For immediate release: July 15, 2022

Whip Scalise Examines the Political Landscape Heading into the Mid-Terms

“People understand what the problems are – you don't have to sell them on the idea that the country's on the wrong track.”

WASHINGTON, DC – In remarks yesterday morning before a breakfast meeting of The Ripon Society, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (LA-1) assessed the national political landscape heading into the mid-term elections and shared his thoughts on some of the most pressing challenges facing the American people this year.

“There's a lot of energy out there,” Whip Scalise stated. “When you go around to these swing districts that are ‘50-50’, and today we've got about forty to sixty of them, you see what people care about. As we saw a few days ago, inflation is up to 9.1% -- forty-year high inflation. People feel this when they go to the grocery store. When families try to buy some of the ingredients for the breakfast table, they're paying a double-digit higher cost for all of that. When they're going to the gas station to fill up their car, they’re paying more than double what they were paying two years ago. It gets people angry, and it should get people angry because this isn't the seventies.”

“But up here, you've got people running Washington that have said publicly that they want higher gas prices. They want higher energy costs. They want people to just stop using fossil fuels. That is not in line with how people live their lives today. Anybody who's honest with you will tell you, even if they believe in the Green New Deal, we're going to have decades more where we still need fossil fuels to run an industrialized economy.”

According to Whip Scalise, the precarious nature of the U.S. economy and the seemingly out-of-touch proposals from the Left has resulted in many voters balking at the thought of Democrats retaining their majority in Washington.

“I was in Bangor, Maine two weeks ago and was in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Monday,” he noted. “Y'all remember Scranton, right? Joe Biden's hometown. His popularity is 35% in his hometown. He won't even go campaign for the Democrat incumbent. Not because he doesn't want to. But because the Democrat incumbent doesn't want him to. Because people don't like the policies. It's hurting low-income families. All these policies have a real impact on people and folks are seeing it.”

Whip Scalise further noted that the House GOP established a number of task forces last year for the purpose of creating a thoughtful Republican platform for candidates to campaign on this fall.

The task forces include:

“We've been working for months now,” he said of the effort to lay out a positive Republican agenda. “We put together these task forces and have sat down to come up with better policies to fix these problems. We're going to roll this out this summer, and it will be called the Commitment to America… People understand what the problems are – you don't have to sell them on the idea that the country's on the wrong track. What they're looking for, and what people are hungrier for now more than ever, are sound, honest ideas about how to fix these problems. That's what we're going to be talking about between now and November 8th.

“Then, if we get this majority, we are going to carry out these policies in a Republican House starting in January. We will pass those bills, have this national debate, send bills over to the Senate, put pressure from all around the country on the Senate to take these up, and put pressure on the President to have to answer to what he would do when we send him bills that will lower gas prices. Would he sign it or veto it?

“I think the country's ready for this debate. I think they've been ready for it for a long time.”

To view Whip Scalise’s remarks before The Ripon Society’s breakfast meeting yesterday, please click on the link below:

https://youtu.be/tUUgiZfJyzU

The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.

For more information on The Ripon Society, please visit www.riponsociety.org.

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