 How's this for a baptism by fire? Just three days after being sworn into Congress to represent Michigan's third district, Republican freshman Peter Meyer found himself and his colleagues trapped without security in the bowels of the Capitol building while a riot that ultimately claimed five lives raged all around. The following week he was one of just 10 Republicans and the only first-term member of the GOP who voted to impeach Donald Trump whom he had supported on the campaign trail. Meyer's vote to impeach led to a narrowly failed center vote from his own state's GOP and immediate announcements that he will be primaried in 2022. The 33-year-old Iraq War veteran who says his military training helps him maintain focus is filling the seat vacated by former Libertarian Party Congressman Justin Amash whose policy views he shares on a broad range of issues. Meyer told Reason why he believes in limited government economic freedom and individualism, why he's against out-of-control stimulus spending and military adventurism and how he plans to combat the craziness he sees both on the right and the left in the House of Representatives. Representative Peter Meyer, thanks for talking to Reason. Thank you for having me on, Nick. A pleasure. Let's start with, you know, you are one of just 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump the second time and from what I've read, you're the only first termer to do that. Why did you vote to impeach Donald Trump, your party's president? Well, you know, that question is something that I know a lot of my constituents have been asking. I've had a number of town halls and have heard a number of very impassioned opinions. You know, to me it was a pretty simple question of, you know, is the Republican Party a party of rule of law? A party that believes in accountability? Or is it one that puts a personality, you know, above principles? The House's role in an impeachment is pretty narrow. We look at the article or articles. In this case, there's only one of impeachment that are laid before us and have to make a judgment if we believe it to be true and accurate. And then, if so, if impeachment, you know, is a reasonable decision to make. Obviously, this was one that was politically less than optimal. I did not want in my first 10 days in office to impeach a president of my own party. But the fact of the matter is January 6th and the assault on the Capitol would have never happened if it wasn't for President Trump propagating two lies. One, that November 3rd was a landslide victory for Donald Trump that was stolen, and two, that January 6th was a day to stop the steal. And those two lies, which could have easily just faded away into nothing, were continually amplified, legitimized, and propagated by Donald Trump. And it resulted in the deaths of five Americans, the defiling of the seat of our democracy, and frankly sent a message that we absolutely, it sent a message that, you know, our first, our section one powers can be undermined by the executive. So the third district of Michigan is becoming the impeachment seat, right? Because Justin Amash, who you replaced when he chose not to run for re-election, had voted to impeach Trump a couple years ago or whatever. You, like him, are taking a huge amount of guff from constituents. You mentioned some town halls and stuff, but so far you, you know, it's been announced, one of your primary contenders from this past election cycle has said he's going to primary you. You may be censured by the state GOP. This has happened to other Republican congressmen who voted to impeach members of Congress. How do you feel about that? You know, and I guess, sorry to step in on my own question. First, are you elected? Like, is your philosophy that you're elected to reflect your conscience or that, or the will of your constituents? You know, and then how are you going to deal with it if your own state party says, hey, you're in big trouble, Buster? Yeah. So my philosophy to answer that question is that you're elected to exercise your judgment. And you're elected, you know, based off of the principles and the values that you espoused during the campaign. But then ultimately, the job of a representative is not just to represent, you know, the opinion of the mass in a point in time, right? Or else, what's the point? I mean, just take a poll, figure out where people are and then have that be the direction. I mean, there will be accountability for the decisions that I made. And that we'll see in either the August 2021 primary or in that November general election. But at the end of the day, I have to, I think every constituent has to elect folks that they trust their judgment. And even if they don't necessarily agree with it, at least reach a point of understanding. That's one of the reasons why I have been very accessible. We're actually the first congressional office to do a live Zoom town hall where constituents could ask questions via video. It took us a little longer than I wanted to. And I can't believe we were the first to do it. But I think that's what I owe the constituents. But I think it was Edmund Burke who said, and I'm going to butcher this in the paraphrasing, you know, that you do your constituents a disservice if you sacrifice your judgment for their opinion. Because opinions change and opinions are dependent on perspectives and