 1977.
At the time of his death, McDonald was considering a run for President of the United States.
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