Congressional delegation addresses Infrastructure, China, IRS

Aug. 12, 2021, midnight ·

Nebraska's congressional delegation at SAC Museum
Reps. Don Bacon, Adrian Smith, and Jeff Fortenberry, along with Sens. Deb Fischer and Ben Sasse, at SAC Museum Thursday (Photo by Fred Knapp, Nebraska Public Media News)

Members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation expressed their views on subjects including infrastructure and relations with China in a “legislative summit” meeting Thursday.

Flanked by vintage war planes at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska’s two U.S. senators and three representatives addressed a wide variety of topics at a business-sponsored forum.

Sen. Deb Fischer talked about the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill just passed by the Senate. Fischer, one of 19 Republicans who joined with Democrats voting for the bill, praised the bipartisan cooperation.

“I found it encouraging that we had Democrats in the United States Senate who reached out to Republicans to work on that infrastructure bill, ‘cause they didn’t need to. They could have written that bill on their own. They could have passed it on their own, through that process of reconciliation. So I found that hopeful that we had Republicans who were able to have input into the bill,” Fischer said.

Fischer said the bill would bring about $2.5 billion to Nebraska for roads and bridges, as well as additional money for improvements to airports, water infrastructure, and broadband. Fischer said those things could happen, despite Republicans having little leverage in the Senate or the House.

“So to be able to accomplish big things in atmosphere like that? I believe that that’s what Nebraskans and that’s what the people of this country want to see. And it’s going to continue to help our state grow and it’s going to continue to help our country grow,” she said.

Fischer’s Nebraska Republican colleague, Sen. Ben Sasse, voted against the infrastructure bill. Sasse did not address the issue at Thursday’s forum. But in a press release after the vote, he said it continues to spend money the country doesn’t have. “Yes, infrastructure is important, but doing it the right way is more important,” he said.

At Thursday’s forum, Sasse did weigh in on a number of topics. He criticized President Joe Biden’s withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, suggesting it would have been better to leave a small residual force there to continue to combat regional threats.

“We were preventing terror attacks from Afghanistan and from lots of neighboring countries. And the isolationist nonsense that says ‘End our forever wars,’ it’s complete and utter b.s. The terrorists have global reach with modern technology, with modern travel and with modern telecommunications. We can be forward-deployed and we can win, or we can do the stupid thing, and we will lose,” Sasse said.

Sasse saved his harshest criticism for China, including its treatment of ethnic minority Uighur population, a largely Muslim group.

“There’s a genocide happening in our time. What’s happening to the Uighurs is a holocaust. The dormitories that have one and a half million people put in them – slightly more than half of them are women -- the Han Chinese men in the neighborhood who are invited to come in to provide ‘comfort’ to these women are raping them to try to make extinct the Uighur population in China,” he said.

The state’s three congressman, all Republicans as well, also answered questions. First District Congressman Jeff Fortenberry criticized the U.S. relationship with China.

“This relationship over the last two decades that’s been formed has become very, very perverse. So, manufacturing went there. They make the stuff, we buy the stuff. They have our cash, we run up debt. They buy our debt, and then we’re dependent on this consumer goods cycle as well. All the while this is underwriting this sort of strange hybrid of communistic capitalism with its economic, nationalistic motives, which is a machine that just has to be fed and fed and fed,” Fortenberry said.

Second District Congressman Don Bacon said a new organization at Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue would help push back against what he said was a Chinese advantage in electronic warfare.

“They’re going to try to take away our GPS. They’re going to try to take away our radars. They’re going to try to stop all of our communications. So just this past week, after five years of Congress trying to force this into law, they finally announced they’re going to put a two-star (general) in charge of this mission. They’re going to build an organization, they’re going to put it right here at Offutt... It’s going to run our electronic warfare capabilities. It won’t be a large organization, but these are the areas that we can compete in, because we have that expertise. We have those communication networks, we have the infrastructure there, and we can build on that in the future,” Bacon said.

And Third District Congressman Adrian Smith, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, criticized a new mission for the Internal Revenue Service.

“Most recently we’ve seen the IRS now turned into a monthly payment agency. Not just your tax refund once a year, but a monthly payment agency. There were concerns that the IRS didn’t have the resources to even process your tax returns prior to that, and now Washington has turned it into this payment agency that I think is very troubling,” Smith said.

The IRS began issuing child tax credit payments last month. The payments are scheduled to end after December, unless Congress renews the program.