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TiffanyFrom page 7re-evaluated to see whether it is serving the interests of the American people.” Especially when you you look at the Midwest and much of the middle part of the country, Tiffany said, voters are saying very clearly that Washington, D.C., does not reflect who they are as a country and have too much power.“If there is one thing I could do as a legislator, as a congressman, it is to take power away from Washington, D.C., because the decisions people make at the state and local level are almost always going to be better than if they are made by the federal government,” he said. “There are all kinds of examples — health care, wolves — you can just go down the list where the federal government fails the people of this country, and they fail the people of this country because they use a cookie-cut-ter approach when regulations and rules are created that we all have to live by.”The thing is, Tiffany said,people in Wisconsin are far different from people in California, and the circumstances are different, too, from state to state.“The whole notion of federalism really needs to be brought back to the fore, and we need to take power away from Washington, D.C.,” he said.Tiffany said he was the only legislator who has actually successfully moved a division of an agency in Wisconsin out of Madison, when he spearheaded the move of the DNR’s forestry division from Madison to Rhinelander.“We should be doing that type of thing in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “The main reason to move them is that, just like Madison gets so insular, Washington, D.C., does the same thing. The federal government gets so insular, and they just talk to themselves. They don’t interact with the rest of America.”Not only that, Tiffany said, but agencies miss out on recruiting talented personnel by attracting only those who want to live in and around Washington, D.C.“So for, say, agricultural policy, you get some personwho wants to live in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “For the average kid who grows up on a farm who maybe doesn’t want to farm but wants to remain in agriculture, they don’t want to live in Washington, D.C. But if they had the opportunity to live in the suburbs of Kansas City, they might take that agricultural job. It’s about who we are recruiting into these agencies. They are so insular and they all think the same.”In foreign policy, Tiffany has called for an end to the nation’s one-China policy.“This was a policy put in place in 1979 by President Carter and it recognized only mainland China, and that decision was panned by both Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “So they developed a workaround to be able to recognize Taiwan, though not officially in the same way that we normally do.”Now it’s time to recognize mainland China for what it is and who they are, Tiffany said.“They suppress their ethnic minorities in western China,” he said. “They are a bully. They’ve been skirmishing with India on their border there. They have basically taken over Hong Kong, which was once a free city. They have designs on taking over Taiwan, which is a democratically run country. They are stealing our intellectual property, including right out from under our noses in our major universities.”So now it’s time to take on China, Tiffany said.“We shouldn’t do it in a way that provokes a war, not seeking that at all, but their aggressiveness cannot be allowed to continue,” he said. “They want to be the global king. We have to make a decision with our policies coming out of Congress over the next decade: Is the 21st century going to be a China century or is it going to be another American century with free people across the world?”Keeping America GreatTiffany says he is keenly aware of the erosion of free speech in the U.S. and the parallel rise in censorship.“One of the biggest concerns I have going forward is people being able to practice free speech in America, and us being able to continue our American culture,” he said.“We have people who, when they are tearing down statues across America, including those of Lincoln and Washington, they clearly have no concept of the greatness of America. We cannot allow them to destroy our culture.”Tiffany pointed to rioters who tore down two statues at the capitol in Madison, the Forward statue, a symbol of women’s rights, and the statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg, a Union Civil War soldier who was killed fighting to abolish slavery.“Those are people who are ignorant of the culture of the state of Wisconsin and of who we are as a people,” he said. “That must stop. Denying people the ability to share their political views in open forums by using force must stop. We have to stand up against that. Otherwise our country is going to end up in a really bad spot where we cannot practice our First Amendment rights.”Richard Moore is the author of the forthcoming “Storyfinding: From the Journey to the Story” and can he reached at richard-moorebooks.com.
Newspaper Details
The Northwoods River News
Rhinelander, Wisconsin, US
Fri, Oct 30, 2020
Page 22
Full Page
Clipped by
Jillian S.
NA, 05 Dec 2024
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