A founding member of a new conservative congressional caucus on Tuesday morning distanced the group from his party’s obsession with the Keystone XL Pipeline.
“I think every member of the House Freedom Caucus believes that the Keystone Pipeline is a good idea,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, in response to a question from a caller. “But it seems like it has become the energy policy of the Republican Party to do the Keystone Pipeline, and it’s just one component.”
Labrador said that the caucus, which was founded last week by nine lawmakers and now contains over 30, was created for conservatives who think that “both parties” are held captive to special interests and “sacred cows.” He used that sort of language to decry the pipeline issue, which has occupied almost the entire first month of new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) legislative schedule.
“We need to look at all the different energy sources that we have,” he added. “We need to make sure that we’re not doing anything just for special interests, that we’re doing something for the American people. And the American people are demanding we do different things on energy.”
It’s not likely that Labrador was terribly concerned about climate change or referencing a New York Times poll released last week which showed that a majority of Republicans deem anthropogenic global warming to be at least a “somewhat serious” problem. In February, he told former “Meet The Press” moderator David Gregory that he “won’t be guided by the global warming propaganda machine.”
Labrador did, however–speaking for himself and not the Freedom Caucus, he noted–attack one other major tenet of the Republican Party in foreign intervention.
“We do need to look at our war policy,” he said, in response to another caller. “We’ve been in a prolonged war now for over 12 years. We need to figure out what, exactly, our mission is. This is one of the reasons so many Republicans have been leery of going into other conflicts because of the money that we’re spending, the lives that we’re losing, the people that have sacrificed for the freedom and security of this nation. We need to be reconsidering our foreign policy and some of the things that we’re doing.”
“I don’t want to be here to just make contractors more money,” he added.
In response to another caller who pointed out that Idaho is a net recipient of federal taxpayer money, Labrador did say “I don’t think I ever said I want military spending to go down,” however.
