SCOOPING: Rep. Andy Barr dishes on his possible Senate run, his support for Trump, and the threat from China

THE LOWDOWN:

• Rep. Andy Barr joined the Republican Study Committee (RSC) on the newest episode of their podcast, Right to the Point.

• The Reporter got the exclusive preview of the latest episode, where Barr covers everything from China to his potential Senate run.

• Rep. Mark Alford (R., Mo.), a veteran newsman himself, gave the interview.

Rep. Andy Barr (R., Ky.) had his turn in the hot seat on the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast — which the Washington Reporter got an exclusive preview of.

Barr covers everything from China — which he called “an enormous threat” to America — to his potential Senate run.

“We’re taking a look at it,” Barr said on the podcast.

Barr also talked about his support for President Donald Trump in the episode, giving the president credit over his foreign trade policy.

“Because of President Trump's leadership…President Modi of India announced a 50 percent reduction of tariffs,” he said.

Rep. Mark Alford (R., Mo.), a veteran newsman himself, took his turn as the interviewer. Under its new chairman, Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas), the RSC launched the Right to the Point podcast in which its members take turns asking each other questions that the liberal reporters who dominate Capitol Hill refuse to do.

Click here to listen to the latest Right to the Point, featuring Rep. Andy Barr.

Here are our top takeaways from Barr’s interview with Alford, lightly edited for clarity:

Senate run?

• “Kentucky supports President Donald Trump. This is an America First party, and the people of Kentucky deserve a Senator who will support President Trump and support his agenda; I certainly do. And he deserves a cabinet that will that he of his choosing, that will support his policies and his agenda. And so we're looking forward to the future of the U.S. Senate supporting President Donald Trump.”

• “Those are disappointing votes [by Sen. Mitch McConnell against several of Trump’s cabinet picks], of course. The Supreme Court and the role that the Senate played in the last several years in confirming conservative originalist justices will be his legacy. That's a strong legacy. But we need a need a senator who's going to be with this president.”

• “We're taking a look at it. And we're getting a lot of encouragement, from a lot of my constituents and other Kentuckians around the state to take a look at it, because these are MAGA Kentucky voters and MAGA supporters, and they know that I have been with the president as Chairman of his presidential campaign, that I was the first in the federal delegation to endorse President Trump before the primary in 2024. President Trump came to my district in 2018 and campaigned with me at my invitation. So we go way back, and he knows that I've been a strong, loyal supporter of his agenda.”

Trade:

• “Democrats try and say that Trump’s trade policies are bad for Kentucky because of bourbon exports. Nonsense. It's actually the opposite. It's that we're actually fighting for market access, and we recently celebrated the announcement, because of President Trump's leadership, that President Modi of India announced a 50 percent reduction of tariffs. That's going to dramatically increase access into the world's largest market, 1.4 billion consumers in India. And when you put Kentucky bourbon on a level playing field with that legacy imperial scotch, we will clean their clocks, because that sweet corn based bourbon matches perfectly with the spicy Indian palette. I love it, and we are going to produce so much bourbon for our friends in India that you won't even know what to do with all those bourbon barrels in Kentucky.”

Economy:

• “Inflation is the number one challenge. The cost of living is number one. That's what my constituents talk about a lot: the cost of living. It's just unaffordable. If you think about where mortgage rates are today, the cost of housing, it’s terrible. Fortunately, I think we're going to be tackling that with more energy production under President Donald Trump and deregulation. I think a lot of this deregulation in the capital markets, deregulation and energy, deregulation of business, all of that will have the beneficial impact of lowering costs.”

China:

• “It's an enormous threat. They're a peer competitor. Now, unfortunately, they are the second largest economy. They have a lot of challenges with their economy and they're a predatory economy, through unfair trade practices, through theft of intellectual property, by exploiting access to our capital markets, and fueling their civil military fusion, they have been able to build up their military capabilities by exploiting the economic warfare tactics that they've used against the West. So we have to be vigilant about that, and we have to make sure that we protect the dollar's dominance. We need to make sure that we get our fiscal house in order in the United States, so that the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and clearly one of the aims of China is to become the world's superpower, to displace the United States as the world's global superpower, and to impose their authoritarian worldview.”