facts that can be ever fluid. It's also fascinating. When you were running for office, you said you supported Donald Trump as president. What did you like about him before Election Day when he kind of flipped and said, no, no, I had to win because I voted for myself. Everybody I know, everybody in my family, I think voted for me, you know, and then went on this two month bender of propagating BS about the election being stolen. But what did you like about Trump before November 3rd? During the campaign, to me, the easiest way to win a primary is also the easiest way to lose in a general, in a competitive seat, right? I was and remain a fan of many of the policies. I remain a fan of shaking up a state system of fighting against a status quo that reverts to the meat. And I give and have given Donald Trump credit for that. But to me, there's a difference between being able to affect positive change from that and bring in a moment of institutional ruin that really put our democracy in peril. And that's where again, rhetoric and bluster is something we've always had in our political system. But where that trends into political violence and frankly, into an assault on the seat of our legislature and into threats and intimidation, not just banter. That's a line that can't be crossed. And frankly, when I was sitting there after having evacuated the House chambers on January 6th, and I saw his first video and had been waiting for Donald Trump to do something, to say something. I mean, these were his people. This was a moment when the country needed someone to step up and lead. He abandoned his office. He abandoned responsibility. He shrunk from that moment. And to me, he also betrayed all the accomplishments of his past four years of Middle East peace deals, of Operation Warp Speed, of deregulation of a burgeoning economy before COVID that had wage growth, even at the lowest level. All of that was wiped away. That's not how the history books remember him. Can you handicap? Do you think he will be convicted in the trial in the Senate? I don't think it's outside the bounds of possibility, but I am certainly not expecting that senators will rise to the moment. I think there's been backpedaling of enormous magnitude. You know, they're backpedaling so hard that the chain's off the sprocket and dragging on the ground. I mean, it's really something to behold. Do you worry about being censured by the Michigan Republican Party in your home state? Will that affect you? Or will that have any real impact? You know, Paul Henry, who held this seat in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was censured by the local party GOP because he voted against Reagan's Mx missile program. A censure is a strongly worded letter. I respect the opinion of those folks, but at the end of the day, they're not the folks who sent me to Washington. So, you know, it's funny to say like in your first two weeks in office that voting to impeach a president for the second time is like not even the most interesting thing that happened to you. You were, you know, I mean, a couple of days after you were sworn in, you had the riot show up in the Capitol and you talked with my colleague Matt Welch about that just a day or two after it happened. With a little bit more time and distance, can you describe what it was like to be inside the Capitol when it was actually being kind of overrun by a bunch of crazy people? You know, I spent about three years between Iraq where I was an interrogator and a source handler, you know, with the Army. So as a combatant in Afghanistan where I spent time as a conflict analysis analyst for the humanitarian aid community. And that let me, well, right now I feel pretty comfortable that I could land an airport anywhere in the world and could figure out how to not die. But in that moment, it was just a sense of disbelief that a sense of disbelief that everything was kind of colliding, right, that the rhetoric and the insanity that we had witnessed and the creation of an alternate reality, that that was being played out in real time. And then I had, I had talked to folks who were coming to the rally. I had listened to constituents who wanted me to overturn the election. I was trying to understand, to explain that, well, Republicans are in the minority in the House. So even if every Republican did this, which would be a terrible precedent to set, it still would fail. And then there was just this, this utter disconnect. And frankly, I think that disconnect extended to Donald Trump who, you know, had created his own worldview that was wholly divorced from any constitutional statutory or real world precedent. But it was just utterly bizarre. I mean, I watched the full speech he gave on the ellipse, right? And I just had that sinking feeling where it was, well, if I'm going to go to the Capitol, it's probably the safest place to be is in the House chamber, which did not ultimately end up being accurate. But also, just, I mean, is this the US? Is this how things go? And by the way, where the hell is the planning on the front end? Right. Well, two things about that. First, can you, you've been critical of the way that the Capitol Hill police, not, you know, not the not the rank and file members are there, the beat cops as it were, but the planning, what went wrong there? And do you still, you know, hold them accountable