For years, Rep. Rob Wittman (R., Va.) has worked to ensure that America is and remains energy independent, and he told the Washington Reporter in his latest interview that his policies on American energy independence are good politics.

The number one issue facing his constituents in Virginia’s 1st District, he said, is “still the economy, but it’s all different facets of the economy. It’s energy affordability, it’s groceries, it’s healthcare. If you kind of bundle all those together under the term of the economy, I would say that’s the top issue.”

But, he added, “people are also concerned about safety within their communities. What are we doing to make sure that there’s support for law enforcement? We want to make sure that we are holding criminals accountable, making sure that we are strictly enforcing the laws of the Commonwealth and of the nation, and making sure that we’re doing everything possible to strengthen this nation in relation to the threats that we see around the world.”

One of Wittman’s signature wins for his constituents was his work on the GOP’s Working Families Tax Cuts (WFTC). He pointed to several critical components of the bill, which his Democratic opponent, Shannon Taylor, does not support.

“As I talk to constituents, they are incredibly happy that they’re getting refunds, especially the people who work for tips, people who work overtime, the businesses that know that their tax provisions are going to stay the same; the tax rate on small business doesn’t go from 20 to 43 percent, and they can continue to depreciate their capital investments over 12 months — all those things were preserved in the Working Families Tax Cut,” Wittman explained. “For seniors, knowing that $12,000 of their combined income — that is, both spouses are exempt from taxes for their Social Security income — that’s a big impact on their tax refunds and on their now future benefits that they get from Social Security, the benefits that they’ve earned from Social Security. Those things have been very much at the forefront of people’s minds as to the impact of the Working Families Tax Cuts.”

But it’s Wittman’s work on American energy independence where he has notched several critical wins for both his constituents in Virginia as well as for Americans from coast to coast. “For the first time in the last decade, there was a new refinery being built. We want to make sure we have more capability and capacity here to refine our own oil that comes out of the ground here in the continental United States,” he noted.

“Our efforts to produce more energy in the United States, like the efforts with the administration to open up the largest source of natural gas, literally on the planet, in the North Slope of Alaska, are also paying off,” Wittman explained. “That permitting process is finished now, so we can build a pipeline to bring that natural gas down to Cook Inlet and turn it into liquefied natural gas to bring it to the rest of the United States to be able to bring down energy costs, as well as providing the incentives and the regulatory relief for businesses that are into taking oil wells that still produce, they don’t produce at as high a volume, and going back and getting those oil wells to produce again. Those are things that we already have in this nation, and we just have to do a better job at that. We also want to make sure that those businesses can quickly get those permits to go ahead and redevelop those wells, and make sure those wells go back to producing, as well as making sure that we are building more refining capacity here in the United States.”

Wittman touted the bipartisan and bicameral work he’s been able to do to ensure that American companies can remain competitive against their Chinese competitors. One of his signature pieces of legislation in that realm is the Secure Minerals Act, which he said “acknowledges that the United States has not been in the mining business now for decades, that we have been just overwhelmed by China and their dominance of the marketplace and of the source materials that we need to actually produce here in the United States.”

“It’s great to build a semiconductor plant,” Wittman explained, “but if you don’t have any control over the rare earth elements necessary to build those semiconductors, it doesn’t make any difference how many new plants you build. The acknowledgement of this bill is that we need to get back into these source material production capabilities, and the United States has really been at the forefront.”

“What I want to make sure is that we are able to counter the unfair trade practices by China,” he added. “We want to actually help our companies counter that and get back into production. We want to produce the things that we need here in the United States, for not just national security, but for our own economy, and not being reliant on China and their coercive measures that they put in place in trade is really important. We see that all the time with what’s happening now with this back and forth United States and China on trade policy. Being able to do those things, as well as addressing the issue of energy production is very important. It’s not just developing our own energy here, but it’s also looking at how we fast track the approval processes for things like small modular reactors, and we’re going to need nuclear power for the future energy needs of this nation, and folks on the other side of the aisle need to acknowledge that you can be an advocate for electric vehicles, but if you don’t have the energy necessary to charge an electric vehicle, then it doesn’t make any difference. You can’t be for one without the other.”

From his vantage point in Congress, Wittman has seen firsthand how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) needs to be aggressively countered at home and abroad.