Deficit:

• “The top ways that we can do to protect America's economic standing and leadership in the world is to reduce our deficit, balance the budget, reduce the national debt and protect the dollar.”

ESG:

• “What we've watched over the last several years in the jurisdiction of the Financial Services Committee is the corruption of our capital markets through what's called environmental, social and governance investing. This was a trend that really started in Europe, but has unfortunately come to the United States and has become trendy among asset managers and even among banks to politicize finance, to politicize banking, so that we've seen a trend where banks are cutting off banking services and access to bank accounts to certain politically incorrect businesses, firearms businesses, crypto businesses, fossil fuel energy companies, and are discriminating against those legally operating businesses because they're viewed as conservative or out of fashion with the liberal elites. So they're debanking the business.”

Regulations:

• “A lot of people don't know about bank capital regulations, boring bank capital regulations, but there was a Federal Reserve regulation that was proposed that was arguably the most costly bank regulation proposal in history. It was called the Basel III Endgame. They were trying to harmonize our regulation with Europe. We don't want to be Europe. We should make America more competitive than our than our European counterparts and other banking counterparts around the world. But the the statistic was that that this regulation would have increased capital requirements on already well capitalized banks by 25 percent, sidelining all of that capital available to American businesses.”

• “Elizabeth Warren was full throated in support of this, because, frankly, she doesn't like the idea of tailored regulations. She wants one size fits all regulation so that all that exists in this country is a non-dynamic set of too big to fail banks, so that she can politically control them, so that the Democrats and the regulators and the bureaucrats and the swamp can control those and politically allocate capital or create a need for the Postal Service or the government to provide credit to people. What we really need in this country is tailored regulation, reduced regulation, especially for those small community financial institutions, which are the source of most agricultural loans in this country, which are the source of most new business loans in this country, of mortgages. They know their customer. There's relationship loans. That's the source of the dynamism of our economy. We are going to make community banks great again in our committee and with Donald Trump as president and with the Republican Study Committee, and we're going to roll back all of this burdensome regulation so that. We truly can unleash the American Dream again.”

CFPB:

• “This is a great example of a good project for DOGE, because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the least accountable, least transparent regulator, not just financial regulator, but regulator. It’s totally immune from accountability because they're exempt from the Congressional appropriations process. We want to change that. We want to starve that beast. Frankly, it doesn't really need to exist. The existing Prudential regulators could handle the job.”

• “It’s a nightmare, absolutely. What they want to do is that you want to use junk economics to ban financial services and products from the American people. We want to unleash our credit markets so that Americans can have access to those services and products so that they can reach their economic potential. And I've always said that the best consumer protection is competition and choice. That's what we need: functional, robust markets to provide consumers with choices. That's the best way to protect the consumer. The worst thing that you can do for a consumer is to have a government bureaucrat deny the American people access to financial services and products.”

Kentucky:

• “As you can imagine, I'm the co-chairman of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus and the Congressional Horse Caucus. My district is also home to Georgetown, Kentucky, which is home to the largest single Toyota manufacturing facility on planet. What do they build there? We build the Toyota Camry. We build the Avalon. We built the RAV4 four, and then we also build the Lexus ES sedan. We have about 10,000 Toyota team members there. There’s major foreign investment, Japanese investment, in our district, both in terms of Toyota, but also Hitachi.”

• “There's a lot of agriculture beyond the horse industry. We have a lot of cattle farmers, row crops as well. But it's mainly beef cattle that has become huge since the decline of burly tobacco. We were tobacco powerhouse, along with Virginia, North Carolina, that's gone away. And so we're looking at hemp instead. It’s got a lot of potential. In fact, my predecessor in this seat in Congress, Henry Clay, the former Speaker of the House and four time presidential candidate, he was a hemp grower. He was a hemp farmer. And recently, I've come to realize that one of the potential applications for for hemp is that it can obviously be in manufacturing, it can be in food supplements, but it's got a lot of very interesting applications that really could result in things like pet food. It could be used in household cleaning and other kind of cleaning applications that are natural and not toxic.”

