Interview: Speed dating with eleven House Republicans on their priorities, the economy, foreign policy, the Super Bowl, and more
House Republicans have a "second bite at the apple" to move President Donald Trump's agenda; here's what they told us they want to focus on.
The Washington Reporter spoke with eleven House Republicans during a Rep. Lisa McClain-organized (R., Mich.) media row after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Republicans addressed a range of issues. This week, we’ll share their thoughts in two newsletters; in this issue, House Republicans tackle everything from their top priorities as a conference to taxes and the economy to foreign policy to the NFL.
Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah) sees a major opportunity for Republicans to work together because of their small majority and Rep. John Rose (R., Tenn.), who has been in the majority and minority, sees the next few months as an opportunity to take a “second bite at the apple, a new lease on life, and I am excited to see the president hit the ground running.”
Lawmakers are interested in issues such as immigration and unleashing American energy. Some, like Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R., Texas), said that “the left is currently losing its mind” as Republicans figure out their agenda.
Others, like Rep. Russell Fry (R., S.C.) expect the left to reorganize fairly quickly. “Democrats are having internal squabbles and fights amongst themselves, but there is no doubt that they will get organized again, and that they will be challenging the president again,” he said. “They are already filing lawsuits to try and stop some of these executive orders. I expect more of the same.”
Stay tuned for Thursday’s edition, in which members will further discuss immigration and agriculture.
Below are transcripts of our interviews with House GOP lawmakers, lightly edited for clarity.
House GOP priorities:
Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah): I've never been as excited as I am right now in politics. For the first time in a while, the American people truly understand the importance of our vote. My focus is on education, and I love the fact that we have a president who has prioritized that, and who understands that it’s the ideology that we have going through our system that we need to change and to bring merit into this process.
Rep. Russell Fry (R., S.C.): President Trump, via his executive orders, has already delivered massive wins for the American people, and I think we need to follow up with that from our standpoint in Congress. People want their border secure. They want an economy that works for them. They want American interests put first above those of the rest of the world.
Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas): We know that the things we're trying to get done for the country, we've got an ally in the White House. It’s clear that Trump is ready to get to work. Let’s just start with energy. We've been assaulted for the last four years by an administration that's not only willfully complicit in trying to destroy our economy, but then does things like put in an LNG ban on our country, which doesn't just hurt us, it hurts our allies. Let's talk about the border: the amount of fentanyl deaths in my district, the crime, the bad actors, whether it's gangs or otherwise, that have come through our district, is horrible. I was in the military and I went to other places in the world while I was deployed to prevent those people from actually coming here and never showing up at our borders. You’re talking about 400-plus people who have showed up on our terror watchlist. That’s insanity. So I applaud President Trump and in the next couple of months, we're going to work very hard to put into legislative text the things that he is already doing on things like securing the border.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R., N.J.): Things are very, very different as we go into the Golden Age. It's going to be bumpy. Nobody should kid themselves. Securing the border has to be a top priority. The other side will try and make this look mean-spirited, but a nation has to have borders, and borders that are enforced. They’re not going to roll around. Unfortunately in New Jersey we are a sanctuary state. For me, a top priority is wind turbines. I was a voice in the wilderness on this for years, but they are bad for fishermen, bad for tourism, bad for the whales, bad for national security. Trump told me about a month ago ‘Jeff, I’m going to do an executive order on this.’ His move is going to save our ocean, our economy, and the Jersey Shore.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R., Wis.): I'm going to focus on the welfare system. I don’t think America can be a great country when we’re doing so much to discourage parents from getting married. I think America has been in the decline since Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, given the skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births we’ve seen. If you want less crime, for example, you need to have the family involved.
Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.): The biggest thing is President Trump’s agenda. My goal is to push the ball within the Republican conference to get things done. We’ve got 100 days, then two years, then four years, to get it done. My specific priorities are the budget, energy, deficit reduction, and deregulation.