for basically being missing in action? I do hold them accountable. I've been in situations that I've done, you know, threat assessments and physical security, you know, assessments of structures and facilities. I think, I think there's, you could draw a straight line between the lack of preparedness and the lack of mobilization of the National Guard on January 6th and what we saw over the summer, especially with the BLM protest outside the White House and the clearing of Lafayette Square. I guarantee you, if the National Guard would have been mobilized and nothing would have happened, Nancy Pelosi would be accusing Donald Trump of trying to stage a coup and of intimidating lawmakers. You know, I could put myself in those in the position of those planners and come to come to see why they made the decisions they did, which proved horrendous in hindsight, but I think we're done in good faith at the moment. Do you think they were, they were going easy because of the negative response to a kind of more muscular intervention during the summer months? I think, I think it was partially that. And, you know, I had told a number of folks, you know, if you look at the businesses that are boarding up their windows ahead of the election, you know, they weren't boarding up their windows because they were worried that Biden was going to win. And, and so we had seen over the summer that it's partially political violence. I mean, there was more to it than just politics, but how that had led to riots in the street and become a little bit a nerd to the fact that it was going in one direction. And where I think it was different was that I, and why I had a real sinking feeling going into it. And I'd actually given an interview the day before where I'd said I was very worried about the outbreak of violence that could occur. And I left that interview thinking, ah, was I too honest? And I probably didn't go far enough in retrospect, but it was just that sense that the rage and the violence on the left was sort of omnidirectional versus this had been specifically focused on overturning the results of election on preventing Congress from delaying certification. And that's why, you know, terms like sedition and insurrection come into the fore, because it wasn't just, you know, obviously looting and burning of a city is a horrific act and causes tremendous emotional and physical destruction. And lives, you know, dozens of lives were lost as well. You know, but there's also a very specific threat when it is directed at upsetting the functioning of the government and particularly preventing a transfer of presidential power, which we have always had and prided ourselves in, in this country. Did you fear for your life? You've talked about, you know, the reality of having to wear a bulletproof vest to go to work. Are you still doing that? Or, you know, and in the moment, were you actually afraid for your life? I was afraid in retrospect. I was less fearful when we were in the house chamber than when we had evacuated and we were wandering in the tunnels and trying to flag down police officers who were running in every which direction and saying, what the hell are we doing here? I mean, to me, that was one of the most dispiriting things was, you know, the Cold War, you have Mount Weather and you have the Greenbrier, these evacuation locations for continuity of government, you know, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars have been spent on, you know, protecting us from external threats. And then, you know, there was no safe room. There was no, oh, here's your evacuation location. We just scattered in groups of, you know, 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 lawmakers. And so as, you know, I'd say the moment where I was most uncertain was when we were just wandering through the tunnels underneath the Capitol, knowing that some of the buildings they were connected to had been breached and were no longer secure or had been evacuated. And, you know, if, if the people who were storming the Capitol and sending Facebook messages saying, oh, the members of Congress run the tunnels three levels down, you know, go find them, if they had found us, I don't know what would have happened. You know, let's talk about the future of the Republican Party a bit. At this point, what does being a Republican mean to you? You know, why did you run as a Republican rather than a Democrat? But what's the essence of your vision of the Republican Party? I would say three fundamental values, limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty. And frankly, defining that against a party and a worldview that tends towards centralization, tends towards federalization, tends towards nationalization. You know, I'm a big proponent of subsidiarity. I think if you look at organizations that function and function well, there are those that devolve power down that treat individuals with the degree of agency and respect with accountability that they deserve. I mean, that's how you get positive outcomes. And to me, I mean, unions are the antithesis of that. And whatever party tends towards, you know, enabling elements like teachers' unions is probably going to be one that I'm on the opposite side of. But, you know, I think the other interesting thing in our political spectrum right now is just the tribalization and the self-sorting on any