Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – Congressman Tom Emmer visited Juneau this past week and spoke exclusively to KINY.
Emmer joined the U.S. House of Representatives on January 6, 2015, representing Minnesota’s 6th congressional district.
Emmer was recently elected by his fellow Republican colleagues to serve as Majority Whip in the 118th Congress. Before that, he served as Chairman of the NRCC during the 116th and 117th Congresses.
Emmer also sits on the House Financial Services Committee and is a member of the House Republican Steering Committee.
What is the responsibility of the Majority Whip?
“For people who aren’t familiar with how this works, the Speaker of the House is in charge of everything, in charge of the grounds, in charge of the Capitol Hill police, in charge of the agenda.
Ultimately, that’s the number one position; the number two position is the Majority Leader and the Majority Leader essentially builds a calendar for the year and then works with chairs of different committees and different legislation that is ready to come to the floor and then the majority leader will schedule the floor. My job is to make sure that we have the votes to pass whatever they’re bringing to the floor.”
What was the expectation of the Republican Party leading into last week’s debate, and how did the party’s opinion change based on Biden’s performance?
“Well, I knew Trump was going to do a good job. And I mean, I was asked the next morning, my take on it was Trump killed it and Joe Biden killed himself. There’s just no question that we have known now for more than a year, two years, three years, probably since the beginning of the Biden administration, as we have a man in decline. He really struggles. That debate showed America everything that we have been seeing with Joe Biden.”
Trump is the first US president convicted of felony crimes. How does the party see this affecting the campaign moving forward?
“I think this has made Trump stronger than he ever expected to be. Basically, they weaponized the legal system against their political opponent, their number one political opponent, and what you’re finding from all the polling post this so-called conviction, this sham conviction, you’re finding that the majority of Americans know that it’s a complete false flag.
But more importantly, you’ve got Americans out there who feel that they have been abused by the judicial system over the years. Now they’ve got a presidential candidate who knows firsthand what they feel like and this is only making Donald Trump stronger. It’s another reason why he’s going to win.”
Your recently passed legislation seeks to ban the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency. Can you elaborate on the motivations behind this bill and the potential implications for the U.S. financial system?
“If you read the bill that we passed off the House floor, my bill, it says specifically, that the Treasury and the Fed they cannot create a central bank digital currency, unless it can emulate cash, which means it has to be open, it has to be permissionless. And then it has to be private with a capital P and right now, you can’t show me that you can do the private with a capital P because they can see the transactions taking place and they’ve literally shown that they can trace them back.
So, until you can do that, and look, we were told that we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to keep up with the CCP, because they’re way ahead of us on this. They’ve created the digital Yuan, which they are now using to monitor their citizen’s behavior through their most sensitive financial information.
The Chinese Communist Party is literally building social scores on these. This is big brother, like we’ve never seen before. I don’t want to see that in the United States.
You need a stable coin, that is dollar (US) backed. Congress’s next step should be to pass legislation that provides for what a dollar backed stable coin must look like. Again, I’m going to be different from most, I don’t think the federal government should be creating the stable coins.
I believe private enterprise can create them as long as there is a mechanism to guarantee that it is a dollar backed stable coin. So, if something happens, you can go get those dollars. A great example somebody gave me is, a cabdriver in Brazil would love to do business with US dollars but can’t. If you had dollar back stable coins, now he can access the US dollar and it will only enhance our reserve currency standing.”
In a case brought by a New England fisherman, the court reversed what’s been know as Chevron Deference. In the 1984 case, the courts said judges should generally defer to federal agencies when rules they make are reasonable, and the enabling law was ambiguous. Discuss the impact of the Supreme Court overturning its decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Chevron Deference is about 30 years old. And literally, it was a prior Supreme Court saying that administrative agencies in the executive branch, whether it’s the EPA, the SEC, the FDIC, just pick whatever alphabet soup by agency we’re talking about, essentially held that if a law is vague as to implementation, as to monitoring, measuring whatever it might be, that agency is charged with oversight over that area.
I don’t think anybody anticipated 30 years later, that a radical left wing ideological view, would be implementing its policies through the administrative state. They’ve been doing this, they’ve been creating laws related to climate change, and all this other stuff. I’m all for making sure we protect our air, water, our natural environment, we want to leave this place better than we found it. But you don’t kill yourself with false information while you’re doing it. You’ve got to have reasonable discussions about this stuff, because it’s imperative to not just our survival, but to our way of life.
The Chevron Deference decision a couple days ago, I would argue is the first steak in the heart of the administrative state. If I boiled down the decision, I totally agree with what the court said even though now the left is going after the court yet again. What they’re saying is, by giving deference to the agency, you literally took the job of Congress, the elected officials, away from them. And you’re letting unelected bureaucrats make this decision.”