Rep. John Rose (R., Tenn): Our priorities include getting prices under control, securing the border, restoring our military hardware, restoring America’s stature in the world, restoring our strategic petroleum reserves, getting energy open so that we can produce not only the energy we need, but so that we can export it to the world. We also need to get back to cutting regulations. The Biden administration left us with 1,195 new final regulations that cost the U.S. economy $1.9 trillion and take millions of hours for Americans to comply with. When I ran for office in 2018, I ran because I was excited to see President Trump’s agenda enacted. Now, this is a second bite at the apple, a new lease on life, and I am excited to see the president hit the ground running. It’s exciting to see a president have the energy and the vitality to actually do the job.
The economy, energy, and taxes:
Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R., Texas): I have been eating and drinking all things reconciliation for the last two years given the committees I sit on. We’ve literally been working on this for years, talking with small businesses about what would happen if the Trump tax cuts expire. The last time we had two reconciliations pass was in 1997 when Newt Gingrich was Speaker and we had a much bigger majority.
Rep. John Rose (R., Tenn.): I serve on the Financial Services Committee, and we’ve seen the Biden regulatory agenda just strangle local small community institutions. The Biden administration’s one-size-fits-all approach to regulation has been devastating to small banks in communities like mine. This whole woke policy agenda that has shoved DEI into schools is something that needs to be pushed back on. You’ve seen President Trump talk about the need for common sense policies, and to me a lot of those sound a lot like Tennessee common sense.
Rep. Russell Fry (R., S.C.): We've got some energy challenges in South Carolina and it is really important, not only in my role on the Energy and Commerce Committee, but in working with the president, to make sure that we're not kowtowing to the environmental lobby, and that we're delivering affordable energy that's cheap. For example, there’s a pipeline that’s been held up for three years, and it is not inexpensive. We’ve got an aging energy infrastructure we have to shore up.
Rep. Bob Onder (R., Mo.): We need to end the just ridiculous overspending. There’s a lot of talk about it being hard to deal with entitlements. I think restoring work requirements to entitlements that already have them, such as food stamps, and adding work requirements to Medicaid could be big game changers towards the budget, while also helping return people to the dignity of work.
Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah): I was a very passionate Democrat, until I began a business of my own, and I was surrounding myself with other business owners who had the same ideas I did, and I realized the party I was part of was not at all in sync with the way I thought as a business owner, as a dream builder. I think what's happening now, the culture is changing, because Trump is such a force. You cannot ignore him. Right now, we’re talking about securing the border, making sure were are energy dominant so prices come down, making sure we afford to go and get our groceries. We want to make sure that kids are not in failing schools. Now, I think that the biggest group to reach out to is the white suburban voter who has kind of been sheltered, but between inflation, the idea of safety, and all those things begin to break through. I look at the fires in California, and I think it's going to change some people.
Rep. Tim Moore (R., N.C.): We as a federal government must learn to live within our means and not spend so much. We have to extend the Trump tax cuts. Had the Trump tax cuts not been in place during COVID, we would be in a massive economic hole. That’s a key part of making sure our country continues its prosperity. In addition to taxes, we also have to take care of spending. You can handle a lot of that by tackling waste, fraud, and abuse. We know there are a lot of government agencies that are interfering in individuals’ lives that don't need to be doing that. Not only is it an erosion of liberty, but it's a waste of money. And so you start going after some of those first, you start demanding accountability in every dollar that's spent, and you at the same time limit the taxes, that will have results. I don't think you just do one and not the other. I think you have to do both.
Foreign policy:
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R., Wis.): What the world should realize is that if you harm an American citizen, you will never have another peaceful night’s sleep for the rest of your life. We will find you, we will root you out, and we will destroy you and everything you love. We will crush you, so if there’s anybody out there who’s thinking about that, you need to know that President Trump is deadly serious, and that Mike Waltz is deadly serious. We're not going to get involved in wars just because we can; we're only going to get involved in these conflicts that we have to be involved in. I want to get us back to a place where we are safe as Americans around the world, where our allies are protected, and that does mean a strong NATO, and a strong NATO starts with all the members of NATO paying at a minimum 2 percent of their GDP into defense. A bunch of people that haven't made it there yet; I was with some of our allies, I won’t mention them by name but their initials are Luxembourg and Belgium. Luxembourgers are incredibly sophisticated. They’re saying they can't figure out how to do that over a decade? I’m not buying it. In Wisconsin, my folks are having difficulty buying gas and we’re sending billions and billions of dollars to Europe for their defense.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R., Wis.): We spent some of last Congress investigating extraterrestrial life. I don’t think it’s somebody from Mars, but you saw those drones over Jersey. They kept saying ‘there’s no big problem here, there’s no danger,’ and ‘we don’t know where it’s coming from.’ Aren’t those things contradictory? So, obviously they’re hiding something. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they’re hiding our technology. We may have invented something 30 years ago, the Chinese don’t know what it is, and like all areas of government they have nothing but contempt for Congress and for the public, so they say they can’t tell us.
Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas): The threats facing us with Trump in the White House are still exactly the things I've been talking about before: it's the threat of the CCP, the threat of the Iran, the threat of violent extremism, not just in the Middle East, but here. It's the threat of the gangs and the cartels that are entering our country. It's the fact that we have no deterrence. Now, President Trump comes in and the day before he gets there, he sends a clear message to Hamas and to Iran, and he says, ‘those hostages had better be released before I take the Oath of Office.’ They got a deal done, and a lot of them are coming home, which is better than what Biden could have done. So things are looking up. Deterrence is working. People know that President Trump has credibility, and that's a large factor. We're going to rebuild our military, and we’re going to get to a point where we are respected by our allies and feared by our enemies. When it comes to Afghanistan, I love President Trump saying that he wants to get our equipment back from the Taliban. Obviously, our failure there was the worst military operation in the history of our country. It was a shame. Friends who went and died in Afghanistan, service members I didn't even know, made the ultimate sacrifice. And then we give this air base away and we leave our equipment behind; so President Trump is right. We don't want another endless war. He is right on that. In his Inaugural Address, he talked about the wars we do not start as a metric of success, I believe that in my heart as well. That's where deterrence comes in. I think there'll be a lot of back and forth with Mike Waltz, who is a good friend and the new National Security Advisor; I can finally trust the person in that role.
Social issues:
Rep. John Rose (R., Tenn.): In Tennessee, you learn very quickly on the farm that there are only two genders, and this is an issue we’ve been leading the nation on. You don’t need scientists or politicians to tell you this. When I was two years old, I learned this. These are 75, 80 percent issues. We don’t want men in women’s locker rooms, we don’t want our little girls to have to compete against boys in sports; Title IX opened up a whole range of opportunities for Americans and for Tennesseans, including my grandmother, who played basketball from 1918-1922; in that time, there were no opportunities outside of pickup games for people like her. Then you fast forward 50 years and there are all sorts of opportunities. But now, they’re being taken away.
Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah): I made the switch from being a Democrat to being a Republican several decades ago, and because it is an emotional switch, you don’t go back. What you're seeing right now is a transition that is so exciting, because once we kind of go through the process of realizing that we’ve been lied to, that’s a powerful change. We don't mind when people make mistakes in America, but we do not like being lied to. The attacks from the left on masculinity have been particularly shocking to black men and to Hispanic men.
Sports:
Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah): I think about the small majority we have now. It’s probably the best thing that could happen to us because what happens is that we are forced, because of the power of Trump and his mandate and the relationship has with Mike Johnson, to come together. You cannot say, ‘you know what guys, I'm going to sit this out.’ Instead, you have to say ‘I'll compromise a little bit.’ We can’t do Hail Marys on every play. Al Davis was a great coach when I played for the Raiders, because you had all of these crazy guys but they came together for two reasons: out of respect for Al and out of fear of Al. When you put those together, you are forced to have discipline and to think about the team. I stopped watching the NFL when players started kneeling, so I don’t have a lot of thoughts on who the Raiders should have brought in for their next coach. I definitely don’t think it should have been Andy Reid. Andy is exactly where he needs to be. While I don’t watch, I do root for the Kansas City Chiefs. Andy is a friend, he worked for the Philadelphia Eagles, my daughter worked with him for several years on the Eagles, and he creates a culture just like Al Davis did. Wherever he goes, he creates this culture, so I’m not surprised to see what he’s done in Kansas City.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R., Wis.): I still don’t watch the NFL because of its pivot to wokeness. What kind of message does it send to America when they have ‘end racism’ in the endzones?