“We have to aggressively push back on China’s unfair trade practices, and we have to get back into the source material production business,” he explained, adding how America can ensure that that happens. “We cannot have a strong economy unless we produce the source materials. We talk about reshoring. What are we going to do to get back to producing the things that we need for advanced manufacturing? We talk about the reindustrialization of the United States to get back into making things again. But if we’re going to do that, we need critical minerals. We need basic things like copper production, aluminum production, and that sounds easy. And we do some mining here, not enough, but we do some mining and refining of those materials. But we’re down to only two smelters left in the United States, and those are facilities that actually take the refined material and turn it into the metal that can be used for production.”

In once instance, he said that he “went to the Greens Creek mine about a year ago in Alaska, and we visited there. They’re doing an incredible job with extracting minerals, things like lead and zinc, and all the other minerals that this nation needs in the critical space, and refining those materials there, but then they have no smelters that they can send them to, so those materials are going to have to be sent to China.”

But, Wittman explained, the problems remain ongoing. “We send those materials to China, and then guess what? We buy them back. We buy materials that we mine in the United States back from China. It just doesn’t make sense. My bill gets us back into the full scale of production that is mining, refining, and then smelting those products to make sure we have the complete closed supply chain in the United States, and we do that by countering China’s unfair trade practices, because China will dump those materials on the market below the cost of production, just to make sure that they keep American competitors out of the marketplace, and American competitors are not going to produce if they are going to be paid below their cost of production.”

“My bill, he explained, “ensures a floor for that marketplace that their prices will never drop below the floor production price that they need to actually stay in business, and that way they can counter the Chinese unfair trade practices.”

As one of the top Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Wittman has a vantage point into threats beyond China. Among those are Iran, and ensuring that it is never able to obtain nuclear weapons. 

“It is significant that Iran seeks to have a nuclear weapon,” Wittman said, explaining that that entails more than solely preventing Iran from obtaining conventional nuclear weapons that it launches itself. “I was talking to some people while I was out knocking doors the other day, and someone told me that ‘Iran will never be able to reach the United States. They’ll never have a missile to do that.’ Well, never say never. They’re not going to have one in the near future. But the threat that I am concerned about is their ability to produce a large-scale thermonuclear weapon. And it’s not that they can put it on a missile and send it from Iran to the United States, but it’s what other means can they deliver it by.”

Iran, Wittman cautioned, “can put it on a container on a container ship, and that container ship comes to the United States, and that weapon is detonated with catastrophic results. And I can tell you, there’s a physicist on the other side of the aisle who said the same thing. He says ‘what worries me is not an intercontinental ballistic missile from Iran, but it’s Iran putting this on a ship and bringing it here to the shores of the United States and detonating it, and it would have devastating effects there.’ This may not even be on a container ship, but even on a ship of inconsequential profile, something that people look at and go, ‘oh, that’s nothing.’ And then all of a sudden, boom! You have this weapon detonated.”

“There are threats there, and they are significant,” he continued. “And Iran has continued to express a desire to use a nuclear weapon against their adversaries. Keeping them from having a nuclear weapon is key, and that’s why you hear the president continue to emphasize that. I understand people’s concerns about the Iran conflict. I’m also concerned about how do we achieve the objective to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, and making sure that we get stability back in that region of the world, and make sure that the impact on things like energy prices continues to get mitigated.”

When it comes to containing either Iran or other threats, Wittman and others on HASC have been at the forefront of advancing another of President Donald Trump’s priorities: the Golden Dome missile defense system.

The “Golden Dome is important,” Wittman explained. “Golden Dome provides a lot of the different assets that are going to be of value to this nation’s military, whether it’s enhanced sensing of particular threats, the ability to take on those threats and have multiple different layers of defense there. If we see these threats, from drone swarms to low altitude cruise missiles to intercontinental ballistic missiles, all of that is incredibly important for us to protect the United States. And all of those systems have utility across the United States military. Getting that done and getting those systems developed and that technology in the hands of the war fighter, and protecting the continental United States, is key.”

