We had an opportunity to meet with Congressman Labrador this past week and to hear his story on why the Freedom Caucus chose to elect Paul Ryan speaker of the House of Representatives. Many conservatives including ourselves were a bit upset with Ryan being seated but there is a bit more to the story as our Congressman enlightened us to. As it turns out we were right in our assessment that the Tea Party is not dead just working from the inside instead of the outside. The Tea Party has figured out that politicians don’t listen to protests but they do understand votes at election time count. Congressman Labrador told us about a meeting held between 4 leaders of the Freedom Caucus and John Boehner where he was told that he would not get the support he needed to stay as house speaker if Mark Meadows call for him to step down was brought to the floor. It is because of this conversation that John Boehner made his decision to resign. This is called working from the inside.
The reason that Paul Ryan was installed as the new speaker was because he was the only one that could get enough votes to be elected. It appears that the Freedom Caucus has told Representative Ryan that they want to see if he is going to listen to what they have to say over the next 14 months before judging him. This of course will be after the 2016 elections and hopefully we will have a few more true conservatives in office by then. I do not feel that the Freedom Caucus is beyond going after Mr. Ryan if he does not live up to his pledge to work with them on their issues.
Representative Labrador also discussed the Refugee issue and the Jed Babbin Bill which would postpone allowing refugees in the U.S. and is not going to have enough votes to pass. He spoke about his conversation with the Chief of the FBI who basically said there is no way to vet many of the refugees seeking asylum in the United States. This should send a message to all of our representatives both State and Federal that bringing Syrian refugees to the U.S. is clearly a danger since in many cases we will not know anything about their affiliations. It is up to us as citizens to push back on these refugees entering our state by calling on our state representatives to disallow any payments from state funds for their resettlement.
There is a petition being circulated in all 44 counties to put a question on the ballot about the allowance of more refugees into our state. Here is the link if you should wish to sign it. http://www.treasurevalleyrefugeefacts.org/
We would like to thank Congressman Labrador for taking the time out of his busy day to speak to us about these issues, and hope he will continue to reach out to the conservative organizations who have supported him in the past.