• “Mark Pope is our new coach. We really like Coach Pope because he was the captain of the 1996 national championship team. He knows Big Blue Nation. He knows the passion of the fan base. There is no better fan base in all of college basketball, and he knows what the mission is, and the mission is to hang banners, and that's it.”

• “There's a culture around bourbon. It's America's signature and distinctive spirit. It can only be made by law, a 1963 statute, can only be made in the United States. 95 percent of it is distilled and aged in Kentucky for a variety of reasons. I could tell you about the other 5 percent of course, is counterfeit. But the bottom line is, it has to be American. It has to be American. Yes, 51 percent corn. And it has to be aged in a brand new virgin white oak, charred barrel.”

Immigration:

• “I voted to impeach Mayorkas. It was the greatest abdication of duty on his watch. He was a liar. He lied to the American people. He said the border was secure, and it was not. It had real human cost, not just in terms of cartels and Chinese nationals. We didn't know what they were doing coming across our southern border, record numbers of human traffickers and fentanyl and 20,000 pounds of fentanyl interdicted at the southern border. We don't even know how much came into our communities. Kentucky, unfortunately, suffered from the third highest overdose mortality rate in the country. The Narcotics Officers of Kentucky, the Kentucky State Police, all of our sheriffs, they told us this was directly tied to the open border policies and all that fentanyl pouring into our communities as a result. And it's really just heartbreaking when you hear tragic stories like Laken Riley, because we didn't have operational control over the southern border. I went to the Laredo sector. I was there with Hector Garza, the Vice President of the Border Patrol Council, and one of the points that he made to me was that the scale of the crisis was much larger than what Mayorkas and the Homeland Security Department or Biden was actually reporting, because those gotaways that they were reporting was a big undercount.”

• “The Democrats were not protecting our sovereignty, and they were really destroying our country. You can't have a country without borders, without secure borders, but thank goodness now we have President Donald Trump, because President Donald Trump has turned this around. Even without the resources that he needs, he's providing the deterrence. It does go to show that the difference is in the commander in chief. The difference is in a president who has executive orders that repeal remain in Mexico policy and a president who restores the remain in Mexico policy, a president who is dedicated to deportations of illegals and a president who supports amnesty of illegals, a president who wants physical borders, physical infrastructure and more resources at the border to stop the flow of illegal crossings, and someone who does support all those resources. And so imagine what this president can do when Congress passes this reconciliation bill and gives the President the resources that he needs. Illegal crossings at the border are down 94 percent from last year because of President Trump's desire, because of his will to enforce the law, to give our border patrol agents the resources that they need, and to empower ICE to deport these dangerous, illegal criminals from our country.”

Time in Congress:

• “Chairman Pfluger and I become great friends. He's a great leader of the Republican Study Committee. He really is doing a fantastic job, and we really have become great friends. He's got a young, beautiful family, and his kids have gotten to know my kids, and so that's a lot of fun. We’ve both got volleyball girls. Another one of my best friends here just retired from Congress, Brad Wenstrup. He was a classmate of mine. We came in together. Brad is just a true American hero, a patriot to our country in so many ways. And then Bill Huizenga is another finance guy. We sit next to each other on the Financial Services Committee. Our families have become dear friends over the years, and in fact, that new that young son that I have, his two godfathers are Brad Wenstrup and Bill Huizenga.”

Education:

• “A lot of people think, because I'm such a huge Kentucky basketball fan, that I that I attended the University of Kentucky. It is true. I graduated from the College of Law, but I actually graduated undergrad from the University of Virginia, and I suppose I can blame my interest in public affairs on my time at UVA, because, of course, as everyone knows, this was Mr. Jefferson's University, and you can't help but be inspired by the founding generation of our country, and especially Thomas Jefferson.”

• “Well, there is no ambiguity or lack of clarity in this opinion that I have. And with all due respect to your Missouri Tigers, but my right opinion is that the University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball program is the greatest tradition in the history of college basketball, the winningest program in college basketball history: eight national championships, nine on the way. We're the supreme Roman Empire of college basketball.”