“Some of the other things too are the modernization outside of the exquisite systems,” he added. “We always think about exquisite systems, like our aircraft carriers, our fighter jets, our nuclear submarines, and those are going to be critical parts of our inventory. But as we see, one of the big emerging threats, especially from countries that aren’t near peer competitors, but are ones that can create a significant threat to the United States, are ones that have these expendable platforms, the drones and the attritable platforms, those things that are unmanned. That’s going to be an incredibly important part of the future of the United States military is what do we do with these unmanned systems? How do we have not just thousands, but tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of these platforms to make sure that we can not only defend the United States but also make sure that we provide a significant threat to others that may think to come after the United States? Remember that those platforms are less expensive. They are very effective, as we see other nations using them. And we don’t have to put human beings in harm’s way.”

These threats, he noted, are part of why Trump is correct to prioritize Greenland in America’s foreign policy strategy. 

“We have a presence in the Arctic area,” he noted. “It’s also why there’s been a renewed emphasis on Greenland and looking at how do we make sure that we have Greenland as a more involved ally with helping us in sensing where these threats are. Those are things that people need to understand and that the United States has to put in place. We have significant sensors in the Indo-Pacific for a whole variety of reasons. We started that years ago when North Korea got to be much more aggressive, and we have those too to sense what’s happening from China. We have a little bit on the East Coast, but we need more because of the nuclear threat from Russia.”

Closer to home, another area of affordability where Wittman is focused is on housing prices. He believes that cutting and streamlining regulation is one of the most important things that Congress can do to ensure that more Americans can live the American Dream.

“As we’ve traveled around, we’ve talked to folks about what we need to do to continue to grow this economy, continue to help small businesses, and one big thing I hear is in the realm of regulations,” Wittman said. “What can we do to bring down the cost of homes? We passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which does a lot to reduce the amount of regulation that home buyers have to deal with in the cost of their homes. $131,000 of the cost of a first-time home goes into complying with regulations. Compliance has become an overbearing cost. That’s almost 28 percent of the cost of a new home. This bill looks to reduce that cost. It also looks for other ways to help first-time home buyers leverage their assets to be able to borrow money for a home. We want to make sure that we’re doing things for those home buyers who want to move up when they are growing a family and looking for another home to move into because of the growing family needs, so we’ve been working on things like that.”

Closer to home, Wittman also wants to ensure that Virginia and America remain naval powerhouses. “We have to make sure that we’re using the full capacity that we already have today in our industry,” he explained. “We have a ship building and a ship repair industry, and the ship repair industry goes in cycles where there’s a lot of ships that come to the maintenance yard, and then there aren’t so many, and they have a workforce that has the same skills that are necessary for ship building. We need to do more to utilize the industrial capacity that’s there. We’re working on getting that fully utilized, and also making sure that we build the industrial base for the ship building and ship maintenance enterprises.”

“We talk about more shipyards, but until you have the base production capacity that is in the maritime industrial base to supply these shipyards, you’re never going to get to where you need to be,” he added. “There are lots of efforts going on to grow that maritime industrial base. I want to make sure that we’re doing that. That enables our yards to produce even more. We have to ramp up the amount of domestic shipbuilding that we are doing. There’s been a big push to say ‘we need to go to foreign yards and have them build our U.S. military ships.’ I would say that I have no problem with those yards partnering with our U.S. yards, but I do not think it’s in the nation’s best interest to export that production. So companies like Hyundai that are here partnering with our shipyards here with HII, with Huntington Ingalls Industries, they are doing the right thing. You have Hanwha that just bought the Philadelphia shipyard that’s partnering there. I think partnering with these other companies is fine. Exporting U.S. defense shipbuilding is not the way that we need to go. I want to make sure we’re fully utilizing the industrial capacity here, and there is a lot of underutilized capacity here.”

Wittman wants Americans in and around his district to be at the forefront of America’s naval supremacy. “I just spoke the other day with folks in the industry in the Hampton Roads area, and they are anxious to get underway with that,” he said. “By the way, there’s been an assertion by some that there’s not workforce in the Hampton Roads area. There is workforce here. We have schools like New Horizons that are producing graduates who are ready to go to work in these industries with those skill sets, whether it’s being a welder, an electrician, a sheet metal worker; those folks are coming out of these career and technical education training centers, with the skills necessary to go to work. So that’s the step that we need to take now to make sure that we’re growing the shipbuilding industry here in the United States.”

Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Rob Wittman (R., Va.), lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:

Congressman Wittman, the last time we spoke, you were pumping my gas in Glen Allen, Virginia at an event with Americans for Prosperity, and you were talking about energy affordability. You’ve been talking about affordability for a while; this event was well before we started lighting up Iran. What are the top issues that you’re hearing from voters in Virginia’s 1st District?

Rep. Rob Wittman:

The number one issue is still the economy, but it’s all different facets of the economy. It’s energy affordability, it’s groceries, it’s healthcare. If you kind of bundle all those together under the term of the economy, I would say that’s the top issue. People are also concerned about safety within their communities. What are we doing to make sure that there’s support for law enforcement? We want to make sure that we are holding criminals accountable, making sure that we are strictly enforcing the laws of the Commonwealth and of the nation, and making sure that we’re doing everything possible to strengthen this nation in relation to the threats that we see around the world. 

Washington Reporter:

One of the topics that you were talking about a year ago was the Working Families Tax Cut; it had become law just a couple of weeks before we spoke. Your opponent, like every Democrat running for office, is against that piece of legislation. Last year, you spoke with me about the tax refunds that Virginians were in store for. Give us a pulse check on how that bill has been impacting your constituents since it’s been implemented. 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

As I talk to constituents, they are incredibly happy that they’re getting refunds, especially the people who work for tips, people who work overtime, the businesses that know that their tax provisions are going to stay the same; the tax rate on small business doesn’t go from 20 to 43 percent, and they can continue to depreciate their capital investments over 12 months — all those things were preserved in the Working Families Tax Cut. For seniors, knowing that $12,000 of their combined income — that is, both spouses are exempt from taxes for their Social Security income — that’s a big impact on their tax refunds and on their now future benefits that they get from Social Security, the benefits that they’ve earned from Social Security. Those things have been very much at the forefront of people’s minds as to the impact of the Working Families Tax Cuts. 

Washington Reporter:

How have you been merging what you’ve been hearing from voters on the campaign trail and your work in D.C.? What have been your priorities in the past couple months for Virginia’s 1st District? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

As we’ve traveled around, we’ve talked to folks about what we need to do to continue to grow this economy, continue to help small businesses, and one big thing I hear is in the realm of regulations. What can we do to bring down the cost of homes? We passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which does a lot to reduce the amount of regulation that home buyers have to deal with in the cost of their homes. $131,000 of the cost of a first-time home goes into complying with regulations. Compliance has become an overbearing cost. That’s almost 28 percent of the cost of a new home. This bill looks to reduce that cost. It also looks for other ways to help first-time home buyers leverage their assets to be able to borrow money for a home. We want to make sure that we’re doing things for those home buyers who want to move up when they are growing a family and looking for another home to move into because of the growing family needs, so we’ve been working on things like that. Our efforts to produce more energy in the United States, like the efforts with the administration to open up the largest source of natural gas, literally on the planet, in the North Slope of Alaska, are also paying off. That permitting process is finished now, so we can build a pipeline to bring that natural gas down to Cook Inlet and turn it into liquefied natural gas to bring it to the rest of the United States to be able to bring down energy costs, as well as providing the incentives and the regulatory relief for businesses that are into taking oil wells that still produce, they don’t produce at as high a volume, and going back and getting those oil wells to produce again. Those are things that we already have in this nation, and we just have to do a better job at that. We also want to make sure that those businesses can quickly get those permits to go ahead and redevelop those wells, and make sure those wells go back to producing, as well as making sure that we are building more refining capacity here in the United States. For the first time in the last decade, there was a new refinery being built. We want to make sure we have more capability and capacity here to refine our own oil that comes out of the ground here in the continental United States. 

