EXCLUSIVE: Armstrong speaks on need for accountability, prospects of impeachment and the war in Ukraine
Congressman Kelly Armstrong is feeling confident as we head into election day – not just for his bid for re-election as North Dakota’s solitary voice in the House of Representatives, but also for a ‘red wave’ to sweep into Congress, Republicans retaking the House and possibly making great gains in the Senate.
Yet this confidence is tempered by weighty expectations. In a recent visit to Valley City, Armstrong sat down for an exclusive interview with the Times-Record, discussing everything from oversight and accountability to challenges to free speech to the critical issues of border security, wartime spending – and whether the GOP should impeach President Joe Biden.
“I think we’re definitely going to win back the House. I think the Senate is looking significantly better than it looked a month ago or even a week ago,” Armstrong said. “One of your fundamental problems with this is this: there are 435 house races up for contention right now…you have 435 people saying ‘it you vote for me, everything will change.’ (Except) it won’t. And one of the reasons it won’t is because we’re not going to have 60 votes in the Senate … and president Biden is still going to be in the White House. So what do we need to do? We need to pass good legislation in the House, and then whether it gets a hearing in the Senate or not, we conduct good oversight behind it.”
Perhaps most importantly, a Republican command over both wings of the legislature means opportunity for accountability and oversight, Armstrong said, and more focused priorities in key legislation.
“That’s really important for North Dakota. That’ll mean the farm bill is about farming and not climate. That is a huge issue,” Armstrong said. “Secondly, particularly in the house, it allows us to conduct effective oversight. One-party control, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking the FDA and baby formula, DOJ, you have … everything from department of education coordination on school boards to gymnastics problem to (FBI Director Christopher) Wray, you have two AG reports. This is something I’ve been working on since I was on judiciary, it’s the one thing you can do better in the House than the Senate.”
Permitting reform is an area he wants to focus on as well, and just as important, Armstrong was to turn the media and political focus back on the crisis of the border.
“We’re the geographic center of North America, we produce a lot of things we don’t consume here and we need to deal with those issues,” he said. “We have a laundry list of issues we can work on. The border is a huge one. Our first three oversight hearings in Energy and Commerce should be fentanyl, fentanyl fentanyl. Anybody whose had a fentanyl overdose in their community is a border community. It’s something that probably the DC media is absolutely derelict.”
He points out that with the change in administration has come a reckless change in focus on the border issue.
“When President Trump was President I got asked about the border every 48 hours. By any objective metric it’s significantly worse now and nobody’s talking about it,” Armstrong said. “So we should introduce good border security legislation and then we continue to do oversight on it, because I want to make it uncomfortable for Democrats to go back in their district and say ‘hey, why aren’t you doing something about this fentanyl … that’s killing our kids.’”
He thinks that Congress returning to its actual focus and role, as a source of oversight for the whole of the federal government, would help dislodge gridlock and division between the House and Senate and allow productive work to ensue even if other branches or parties try to block it.
“We know how to secure the border.
That’s not particularly difficult, it just takes some political will,” Armstrong said. “We can write that though. But if they’re never going to have a hearing in the Senate, we shouldn’t just move on to the next thing. We should have oversight have a hearing on the border. We should have the judiciary/immigration have an oversight hearing on the border. We should have energy and commerce have a hearing on fentanyl, we should have homeland have a hearing on why we’re diverting resources from the northern border to the southern border.”
We should have hearings on the various issues, he said.
“That’s the only way you deal with bias in the D.C. media. By doing it in a coordinated way… you can do these things, but that’s how you build these cases…at the very least you are moving forward and doing what you said to the American people you would do.”
Pandemic and Politicizing
Armstrong didn’t mince words when it came to an increasingly egregious lack of oversight in the government today: the actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which have drawn flack for being increasingly partisan in nature.
Politiciziation in the leadership of the DOJ is a real problem, it started long before, you can go to Carter Paige,” Armstrong said. “Michael Flynn is not a very sympathetic person right now, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was set up … It’s a real consequential problem. Our FBI agents on the ground are great people … I think half the population has no faith in them anymore.”
From raiding the homes of journalists to raiding the home of President Donald Trump, the FBI’s actions have done a lot to cast doubt on their integrity, but Armstrong believes in the organization’s merit and that it can be salvaged.
“It can be (salvaged) and it should be. There’s real reasons for it,” he said. “I’ve had cases … in federal court where FBI … stopped a tremendous amount of methamphetamine from getting into high school kids’ and college kids’ hands. There are real reasons for why it exists. We need to make sure the politicization in leadership stops.”
Armstrong wants to clear the legislative board of select committees and have the existing oversight bodies do their jobs – and in particular, this would see congressional hearings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic response.
“Anthony Fauci’s retirement plan should be being in front of Congressional hearings,” Armstrong said. “There’ll be some on oversight … yeah, I think if I was Anthony Fauci, I’d plan on spending some time in front of a Congressional hearing.”
He wants to demonstrate restraint, though, when it comes to using 20/20 hindsight to condemn actions taken in the heat of crisis, particularly when it came to business loan relief.
“The reality is, we were asking … your local diner to shut down,” Armstrong said. “We asked businesses to stop participating in the economy. Yes, there should be oversight. There should be oversight based on what it was like in March of 2020, not now. What I’m worried about is we use a revisionist history to go back and say ‘well you shouldn’t have taken that money because it turns out eight months later you didn’t need it.’ That’s different from fraud, waste and abuse … I don’t want to punish people (who didn’t know what was going on.)”
