GOP Congressman at CPAC: If We Retake Majority, Leadership Should Make Sure ‘Every Member’s Voice’ Is Counted

Your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor is in my hometown of Orlando, Fla. at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this week and on Friday I caught up with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) for a quick hallway interview. We covered two topics: the situation in Ukraine and his hopes for how Congress will function if the Republicans retake majority control in the 2022 midterms.

Steube and I attended the University of Florida at the same time and he currently serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He’s one of the more conservative members of Congress but Mediaite readers might also remember him for his home run at the annual Congressional baseball game last fall.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.

Steube’s thoughts on the situation in Ukraine:

You have to go back almost a year to see why things are happening. But the atrocities that occurred in Afghanistan showed our enemies how weak this administration was going to be as it relates to any other military interferences across the country. And the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Trump had sanctioned, Biden lifted those sanctions. And so now we have a situation where those sanctions were lifted and open up a ton of revenue, billions of dollars, to Moscow and to Russia for that pipeline.

And what’s interesting is they did that a year ago, and now they’ve reinstituted those sanctions, which shows that they admit that they made a mistake because they reversed course on what they were doing. So at this point, because we didn’t do the things that we should have done at that point in time as it relates to sanctioning Russia, long before — as soon as we started seeing troop build-ups on the Ukrainian border, we should have been sanctioning them, and sanctioning Putin, and this administration didn’t even do that.

So where we are now, obviously, this administration is settled and letting the Ukrainians try to defend themselves. A lot of the European allies aren’t getting involved militarily, and we have sent them military equipment and missiles and Javelins and that sort of thing. But it is encouraging to see that the Ukrainians are fighting back and holding their own.

Other additional sanctions Steube would like to see the Biden administration support against Russia:

Well, there’s things that we should sanction Putin himself, which his administration isn’t doing. We should sanction Russia on everything economically. And why are we buying Russian oil, after we’ve done away with producing domestic oil and the Keystone pipeline and cutting domestic production of oil right here in the United States? Open that back up, so we’re not relying upon other governments to get the oil that we need for our country to operate. That’s a security issue for our country. So there’s a whole host of economic things that you can do to sanction the country and Putin himself.

Discussions have heated up lately surrounding trying to seize the yachts, real estate, and other property that are controlled by Russian oligarchs and elites that are scattered around this country, especially in South Florida. Steube supports this:

Anything that we can do to stop Russian aggression, we absolutely should take that step.

If the Republicans take back the House, Republicans would then be in charge of procedure and committees. Former Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) had been an outspoken critic of the “top-down approach” that has long characterized the leadership of both parties in their management of the House: very little discussion on bills, few amendments allowed from the floor, etc. It’s been a growing problem in recent years, according to Amash and others, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) operating this way.

Steube was first elected to Congress 2018 after several years in the Florida Legislature, and shared his views on this topic:

It needs to go back to the way that the House of Representatives was intended to operate. And that was, every member has a voice, every member has an impact on their committees that they sit on. They have the ability to file amendments on bills that move through the process. You do markups on bills that move through the process. I absolutely think that’s the way that the House should function.

I constantly talk about how in the state of Florida, that’s how things operate. And there’s always, yeah, and we balance our budget every year. So there’s a lot of things that should be done. The way the House of Representatives was intended to function, every member’s voice should be counted, and through committee process, every member has the opportunity to do amendments on bills.

So I, in my conversations with Leader [Kevin] McCarthy, I think that’s the direction that he intends on going. And I think there’s a lot of conservative members who will get elected and have been elected and who will get elected in this midterm cycle that feel the same way. And I think that’s going to bring some voice back to the people in America.

The rules package will be decided in conference, the [House] Republican Conference, and I’ve been a part of that for the last several years. There’s debate among the conference as to what rules we want to include and what rules we don’t want to include.

So I would anticipate it would be done just like a House Committee where people have the opportunity and do have the opportunity to offer amendments to the rules after whatever draft they have is published. And so that’s how I anticipate and that’s how it’s been done in the past, that the conference we collectively decide the rules that would govern the house.

Regarding the members he views as allies on these issues, supporting the House leadership allowing more input from the members into the process, more bills, more amendments, Steube said there were “a ton of conservative members” that had been elected with his class. He specifically named Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), both of whom were attending CPAC.

“There’s a lot of guys that are true conservatives and want the House to operate the way it was intended to,” he concluded.

Watch above. Video by Sarah Rumpf for Mediaite.

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