Washington Reporter:

A lot of the policies that you were just talking about are fervently opposed by most Democrats in Congress. But one of the pieces of legislation that you were working on that I saw is the Secure Minerals Act, where at least on the Senate side, you and your colleagues were able to get a Senate Democrat on board. How have you either been able to work with Democrats on issues like lowering energy prices, or are they unwilling to work with you? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

There have been some who have been willing to work with us. The Secure Minerals Act acknowledges that the United States has not been in the mining business now for decades, that we have been just overwhelmed by China and their dominance of the marketplace and of the source materials that we need to actually produce here in the United States. It’s great to build a semiconductor plant, but if you don’t have any control over the rare earth elements necessary to build those semiconductors, it doesn’t make any difference how many new plants you build. The acknowledgement of this bill is that we need to get back into these source material production capabilities, and the United States has really been at the forefront. What I want to make sure is that we are able to counter the unfair trade practices by China. We want to actually help our companies counter that and get back into production. We want to produce the things that we need here in the United States, for not just national security, but for our own economy, and not being reliant on China and their coercive measures that they put in place in trade is really important. We see that all the time with what’s happening now with this back and forth United States and China on trade policy. Being able to do those things, as well as addressing the issue of energy production is very important. It’s not just developing our own energy here, but it’s also looking at how we fast track the approval processes for things like small modular reactors, and we’re going to need nuclear power for the future energy needs of this nation, and folks on the other side of the aisle need to acknowledge that you can be an advocate for electric vehicles, but if you don’t have the energy necessary to charge an electric vehicle, then it doesn’t make any difference. You can’t be for one without the other. You can’t be saying, ‘I’m all for alternative and renewable energy,’ but then turn around and say, ‘well, I’m not for being able to produce the energy necessary to sustain electric vehicle production and the other things that are necessary in order to be less dependent on fossil fuels.’ Well, if that’s the case, then what are the other alternatives? We know that wind and solar are not going to make up the difference. So how are we going to get this nation’s energy demands met? I can tell you, we’re going to be in a challenging place. One of the sole reasons why energy bills are going up is because we have less generation capacity in the United States, and it’s all a simple supply and demand problem. So, what are we going to do to supply more electrical energy in the nation? If you’re an advocate for electric vehicles, you need to be an advocate for greater electrical production. 

Washington Reporter:

Last Congress, when you were on the Committee on CCP, you were the head of the Critical Minerals Policy Working Group there, and you were talking about some of that. Give us a sense from your standpoint from having been on that committee and from being the vice chair of HASC; how does that tie into serving in your constituents in the 1st District, and how do we deal with China in the second half of Trump’s second term?

Rep. Rob Wittman:

We have to aggressively push back on China’s unfair trade practices, and we have to get back into the source material production business. We cannot have a strong economy unless we produce the source materials. We talk about reshoring. What are we going to do to get back to producing the things that we need for advanced manufacturing? We talk about the reindustrialization of the United States to get back into making things again. But if we’re going to do that, we need critical minerals. We need basic things like copper production, aluminum production, and that sounds easy. And we do some mining here, not enough, but we do some mining and refining of those materials. But we’re down to only two smelters left in the United States, and those are facilities that actually take the refined material and turn it into the metal that can be used for production. In our mines today, I went to the Greens Creek mine about a year ago in Alaska, and we visited there. They’re doing an incredible job with extracting minerals, things like lead and zinc, and all the other minerals that this nation needs in the critical space, and refining those materials there, but then they have no smelters that they can send them to, so those materials are going to have to be sent to China. So we send those materials to China, and then guess what? We buy them back. We buy materials that we mine in the United States back from China. It just doesn’t make sense. My bill gets us back into the full scale of production that is mining, refining, and then smelting those products to make sure we have the complete closed supply chain in the United States, and we do that by countering China’s unfair trade practices, because China will dump those materials on the market below the cost of production, just to make sure that they keep American competitors out of the marketplace, and American competitors are not going to produce if they are going to be paid below their cost of production. My bill ensures a floor for that marketplace that their prices will never drop below the floor production price that they need to actually stay in business, and that way they can counter the Chinese unfair trade practices. 

