Here & Now

Glenn Grothman on His Move to Congress

Frederica Freyberg:

I’m Frederica Freyberg. This week on “Here and Now,” a new career initiative to help students with a liberal arts degree find work in a techie-driven job market. Also, a closer look at election turnout for Native Americans and why some tribal communities saw double the number of voters. Plus, we talk with Congressman Mark Pocan to get his perspective of the turmoil in Washington from the Democratic side of the aisle.

But first, the new freshman congressman from Wisconsin, current Republican state senator and now congressman-elect, Glenn Grothman of Campbellsport is headed to Washington. Grothman will represent Wisconsin’s 6th congressional district stretching from Oshkosh to Portage and east to Sheboygan. Glenn Grothman joins us in a week that he learned of his new committee appointment in the US house of representatives. Congressman-elect, thanks very much for being here.

Glenn Grothman:

Glad to be on this show.

Frederica Freyberg:

How did that sound, congressman-elect?

Glenn Grothman:

It was fun being a state senator. A little bit sad, but a new phase in my life.

Frederica Freyberg:

We see that you have been selected again for the committee on education and workforce development. What would you like to see that committee take up?

Glenn Grothman:

Well, actually, there are three committees I’m on.

Frederica Freyberg:

Okay.

Glenn Grothman:

And it’s somewhat– was very much of an honor. They don’t usually give freshmen what they call an “A” committee, but I asked for three other committees and I got all I wanted. I'm on the budget committee, I'm on the government oversight committee, and I am on the education and workforce development committee.

Frederica Freyberg:

So do you have things that you would like to step in and tell those on the committee, ranking members, what they ought take up?

Glenn Grothman:

Well, one thing on education workforce development, which could also be called the education and labor committee, would be student debt. I don’t know whether the chairman would be willing to take that up. I have a good relationship with him. But obviously, it’s a huge problem for our country. You have so many good kids who went to college. They were told, go to college, go to college. All of the sudden they’re 28 years old, they might have 25, 30, 50 grand in debt, and as I guess you're going to do later in the program. They might not have a lot to show for it, and that’s a tragedy. So I think we have to do something along those lines to prevent that debt from getting so out of line in the first place.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, that’s not something that you talked about in your campaign.

Glenn Grothman:

Oh, yes, I did. They just didn’t report it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Okay, all right. You see the spending votes in Washington, the down to the shutdown wire again. This clearly is a much bigger stage than the joint finance committee here in Wisconsin, but if you were already sworn in, if you were among those out there in Washington, would you have voted in favor of this week’s trillion dollar package?

Glenn Grothman:

I didn’t have a chance to look at it. It’s over 1,000 pages. Paul Ryan voted for it, I have a very high opinion of Paul, but Jim Sensenbrenner voted against it. I have a very high opinion of Jim Sensenbrenner. Obviously, people are going to say, why didn’t they push off more of the vote until the Republicans in the senate could participate? As I understand there was a lot of public policy in there that the Republicans felt was good. Because I wasn’t out there, I didn’t go through, you know, the 1,000 pages, but there were smart people on both sides.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, one of the things, as you probably know, this spending package does is fund homeland security, but only through February, to put pressure on the president over his immigration executive order. What was your reaction to the merits of that order and then the legality of it?

Glenn Grothman:

I didn’t like it. I mean, we have to encourage people to obey our immigration laws. Just like every other law, if you begin to say we don’t care that you didn’t obey the law, why are people going to obey the law in the first place? Not to mention, there should be some sort of sanction for people who broke the law in the past. Secondly, no, I don’t think it’s legal. I don’t think it’s up to, once congress passes a law and says this is against the law, for a president to just blanket say we’re going to ignore the law. It’s not just a Barack Obama problem, of course. As a practical matter, President Bush did not enforce the laws either. And we are in a position in which we've to decide as a country, are new immigrants going to come here legally either on a path to citizenship or on some temporary thing like we have right now? Or are we going to open up the doors and have so many of our new workers in this country be the type of people who are coming across the border illegally? When you have people coming here illegally, you’re going to have people who are probably disproportionately looking to get on some sort of public benefits and disproportionately people with perhaps criminal records. And we don’t want that.

Frederica Freyberg:

How about here in the state of Wisconsin where the dairy industry really depends so heavily on immigrant labor, and a proportion of that is certainly undocumented?

Glenn Grothman:

We’ve got to change things so in the future we do have people here who are either here permanently or temporarily, and here legally. And the inability of both the Obama administration and the Bush administration, the Clinton administration before that to enforce the laws has created a mess in which we have so many people working in this country who are here illegally.

Frederica Freyberg:

You come into congress with one of your priorities being welfare reform. There’s been a bit of a flap over your contention on Mike Gousha's show, I gather, that the government bribes unmarried women to stay that way with public benefits. Do you stand by that?

Glenn Grothman:

Well, look, if you are a single person and if you get married, you lose 20, 25, $35,000 in benefits, tax-free. I mean, you’re almost at $3,000 a month, $2500 a month, that influences people’s behavior. And I have heard enough anecdotal evidence of people who consider getting married, and then say, holy cow. You know, I’m going to lose $2,500 a month? I don't know about you, Frederica, but when I was in the state senate, I’m not sure my take-home pay was always even $2,500 a month. So when you have that much of a difference– We live in a society in which we always want everybody to be the same, right? We are so worried, race or sex or, you know, everything, we can’t discriminate. And in our society we say if you get married, you can lose $2,500, $3,000, $3,500. We’re not talking about here punishing people for remaining single. But to punish people that much for getting married just seems to me offensive. And when it’s program after program after program. Be it low-income housing or food stamps or earned income tax credit or day care or Obamacare, when program after program says, please don’t get married, that’s a bad thing.

Frederica Freyberg:

I have one very quick question for you. Your reaction to the hill saying recently that you would be likely to create trouble for John Boehner. How do you react to that?

Glenn Grothman:

Oh, I don’t think that’s true. I mean, you can find– One thing I’m finding is the journalists in Washington aren’t as good as the journalists here in Wisconsin, and they sometimes say things that aren’t true. I did get the three committee assignments I wanted which shows that right now me and the Republican leadership get along very well.

Frederica Freyberg:

Glenn Grothman, Congressman-elect, thanks very much.

Glenn Grothman:

Glad to be on the show.