number of issues and how that ultimately obscures whatever fundamental values or principles those parties may have had into just an assemblage of policy points that sometimes are wildly out of step with those intrinsic beliefs or those intrinsic beliefs just aren't there. Well, can I challenge you a little bit on that? Because from my reading of, you know, and I want to go through some kind of basic issues because there's a lot there. And I find a lot to be interested in in your positions. But to begin with, you are pro-life, right? And should that be, you know, does that contravene a kind of Republican ideal of limited government and of devolving decisions down to the individual level? To me, the question there hinges on, you know, whose life is valued, right? If that sense of due process, that sense of protection, and this is where if you believe that a life is created at birth and it's an irrational belief, if you believe that life starts at conception, then that is a period where those rights are imbued in that creative form. And that I think is where a lot of the disconnect comes in that argument. You have been, you served in the military. I mean, you served in uniform in Iraq and you, but you have been critical of what are being called the forever wars. And it's kind of disturbing that everybody uses that phrase, but very few people do anything about it. Why are you critical of ongoing conflicts with American presence at this point or lasting decades? I mean, simply put, it's wild to me that I was in Iraq a decade ago. Now granted, our presence there in the troops on the ground have kind of ebbed and flowed, but it's always been reactive. And we've never actually had a fundamental vision for what we think the region should be that was actually paired with what we were willing to invest in in order to see that through. In November, sorry, in October, the post 9-11 AUMF will turn 20. I mean, so it's just this sense of momentum and autopilot. It's almost got to be off its parents' life and health insurance. It's six more years. Is it a question of us not being willing to put the muscle behind what we want to do? Because we've spent billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or is it that these are missions that are fundamentally misconceived? I guess another way of saying this is, what is your vision of foreign policy? Is it one where the United States, we've got the best military. We've certainly got the biggest, the most powerful, best looking, all of that. Can they do what they want or is it just we're wrong to be most of the places we are? I'm going to specifically isolate it in the places where we are and to some degree in occupying force. To me, it just it flies in the face of sustainability. I would like, and where I think our government should strive, is to be able to function without lurching from crisis to crisis. But the challenge is you're trying to apply that requires a long-term view. It requires diligence and attention. And we are nothing if not attention deficit and want to forget about things as quickly as possible. And when you look at the world as a series of problems to solve, as soon as it's no longer the problem at the top, it just drops to the bottom of the pile and is off your consciousness, even if it's still there, even if people are still dying, even if things are still happening. And we need to get to the point where we're saying these are challenges to manage, and here's what we're trying to manage them towards. That sense of strategic direction is absolutely lacking. And to me, if you don't have a sense of strategic direction, you hit the reset button, you do the best you can with what's there, but you stop trying to pretend that there's some grand vision that you never had any hopes or even cared to try to achieve. Do you think we should be out of Syria and out of Afghanistan at this point? I think that having a military first mission in those places has been proven to not be effective. I think we're fundamentally, and I'm glad to see the Biden administration stopping the support of offensive attacks in Yemen, but realizing that even every single one of these conflicts were civil wars that we all of a sudden found ourselves in the middle of and then supported one side or the other. And sometimes in Iraq, you're supporting one side and then supporting the other and then going back and supporting the first side again. To what end? Do you have a vision for how American foreign policy should be restructured and should it be military first or should it be more about diplomacy, trade and soft power? Definitely soft power, but with the hard edge. And by that, I mean, we have diplomacy. We utilize development. We utilize the fact that what's in our best interest is almost always stability. Instability tends towards those who fill that vacuum and are willing to do what others won't. And we are bound by a sense of moral certainty that we don't always live up to, but I'm glad we at least pay lip service towards. But at the end of the day, if we should be investing far more in our overseas intelligence, but not just for the purposes of finding some dude in the cave and dropping a hellfire on him, but actually understanding how to navigate and influence what's going on in the region rather than just trying to rack up kills. That's what everything tends towards. And