Kyle Reid, Republican candidate for the 6th District Congressional Race, said in an interview with the Sheridan Express Friday that he wanted the country to return to the Constitution. “The main issue is the separation of powers,” he said. “There is too much overlap in our government and too much regulating that should be the proper role of Congress,” he said. He cited Obamacare and the EPA as examples. “There are too many people in Washington who are making rules who don’t have the authority to do so,” he said. Reid said that the only appropriate regulations granted to Congress to make involve piracy and counterfeiting. “The rest is left to the states,” he said. Reid said that today, people in both parties took an overly broad view of the Constitution in what he sees as an attempt to usurp authority. “And they are proud of it,” he said.
Reid is one of three Republicans seeking to unseat 14-year incumbent Sam Graves of Tarkio. He said that if elected, he would seek to make two changes to the Constitution – repeal the 17th Amendment, which allows for direct popular vote for Senators like they do for the House. “The original intent was that the Senators represent the states,” he explained. The other was the passage of an amendment banning abortion in all but the most extreme circumstances. “Or at least keep the courts out of abortion issues,” he said. Reid said that in Roe, as in many other instances, the courts did too much legislating from the bench instead of sticking to their proper role in interpreting the Constitution. He said that he was also against eugenics, which he said was “racist,” “reprehensible,” and “abhorrent to everyone I have talked to in this district.”
As a representative, Reid said that the ends do not justify the means and that he would serve in strict accordance with the Constitution. As a candidate, he said that he had gotten dozens of surveys from different interest groups, which he said would be better served by polling the people that they claim to represent. As a representative, he said that his role was to be a servant of the people and to follow their wishes. “My job is to represent my constituents, not myself,” he said. Instead, he said that Washington was stuck in a situation where too many people were voting the way they wanted to and not representing the people who elected them. And he said that he sees his duty as representing the entire district. “I will oppose any ideas that play off people against each other,” he said. A prime example given by Reid was the TARP bank bailout, which he said was opposed 9-1 by the people, but passed by Congress. “You have to ask who our legislators work for,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for people to let Congress know where they stand.” Reid said that as a servant of the people, he would keep people informed of what was going on before it was voted on and not after the fact. “I want to give the people a chance to weigh in and make them aware of what’s coming,” he said. “A lot of politicians say they are for the little guy, but the small guys don’t hire lobbyists to represent them. I don’t have all the answers, that is why I would rely on my constituents.”
Reid lives in Louisiana, Missouri, which is right on the Mississippi River near Hannibal. He said that they have the same worries as people in Northwest Missouri do about the EPA coming in and taking over water regulation. He feared that the EPA would seek to force farmers to get permits from the EPA for practices that farmers have always done. He said that incumbent Sam Graves’ “Stop the EPA” bill did not go far enough and that it should be abolished entirely, calling it “federal overreach.” There is a widespread concern in this area about the EPA taking over the regulation of city wastewater at massive expense to local cities and water customers.
One of the few areas in which Reid sees a role for government is in immigration. “We spent taxpayer dollars on a wall that was never built,” he said. He said that he was “100% against” amnesty, saying that it was simply “rewarding bad behavior.” Before NAFTA, Reid noted that a huge portion of Mexico’s economy was dependent on cash from people sending money back home. He said that in Guatemala and Honduras, 10% of their GDP was from money that immigrants to the US send home. Reid said that it was the duty of the states to call out the National Guard to secure the borders. “That was what happened in the beginning,” he said. “There were lots of open borders and hostile people” when the country was first founded, according to Reid. Instead, Reid said that the current policy was the government fighting terrorists abroad when “our southern border is wide open.” Reid said that the real threat to national security was from people who could just walk into our borders. He noted that in Afghanistan, two thirds of the people fighting there were not even native Afghanis; they are from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whom we send billions of dollars of military aid to.
Reid opposes the recently-passed Federal Farm Bill, which he called a “monstrosity.” He said that it was “crony capitalism” and “corporate welfare,” where the government and not the free markets pick the winners and losers. “They rolled conservation and food stamps into this bill in order to get Democratic votes,” when Reid said, “they otherwise never would have voted for this.” Reid said that farm policy was best left to states and the markets. He said that the present situation was one where the government was imposing huge tax burdens on small businesses and that the only winners were the ones with enough money to hire a lobbyist to represent them in Washington.
On education, Reid said that he opposes high-stakes standardized testing and that he would like to see the Education Department abolished. Ronald Reagan, he noted, had campaigned to abolish the US Department of Education back in 1980 after President Jimmy Carter had made it a cabinet position. However, he said that was a broken promise as Reagan did not have enough votes and the focus shifted from abolishing it to trying to make it better, which Reid said has failed. “And we have the same thing with the GOP and Obamacare,” he said. Reid said that No Child Left Behind was a “disaster” for school policy and that the government under Obama had offered waivers, only to back it up with the threat of revoking waivers if states and local schools did not comply with new standards. “If we’re going to fund education, it should come with no strings attached,” he said. “We all want our kids to be well-educated, but throwing money at the problem is not the answer.” Instead, Reid said that the solution was to returning schools to local control and that he did not buy the notion that our children are lagging behind other countries in certain subject matters, as has been frequently reported in the news over the last 20 years.
Reid said that as a hunter and target shooter, he was against “any scheme to regulate any owning of firearms by our citizens.” He said that the intent of the 2nd Amendment was to keep the people on an equal footing with the government and that he didn’t buy arguments that the Founding Fathers did not envision the kind of firearms available today. “They would have wanted these firearms in the hands of the people to fight the British,” he said.
He said that there were several causes of the present sustained decline of rural populations. “I travel through towns in the 6th district, and it is quite upsetting for me to see small businesses that are all boarded up,” said Reid. He said that one thing holding back smaller communities was economic policy and tax structure. He called for the “fair tax” and to gut the IRS. He said that the key to reviving small towns was to make it easy to start one’s own business. Instead, he said that we have four-year colleges, which he said prepare students to work at large corporations in the big cities instead of coming back home and taking over the family farm or family business. “And then you have corporate takeover of niche markets and centralization,” he said.
“I’m a country boy at heart,” said Reid. He said that small towns were havens of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility and places where everybody knows everybody. “Instead, you go to the big cities and most people can’t name three or four of their neighbors,” he said. He said that the population has shifted from rural to urban since the country was founded, and the way to reverse the trend was to support policies which encourage young people to stay at home.
Reid is married to Tiffany; they have three sons and one daughter. He is an electrician, farmer, mechanic, and a welder. They live on a farm near Louisiana, MO, where they raise cattle, pigs, chickens, goats, and horses. “We try to feed ourselves and have some left over for our neighbors and the local farmer’s market,” he said. In the background, a rooster was crowing regularly as Reid shared his views. “I take no corporate, business, or PAC money,” he said. “I am just a concerned citizen who is throwing his hat in the ring.”
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