SCOOP: Rep. Lisa McClain on her three roles as GOP Conference Chair, the One Big, Beautiful Bill, and more
Rep. Lisa McClain explains what exactly a House GOP Conference Chairwoman does during a visit to Rep. John McGuire's district.
POWHATAN, Va. —
It’s no secret that most Americans don’t know what exactly the House GOP’s Conference Chair does, but Rep. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.) is working to change that.
For months, she has criss-crossed America with her GOP colleagues, learning from Americans about what they want to see more of from Washington, while also pitching the merits of the GOP’s signature legislative package of this Congress: the One Big, Beautiful Bill.
At a visit to a restaurant with Rep. John McGuire (R., Va.), McClain explained what exactly her job is.
“I see it as threefold,” she explained. “One, I believe I am the number one salesperson for the conference. It is my job to work hand in hand with the White House to deliver messaging for the Republican conference. And that's exactly what we're doing, and I think we're doing it very, very well. But it's not me, it's all of the people who work in Congress. They come back to the districts, and they bring the stories to life of the working families tax cuts or of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, there's enough in there for everybody in it.”
“Job number two,” she continued, “is to run the conference. Figure out at all of our conference meetings what we're going to talk about, what our messaging is, what our strategy is, work with leadership on what bills are going to get to the floor, what we're going to cover, and how we're going to do it. It's more on a strategic level and I work hand in hand with the White House to make sure we don't get off the rails. We need to make sure that the House, the Senate, and the White House are all rowing in the same direction, and that there is no light between us.”
“And then the last thing,” she said, is that “we need to keep our majority. Not only do we need to keep it but we need to grow it. As I was talking to some of you earlier, if we don't, it's not going to go back to the moderates; the Blue Dog Democrats are gone, they are done. It's going to go back to your leftist extremes, and we will not know what this country looks like.”
McClain told the audience that she “will take any issue on face to face,” and she did so on everything ranging from taxes to immigration to Medicaid reform.
“Taxes? Let's take a look at the taxes right here in Virginia,” she said. “Mr. McGuire, he saved you $8,000 a year. The average Virginian will see an $8,000 tax cut. And I can tell you, he was on the phone with President Trump. It was an all nighter. He was on the phone with President Trump, but every single Democrat, and this is what doesn't get any coverage either, and it blows my mind, so I say it and I say it loud: every single Democrat voted to raise every single Americans’ taxes, period, full stop, end of story.”
“Border security?” she continued. “We don't even hear about that on the news anymore, because President Trump has it under control. Oh, gee, I thought Biden said we had to pass something legislative?”
“And then let's talk about Medicaid,” she said, fearlessly jumping right onto what many of her colleagues have viewed as the third rail of the recent reconciliation package.
“Everybody wants to run from Medicaid,” she said. “We are kicking people off of Medicaid. You are right. Guess who we're kicking off of Medicaid? The people who shouldn't be on there to begin with. So we are kicking off 1.3 million people who are receiving Medicaid fraudulently,” she said to applause.
“How about 4.6 million people who could work that are choosing not to?” she asked. “And I use work as a very loose term. Work means you could volunteer only 20 hours, let’s not get crazy, only 20 hours, to receive your benefit. How about go back to school, which the government will pay for so that you're actually not taking from the system? You're actually contributing to the system. What a concept? And it's only for people who are able bodied.”
McClain also tied her final point about expanding the GOP majority to what she deliberately termed the “murder” of Charlie Kirk.
“Let's just call it what it is: the murder of Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It was different, and it hit a different cord in America, and I saw it through the lens of my 22 year old daughter who just graduated from college, who was very involved in Turning Point, who was very involved in her college as a conservative…but it hit her different. It touched her differently.”
For young Americans like McClain’s daughter, Kirk’s killing is uncharted territory. “Yes, she saw the assassination attempts — twice — on President Trump,” McClain said. “She saw the murders of the lawmakers in Minnesota. She heard about Steve Scalise and the shooting on the baseball field. See a pattern? See a pattern? I do, but this one hit her differently, and she said to me, ‘mom, my voice will not be silenced.’”
For McClain, hearing that from her daughter made her proud. “I'm like, wow, I feel good as a parent, because it felt like, gee, I did something right today.”
Americans are struggling with “an ideological problem,” McClain said. “We have one side that believes in law and order, and that's good. We believe that we should support law abiding American citizens, and then we have another we have another party that believes we should take care of and that we should the criminals.”
“We have lost our minds,” she said — contrasting the saturation coverage Daniel Penny and the lack of coverage of the murder of Iryna Zarutska.
But, she believes that “we have a rebirth in right versus wrong, good versus evil, capitalism versus communism.”
“I come from the state of Michigan,” she told the crowd of Virginians, who have a critical election of their own coming up in a few weeks. “We got our lunch handed to us in 2022. Why? Because we weren't united. In 2024 under President Trump, we were united. We understood who we were fighting against and what we were fighting for. If we can keep that momentum, we will continue to win.”