U.S. Congressman David Kustoff, Republican representative for the 8th District, was the guest speaker at Friday morning’s Carroll County Chamber of Commerce Good Friday Legislative Update at the Carroll County Civic Center in Huntingdon.
Kustoff updated local community leaders on the latest happenings in Washington, and after that gathering, he dropped by the Carroll County News-Leader office to share some of those highlights with the local media.
The congressman first addressed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that was recently passed with no support from Republicans.
Kustoff said that he voted against the bill for several reasons.
“I felt that what Biden proposed was not targeted, it was too soon, and it spent way too much,” said Kustoff, who pointed out that only about nine percent of that $1.9 trillion deals directly with COVID-19 issues and that a lot of the money passed in last year’s five stimulus/pandemic response bills hasn’t even been allocated.
“There was still a trillion dollars that hadn’t gone out the door yet,” he said. “We needed to give it some time to see what worked and what didn’t work.”
Kustoff was also critical of the Democrats’ HR1 voting rights reform bill that recently passed in the U.S. House on purely partisan lines, but has not yet been introduced into the Senate.
Kustoff said that, if made into law, this bill would federalize the election process, taking control over how elections are conducted away from the individual states and giving that control to the federal government.
Specifically, Kustoff said that the bill would end requirements that voters provide some kind of official identification before voting, mandate extensive expansions of mail-in ballot voting, and use taxpayer money to fund a six-to-one federal match for all political donations of $200 or less – meaning that political candidates or parties would get $1,200 from the federal government for every $200 individual donation.
The congressman also offered stern words regarding President Bidens proposed infrastructure bill.
“We just obligated the country for $1.9 trillion, and now he [Biden] wants another $2.3 to $2.5 trillion,” said Kustoff. “A large number of the items in this bill are not what would be traditionally considered infrastructure. There’s a lot of the Green New Deal in this proposal, and I fear Biden is yielding to the far left and progressives on climate issues.”
Kustoff expressed concerns that all this printing of money to cover massive government spending is already causing inflation in the economy.
“I remember how things were in the late 1970s and early 80s,” he said. “We don’t need to return to times when people couldn’t borrow money because they couldn’t afford to pay the interest.”