I want to get to the points where you kind of line up pretty well with, I think, a kind of general libertarian point of view. But I guess we'll kind of go backwards into that. That's a problematic word in the third district. When it comes to China, what is the goal of our interaction with China and what is the best way to achieve a kind of relationship with China, which benefits the United States, but also doesn't destabilize other parts of the world? I think that that tension is fundamentally where our hope and frankly, our naivete over the past two decades has really come home to roost. To me, it's, well, when I was in Afghanistan, if I bought a rug and the guy walked away with a smile on his face, I knew that I'd gotten the worst end of that deal. And to me, China has been walking away with a smile on its face and their interactions with the West for far too long. We've been under this assumption that further prosperity would tend towards further democracy, that trade and reciprocal arrangements would lead to a more open society that would inherently tend towards us. That idea of a democratic consensus. I mean, it's just it's political science fiction. What we need to be doing at every turn is, again, having a sense of, okay, where do we need to go in our bilateral relations? How do we ensure that that respects the sovereignty of neighboring countries? And how do we also have clear red lines that can't just be transgressed with impunity? And I think all too often the US talks a really big game. And then, as you saw with Obama's red line in Syria, fails to actually live up to it. Now I'm not advocating for taking an inherently belligerent position, but if you say you're willing to do something, by God, you got to do it. So what is China? And I guess, I know you are, according to your campaign, when you were running, your pro free trade, but you have at various points drawn along and saying, what we have with China is not fair trade because we're letting their goods come in here easily and they're blocking us from their markets in various ways. So how do you resolve that? How do you kind of bring China to heel? If I had a time machine, it'd be so much of the intellectual property theft that has undermined the West. I think it's conservative estimates of at least a trillion dollars in intellectual property have flowed in one direction over the past two decades. China doesn't have to invent. They can just steal and modify and then rush something to market before our companies can. That's something that we need to ensure. I mean, that is a part of the trade, right? That's not in the open market. That's not going across on a container ship. It's not counting towards the GDP of either nation, but that has become a component of the trade that we need to cut off. We need to isolate, but you can't just have that be a defensive measure, right? I mean, and this is where I say, if we're only looking at things that are military and non military, if we're not appreciating the fact that I would love for us to have a perfectly free trade system, but it also needs to be one that recognizes that if we are the only ones giving, then we will be taken advantage of. That there are countries who will resort to protectionist measures. There are countries that will operate in an underhanded way, and you need to have accountability mechanisms, and that may not be in the trading world. That may live in other parts of our government, have accountability mechanisms that keep that playing field level. Do you feel that China is, should we be heavily backing Hong Kong in its push against China authoritarianism, and is that part of the ebb and flow of kind of national relations or international relations with China? Why we're not having the type of visa programs that the UK is having right now to allow talent from Hong Kong that wants to relocate, that wants to rebuild, that wants to take that talent, that ingenuity and apply it in a place with the infrastructure to really let it grow, just makes absolutely no sense to me. And so much of our immigration system seems aimed at pushing out or rejecting the best and brightest so they can go be our economic or geopolitical adversaries. And I've yet to understand that, but specifically with Hong Kong, it's a question. And we have the same question with Taiwan. We need to hold firm or else we'll be run over. But what's worth starting a war over? And to me, this is where I really loathe the fact that many of our adversaries have a full range of asymmetric options that are short of war. I mean, Iran has been at war with us for 40 years, but they've been doing it in such a way that prevents an open conflagration. And that is to their advantage. And we need to have similar toolkits and not just look at the world as friends and enemies, but as folks who are going to live in the gray area between. So in a way, I mean, Trump, you support Trump's China policy, right, where he's pushing back. And it seems as if Biden is actually kind of holding firm to a lot of that, right? I should hope so. It's early days. And most of what the Biden administration has done has not had much scrutiny because the internal skirmishes on my side of the aisle have been all consuming. I can only imagine what the first two weeks of the Biden administration would look like if Donald Trump still had his Twitter account. So