Lucia Starbuck: It’s been about half a year since we were last in the KUNR studio together. A lot has happened. Let’s start with the debt ceiling. That was a huge issue. The US almost took a major credit hit. You voted in favor to lift the debt ceiling. Why?
Mark Amodei: This is one of those issues where even though there are strong feelings on both sides, nothing good happens out of a default. Whether you like the administration, don’t like the administration, in this growing culture of partisan talking points, you still have to take care of some basic things, and that’s one of them. Nobody wants to stand up and say, ‘Yeah, it was on my watch that we basically shut it down because we didn’t have money to pay the bills.
Starbuck: Let’s get into some of the legislation that Nevadans can see right here at home. The Lake Tahoe Restoration Act is set to expire next year. What are you doing to address this?
Amodei: We’re working on the renewal as we always are. There are always bumps in the road, kind of like the debt ceiling thing where it’s like, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to stop that, I don’t mean that to sound complacent, I think there’s been enough of an investment, and there’s enough buy-in from, interestingly enough, California and Nevada, and locals, and people with different opinions about a lot of things, and especially resource-wise. This has been going now since President Clinton. I expect it’ll be reauthorized.
Starbuck: You’re also bringing back legislation known as the lands bill to give federal lands to local governments. Why is this needed?
Amodei: No other place in the nation is like Nevada in that if you want a school site, a 40-acre middle school in the north part of Reno, everybody is surrounded by BLM land. Now that’s not evil in and of itself. If you want to do anything, you’ve got to pass a lands bill. We went to your city council, or your planning department, or your county commission. Those are the people that are writing the bill because we think they should — it’s not a dodge. Those are the people that are responsible to the voters in their communities for how that community grows. And if you don’t like what they’re doing, then you kick ’em out at the next election. There’s a lot of folks that, ‘Nope, we don’t want any of that,’ and I get it, but it’s like growth is the cash flow, to be honest, that all the communities in Northern Nevada and Western Nevada have basically relied upon, and nobody said it quite that way. It’ll always be controversial, I think.
Starbuck: You were scheduled to speak at Basque Fry. Where were you?
Amodei: Well, I was in appropriations meetings all weekend and we were getting ready to start marking up bills.
Starbuck: I was interested to learn that, talking to attendees, Northern Nevada voters, they were pretty split on Trump or DeSantis. If you had to choose, who do you prefer to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee?
Amodei: Somebody that can beat Joe Biden.
Starbuck: Whose policies do you align more with?
Amodei: I don’t know if there’s much difference between them. Who would be a Donald Trump running mate? Because while I think the world of Mike Pence, and that’ll make some people angry, but it’s like in all of my dealings with him, he was an honorable guy. He was a down-to-earth guy, and being Donald Trump’s number two takes some special skills and effort. But for the folks who said he should have tried to hijack the confirmation vote stuff for the electoral college, Mike Pence did a hell of a job. I don’t think that’s going to make him the president or the presidential nominee. I just think it’s way early right now before I have to go into a ballot box.
Starbuck: What are your goals for the rest of the year? What can we expect from you?
Amodei: We want to get lands bills passed. We want to make sure that we do something that’s responsible for the economy and dialing back the spending from the COVID era. On the big scale stuff, there are things we can do as the House because we have ultimate control over the purse strings along with the Senate, and so we need to get spending back in the right direction because I just believe it’s unsustainable. I expect there to be major cuts in the FBI and Department of Justice’s budgets. We’ll see if I’m right or not.