Washington Reporter:

While serving in Congress, you’re also a member of the Congressional Shipbuilding Caucus; people would be surprised at how few ships we are building. How do we make sure that we have a navy that is capable of countering China and any other threat for the 21st century? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

We have to make sure that we’re using the full capacity that we already have today in our industry. We have a ship building and a ship repair industry, and the ship repair industry goes in cycles where there’s a lot of ships that come to the maintenance yard, and then there aren’t so many, and they have a workforce that has the same skills that are necessary for ship building. We need to do more to utilize the industrial capacity that’s there. We’re working on getting that fully utilized, and also making sure that we build the industrial base for the ship building and ship maintenance enterprises. We talk about more shipyards, but until you have the base production capacity that is in the maritime industrial base to supply these shipyards, you’re never going to get to where you need to be. There are lots of efforts going on to grow that maritime industrial base. I want to make sure that we’re doing that. That enables our yards to produce even more. We have to ramp up the amount of domestic shipbuilding that we are doing. There’s been a big push to say ‘we need to go to foreign yards and have them build our U.S. military ships.’ I would say that I have no problem with those yards partnering with our U.S. yards, but I do not think it’s in the nation’s best interest to export that production. So companies like Hyundai that are here partnering with our shipyards here with HII, with Huntington Ingalls Industries, they are doing the right thing. You have Hanwha that just bought the Philadelphia shipyard that’s partnering there. I think partnering with these other companies is fine. Exporting U.S. defense shipbuilding is not the way that we need to go. I want to make sure we’re fully utilizing the industrial capacity here, and there is a lot of underutilized capacity here. I just spoke the other day with folks in the industry in the Hampton Roads area, and they are anxious to get underway with that. By the way, there’s been an assertion by some that there’s not workforce in the Hampton Roads area. There is workforce here. We have schools like New Horizons that are producing graduates who are ready to go to work in these industries with those skill sets, whether it’s being a welder, an electrician, a sheet metal worker; those folks are coming out of these career and technical education training centers, with the skills necessary to go to work. So that’s the step that we need to take now to make sure that we’re growing the shipbuilding industry here in the United States.

Washington Reporter:

Can you tell me about your work on HASC on the Golden Dome, and what that means to Virginia’s 1st District and to America?

Rep. Rob Wittman:

Golden Dome is important. Golden Dome provides a lot of the different assets that are going to be of value to this nation’s military, whether it’s enhanced sensing of particular threats, the ability to take on those threats and have multiple different layers of defense there. If we see these threats, from drone swarms to low altitude cruise missiles to intercontinental ballistic missiles, all of that is incredibly important for us to protect the United States. And all of those systems have utility across the United States military. Getting that done and getting those systems developed and that technology in the hands of the war fighter, and protecting the continental United States, is key. Some of the other things too are the modernization outside of the exquisite systems. We always think about exquisite systems, like our aircraft carriers, our fighter jets, our nuclear submarines, and those are going to be critical parts of our inventory. But as we see, one of the big emerging threats, especially from countries that aren’t near peer competitors, but are ones that can create a significant threat to the United States, are ones that have these expendable platforms, the drones and the attritable platforms, those things that are unmanned. That’s going to be an incredibly important part of the future of the United States military is what do we do with these unmanned systems? How do we have not just thousands, but tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of these platforms to make sure that we can not only defend the United States but also make sure that we provide a significant threat to others that may think to come after the United States? Remember that those platforms are less expensive. They are very effective, as we see other nations using them. And we don’t have to put human beings in harm’s way. I argue the human beings in our nation’s defense, our men and women who serve in uniform, are the most valuable asset in our inventory. What do we do to protect them? We make sure that when we don’t have to, we don’t put them in harm’s way. That’s another key aspect of our modernization, and I want to make sure that we’re modernizing at the speed of relevance, especially in relation not just to our near-peer threats, but also to those non-state actors and other entities around the world that seek to harm the United States and can do so rather inexpensively and with lower technology platforms that do create a significant threat to us. We need to be able to counter that with an equally effective platform, one that doesn’t cost millions of dollars per shot, but that we can do it at a very, very affordable cost level and with an effectiveness that takes out their capability to threaten us. 

Washington Reporter:

When it comes to the Golden Dome, Americans might not have a sense of when we would need this. What what are we building it for? As you’re conceiving the threats that this is designed to counter, what are you looking out for? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

Those systems are really about sensing what may be coming our way, and there’s a high probability that what’s coming our way will come over the polar regions, which is more difficult for us to sense because we don’t have a set of sensors there to be able to determine that there’s a threat that’s coming our way. Being able to build that system of sensors is key, then making sure that we have systems able to take out those threats when they come our way is an important next step. That’s one of the reasons why there’s been a lot of focus on the polar regions, why there’s a lot of focus on building icebreakers, so we have a presence in the Arctic area. It’s also why there’s been a renewed emphasis on Greenland and looking at how do we make sure that we have Greenland as a more involved ally with helping us in sensing where these threats are. Those are things that people need to understand and that the United States has to put in place. We have significant sensors in the Indo-Pacific for a whole variety of reasons. We started that years ago when North Korea got to be much more aggressive, and we have those too to sense what’s happening from China. We have a little bit on the East Coast, but we need more because of the nuclear threat from Russia. 