that's to your earlier point, one of the challenges is we have a media environment that's focused on what shines the brightest and not what actually generates heat. You mentioned immigration. And you're a proponent of a merit-based immigration policy. Donald Trump was, frankly, anti-immigration. His administration did everything they could to reduce illegal immigration. Everybody tries to block illegal immigration. And that seems to be kind of outside the ability of governance really to control the border particularly effectively. But what is your vision of a merit-based immigration policy? Right now, our immigration system is like heating in a New York apartment. It's either blistering hot or bone cold. And there's no ability to really modulate it. To me, if you think of the strongest argument against immigration, there's a safety and security element on the margins, but it's by and large the fear of American jobs being replaced. When on the whole, immigrants are a net creator of jobs or a net creator of economic development. I think when the issue is abstracted at the federal level, when you're trying to appeal to Washington to make those type of judgments and determinations, it's inherently going to be imprecise. So when I talk about merit-based immigration, when I talk about how our immigration system would be, I would love to see the States be one of the drivers of identifying what their need is, what their capacity is, and then trying to flip on this head this fear that immigrants are going to take American jobs. The same folks who will say that. I've had farmers who come up and they say, we have too many immigrants. We need to build the wall, but I also need to figure out how to help out my guys over here because they're good people and they've been here the whole time. That sense of proximity breeds trust, breeds understanding, and that distance conversely creates fear, creates suspicion, and that's what undermines our system as a whole. Are you in favor of a kind of state-based set of immigration quotas and things like that? Citizenship would always need to lie at the federal level. I think that is a no-brainer, and you would absolutely need to have some degree of caps, but instead of the current system we have, that's just a patchwork since 1965 with a lot of bizarre vestiges aligning with, well, what are the industries in the state need? If you talk to Michigan, circa 2012, 2014, then Governor Rick Snyder was like, for the love of God, can we get some people to help repopulate Detroit? Some of the most vibrant communities in the Detroit area, the most vibrant working-class communities were composed of Arab immigrants, of Yemeni immigrants, of folks who had come from Mexico and had created senses of community, and were willing to put in the work to kind of bring those areas back. That's not necessarily going to be the same scenario in Los Angeles. So having a regional-based approach, having states have that input, and ideally getting to a point where it's not this all-or-nothing, you're either illegal or you're on a pathway to citizenship, but something that appreciates the gradations of the requirements in our economy today would put us on a path where we can have the immigration we need to support our economy without having the fear that it's going to take away jobs from Americans. Overall, I mean, would you characterize yourself as kind of more open borders rather than less open borders? More immigrants, generally speaking, is better than fewer immigrants. Where that appropriate number is, I think, is hard for us to calibrate at the federal level. I think it is plainly evident from many of our companies today that immigrants bring a sense of hunger and a sense of vision and an idea that can be realized and achieved. But I'm also aware of some of the possible negative ramifications of having a system that doesn't check against those impulses. I mean, we're kind of circling back to what we were talking about earlier with these kind of paranoid trends and that fear of the other, and how that has become so encapsulated in those two myths that November 3rd was a landslide election. January 6th was an opportunity to stop that steal. All of that is in that same vein, that same fear, that composition of a worldview that has to be defended and you're going to latch on to whatever straws you can to build up protections against the reality. Would you vote for Joe Biden seems to be signaling that there's going to be less enforcement via ICE and things like making dreamers, people, kids who were brought here by their parents and don't have clear legal status. Would you vote to make somebody who grew up here and might be in the military, might be working, whatever, should they have a quick path to citizenship or should they be deported? I think there's no doubt they need stabilization in the short term and then we need to have a broad discussion on what our immigration priorities are as a country. I mean, I feel like the Republican Party has bounced between being open-minded to some form of stable policy then retreated back to nothing while the Democratic Party has kind of moved the goalposts further and further towards, I don't know, open borders may be going too far but at least blanket amnesty and pathways to citizenship across the board. Now, as long as you have a porous southern border, you're