War and Tweets
A very large volume of money has been spent to support Ukraine against Russian incursion, an issue that’s as contentious as any other, and one even Biden himself has warned pushes us closed to nuclear armageddon. Armstrong wants the matter to not be decided by leadership in backroom deals or waged by executive order, but reclaimed by Congress and taken to the debate floor.
“I don’t think there’s an issue that’s been involved in Congress that deserves a more robust debate on the floor of the House. Open and honest debate,” Armstrong said. “This is something that shouldn’t be written in leadership’s office, tacked on another bill and then asked to be voted on 12 hours later. We should have a debate on this and I’ll tell you why … there’s real reasons why we should keep engaged in some meaningful way in Ukraine. There’s also real reasons that we should have real guardrails on the money.”
He’s open about Ukraine’s clear history of corruption – as well as its clear benefit to the world.
“Ukraine isn’t our quirky little cousin, they never have been,” Armstrong said. “The oligarchy system in that region has always had corruption issues … but 12.5 percent of the world’s calories come from the Donbas region (and) 35 percent of the world’s wheat. I don’t know what the value of taking Vladmir Putin off the board without having a U.S. soldier shot at is, but I know it’s a lot.”
World hunger is a big concern and a possible outcome of ongoing war and disruption in Ukraine, according to Armstrong.
“Hunger topples more governments than anything. It’s the 21st century and if we don’t open Odessa’s port there’s a chance the world runs out of wheat at the end of the year. What does that cost the United States? These are real questions and I don’t know the answers to them. I don’t know the right numbers, I don’t know what the right metrics are … I need to rely on my party, on guys on both sides.”
He says there’s merit to the argument the border should be secured first, but he also said:
“I also have friends who have served overseas, dealt in these issues who legitimately tell you that this is a once-in-ageneration opportunity to take one of our two strategic adversaries off the board. Why aren’t we debating this on the floor of the House?”
Perhaps a part of that comes from the importance to D.C. politicians in having a strong social media presence, an issue exacerbated by billionaire Elon Musk’s recent purchase and takeover of Twitter.
“Twitter is a hellscape that nobody should ever go to,” Armstrong said. “We use Twitter primarily … the vast majority of people who care about Twitter are DC reporters and DC staffers.”
He calls out the increased use of “misinformation” by both partisans and federal agencies as attempts to police free speech.
“I’m a pretty smart guy. I don’t know what ‘misinformation’ means. I don’t know what ‘transformational’ means. Those are two words that my Democratic colleagues throw out a lot, and I think what they mean is ‘whatever we’re doing that costs a lot of money is transformational. Whatever we disagree with is misinformation,’” Armstrong said. “A lie is a lie, truth is truth, fine … but the reality is the best cure for bad speech is more speech. I’ve never, ever seen a method of dealing with any of this that has any adequate protection of ‘who polices the policers?’”
He sees social media as encouraging attacks on people over ideas.
“We try very hard to fight with ideas and not fight with people … far too many people in D.C. go there to become social media famous. Being Twitter-famous in D.C. is like being the host of an outdoor show,” he said. “You think you’re famous, but you’re only famous to a subsect of whitetail nerds who already think they know more about hunting than you do.”
Impeachment
From the withdrawal from Afghanistan to his personal conduct to a recent quid pro quo attempt with Saudi Arabia, many vocal elements on the right have called for Biden to be impeached, as Trump was, largely along party lines at that. Armstrong considers this a non-starter, and thinks Trump’s impeachment was a tactical blunder by the Democrats.
“I think the Democrats screwed up when they took over in 2018 because they didn’t actually conduct actual oversight,” Armstrong said. “The only thing Democrats cared about – Impeachment has always been a political remedy, it’s not a legal remedy.”
He thinks the impeachment of Trump hurt the Democrats in the long run.
“They never actually conducted real, efficient oversight. We should investigate conduct and not people … I’m not particularly interested in what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the salacious form of that. What I’m interested in is when was Hunter Biden coming back overseas and meeting with the vice president? Was he doing it every single time or only when he was on business deals?”
Building a solid case is more important than political theater, which impeachment can often devolve into.
“The problem with impeachment is that everything turns binary,” Armstrong said. “Your goal in any political thing is to convince hearts and minds. We
don’t do criminal investigations in Congress … let’s not pretend we’re some neutral fact-finding body.”
More important than scoring political points, Armstrong thinks that, should the red wave manifest, it should come with a focus on curbing spending, securing the border and making successes of its own. He cautions that the support the GOP enjoys right now is largely not due to its own actions.
“We have a once in a generation opportunity to bring new people into the Republican fold … we are bringing in Hispanics and different people into the Republican party, but it isn’t necessarily what we’ve done,” Armstrong said. “It’s that they’ve come form socialist countries and they say ‘hey, socialism doesn’t work.’ So let’s not over-exagerrate our success and not realize a lot of these headwinds have been created by this administration. And the reason I say that is because if you get cocky, you get beat. That means go do the work.”
He says he’s willing to do the work, to pursue accountability and to vote accordingly, and he’s willing to accept that not every choice he makes may be a popular one – and in terms of his own accountability, he will face that from his constituents.
“I’m going to take votes that not everybody who reads this article is going to agree with. There’s no way not to,” Armstrong said. “The entire community reading this, every one of them has a particular world view and a particular issue they’re going to disagree with me on. I’m okay with that – but I’ll come home and explain it.”
Election day is November 8.