Washington Reporter:

Speaking of nuclear threat, President Trump bombed Iran to prevent it from ever becoming a nuclear threat that would necessitate the Golden Dome or anything else. From your vantage point on HASC, how how is that going? What needs to be done to accomplish Trump’s goals and end the conflict? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

It is significant that Iran seeks to have a nuclear weapon. I was talking to some people while I was out knocking doors the other day, and someone told me that ‘Iran will never be able to reach the United States. They’ll never have a missile to do that.’ Well, never say never. They’re not going to have one in the near future. But the threat that I am concerned about is their ability to produce a large-scale thermonuclear weapon. And it’s not that they can put it on a missile and send it from Iran to the United States, but it’s what other means can they deliver it by. They can put it on a container on a container ship, and that container ship comes to the United States, and that weapon is detonated with catastrophic results. And I can tell you, there’s a physicist on the other side of the aisle who said the same thing. He says ‘what worries me is not an intercontinental ballistic missile from Iran, but it’s Iran putting this on a ship and bringing it here to the shores of the United States and detonating it, and it would have devastating effects there.’ This may not even be on a container ship, but even on a ship of inconsequential profile, something that people look at and go, ‘oh, that’s nothing.’ And then all of a sudden, boom! You have this weapon detonated. There are threats there, and they are significant. And Iran has continued to express a desire to use a nuclear weapon against their adversaries. Keeping them from having a nuclear weapon is key, and that’s why you hear the president continue to emphasize that. I understand people’s concerns about the Iran conflict. I’m also concerned about how do we achieve the objective to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, and making sure that we get stability back in that region of the world, and make sure that the impact on things like energy prices continues to get mitigated. 

Washington Reporter:

You were just talking about knocking on doors on the campaign. Hakeem Jeffries, Abigail Spanberger, and other Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars in Virginia to draw you out of office, and it briefly succeeded before the courts did what Jason Miyares said they would do, which was to reject the attempt to gerrymander Virginia. What has that done to Spanberger in your district? Is this something that has made her even more of a lame duck than the one-term Virginia governor policy allows? How’s this been playing out in Virginia’s 1st District? 

Rep. Rob Wittman:

I’ve been listening to folks out and looking at our polls, and it all shows that this has had an impact on Governor Spanberger. People do not like when you say one thing and do something else. She said emphatically during her election that she was not in favor of this gerrymander, and that she didn’t think that the General Assembly should go forward with it. And then, lo and behold, the first bill she signs into law is the gerrymander. And then Judge Jack Hurley rendered the right decision, and the Supreme Court upheld that to say it was unconstitutional, and that it didn’t conform with Virginia statutes, which meant it was also illegal. It’s had a significant impact because the biggest element of what voters look for in both their candidates when they’re casting a vote, but also in their elected officials is integrity, and they may not always agree with you. They may say, ‘I don’t like the decision that you made.’ But what they want you to be is consistent. They want you to do what you say you’re going to do, and when you don’t, you lose that integrity. And to me, that’s the most important thing that an elected official can have, and the people that I’m hearing from believe that the governor lacks integrity. 

Washington Reporter:

Your latest Democratic opponent is a law enforcement officer, but you’ve been rolling out law enforcement endorsements one after the other. Why is Virginia law enforcement is backing Rob Wittman, and not a prosecutor?

Rep. Rob Wittman:

We’re very blessed to have the endorsement of almost every law enforcement official across the 1st District, and it’s pretty simple. It’s because Shannon Taylor, my opponent, is soft on crime. She doesn’t aggressively prosecute. She is a sympathizer to criminals, and those things matter. And those things matter to folks out there who put people in office — the voters — and when they’re concerned that somebody going to protect them, we all raise our right hand and swear to uphold and defend the Constitution — the Constitution of the United States, Virginia, and the laws of the Commonwealth and the laws of Henrico County — and people expect her to do that. They expect her to do that aggressively, with deference to the people she represents, who are the citizens of Henrico County — not the criminals. People don’t expect her to be a criminal sympathizer, and that’s exactly what she is. If you look at her criminal prosecution record, she significantly reduced, from 45 years of a sentence down to two years, for a neonatal intensive care nurse who broke the hands and and legs of infants there in her care. She also did not prosecute a sexual abuser as a felon and she allowed that to be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, which means that that individual did not have to go on the sexual offender registry, so that individual can move into any neighborhood, anywhere, and people will not know that that person is a sexual offender. It’s unbelievable. And then there was a murder victim where a young lady was stabbed to death, and she happened to be pregnant, and she died, and her soon-to-be baby died, and she would not prosecute the murder of two individuals. She would only prosecute the murder of the mother because she said the assailant didn’t stab the mother in the stomach. How grotesque is that? But that’s my opponent. She is soft on crime. She is the criminal’s best friend. She doesn’t uphold her oath, and that is to defend the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the laws of the Commonwealth, and the laws of Henrico County. She is there to be a criminal sympathizer. 

Washington Reporter:

One of the groups on the Democratic side that is criticizing you is ironically called the League of Conservation Voters. You come into politics as an environmental health specialist; what are your thoughts are on that? That seems like a glaring contradiction here.

Rep. Rob Wittman:

I’ve had an incredibly strong record on the environment during my time in Congress, from the Chesapeake Bay Conservation and Accountability Act, where we have made massive changes to how we improve the water quality in the Chesapeake Bay, to the ACE Act, which is the American Conservation Enhancement Act, that enables a number of programs to really go far into enhancing our natural resources. I’ve got an incredible record with that. I’m a member of the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, and we’ve done quite a bit to put into setting aside wetlands for critical conservation elements, especially migratory birds. I’ll stand by my record any day of the week. And when the League of Conservation Voters does those types of things, what it does is it says that they’re an illegitimate organization. They’re not interested in conservation. They’re only interested in coarse politics. They don’t care about policy because if they looked at my record objectively, they would say ‘we agree with everything that Rob has been doing here.’ Yet they turn it into a political effort, and when they do, they delegitimize themselves. What I would tell people is to look at my record, and the League of Conservation Voters is just a political hack organization that now is deciding that that’s how they’re going to interact.

Washington Reporter:

Democrats are probably going to outspend you like they do to most Republicans. What is your bumper sticker case to voters in the 1st District? What are you telling them on the trail of you versus Shannon for why to send you back for another two years?

Rep. Rob Wittman:

Our effort has really been about delivering for folks back in the district, delivering results for localities, making sure that we are doing things that make a difference in people’s lives, and we’ve been doing that throughout the years. We are helping these counties with projects, like in Mathews County, the dredging of the creeks to make sure that our commercial fishermen have access, to enhancing emergency communications in other counties to make sure that when the call goes out, that our first responders can get to that call and can have very reliable communications, to make sure that we are funding new highway projects in places like Chesterfield County, to make sure that people don’t have to sit in traffic for hours on end waiting to get home, to making sure that we are working with localities to make sure that their infrastructure is maintained, to keep school busses and maintenance vehicles operated. At every turn, we work with localities to ask what’s important to them, and we’ve been able to deliver on those elements that make a difference in people’s lives. That’s where I’m different than my opponent, because she is not making a difference in the lives of people she represents; she is only making life easier for criminals.

Washington Reporter:

One of your accomplishments is the cleverly-named SHARK Act. Tell me about that.

Rep. Rob Wittman:

The SHARK Act is really about addressing an imbalance in our marine ecosystems. It’s actually a success story, where the National Marine Fisheries Services has put in measures to allow shark populations to recover, and the good news is, they actually have recovered. The bad news is, they recovered to such an extent that they are now eating the catch of our fishermen! So if you go out to fish, you are having to battle the sharks for your fish. We want to make sure there is a balance there. We want to make sure that fishermen can bring home their catch and not yield it to the sharks. How do we do a proper job managing the population of those sharks? That is an ongoing question.

Washington Reporter:

Congressman Wittman, thanks for chatting.