never ever going to be able to get to the point where your immigration system is well calibrated to your country's needs. I would prefer to see far more legal immigration and again aligned with state-based economic requirements and without understanding that if states are worried about American citizens not having the employment opportunities that are out there that that could be solved within that state because they're going to be most finely attuned. I'd rather have far more of that and I would also rather we don't have the sort of gray area system we have where several of our industries, I mean especially agriculture and meat processing, those industries would collapse without the illegal immigrants that are keeping them propped up with a wink and a nod. I mean, that just is a system that tends towards abuse towards just dark outcomes and mistreatment of individuals and is ultimately quite inhumane. What you're feeling about stimulus spending, you're going to be voting on all of this stuff any day now. What should there be massive injections of government spending into the economy right now? Biden is talking about a $1.9 trillion spending package. If that comes for a vote, are you going to be voting for something like that? It's ultimately going to depend on what's inside, but right now and let's be very honest, the reason why it's $1.9 trillion and not $2 trillion is so that Biden can't be accused of spending trillions of dollars he wants to be able to asterisk it. It was sold for 99 cents, not a dollar. I looked at some of the internal component pieces. For the life of me, don't understand why we're spending $20 billion on vaccines, $50 billion on testing. Give me a bill that spends $200 billion on testing and gets us to be able to reopen in half the time. Then we've just prevented the need for far more of that economic stimulus that is baking in a closure of the country that keeps getting extended further and further. We have the tools to get to the end that we need and yet there's far more of an emphasis, I think, on continuing a state of dependency, continuing a state of government control. I'm not presupposing out of malevolence, but it isn't, let's sprint as fast as we can towards the light at the end of the tunnel. It's well we're already going down the tracks. When you talk to your Democratic colleagues or whatever and you say, why instead of talking about spending $2 trillion and we spent $4 trillion last year on various forms of stimulus spending, why don't we just throw, what would be a massive amount of money towards testing and vaccinating people and open things up? What is their response to that? Is it like you're crazy or what? So I'm actually part of a bipartisan coalition called The Problem Solvers. We're trying to get a set aside package that says, listen, let's debate some of the more contentious parts of the stimulus and right away give us a standalone bill that will have money for PPE, testing and vaccines. We'll get it through, slam dunk, no issues there. Realities, there's already over a trillion dollars from the previous stimulus that hasn't been spent. And so this sense of urgency on behalf of the Biden administration, it's a little bit contrived. But the other reality is that they want to keep that in the package so that if Republicans bulk at, say, a minimum wage of $15 being dovetailed within, it's not that. It's you voted against money for vaccines. Let's be very clear. I've talked to folks on the other side of the aisle and saying we want to work on a bipartisan package. And they say, well, we're using budget reconciliation. It can be bipartisan. All you have to do is vote for it. You are the scion of a major superstore chain, Myers, a chain founded by your grandfather in the early 60s and its current form. How do you feel, you know, Myers employs a lot of people who do kind of low, I don't want to say low skill, but I mean, it is kind of low skill work, you know, commercial work. Where are you on a $15 minimum wage, national minimum wage? I think our stores average wage, it's a little bit different from seasonal and kind of summertime workers, but it's pretty close to there. I mean, granted, we're in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, so it's not, you know, Wegmans in Virginia and New York. But it strikes me that when it comes to a $15 minimum wage, Amazon is totally supportive. You know, the larger your company, the more collective bargaining your employees have, the higher your wages are going to be to begin with, the more you're happy to embrace a $15 minimum wage because it undermines your competitors who don't have those degree of scale. I mean, it's creating barriers to entry in the market. It's frankly creating barriers of entry to, especially young and low skilled employees. You know, I'm sure robot manufacturers love it because it makes their products that much competitively cheaper, but I think it's I mean, it's a policy without any strong rationale or frankly, economic grounding. Why $15? Why not $14.25? Why not $13.75? You know, $15 is a nice number. Where are you on climate change? Is human activity contributing to climate change? And is that something that the government needs to be dealing with? And if so, at what scale? Yes, and yes, I think climate change is real. I think we need to be mindful of the fact that our carbon emissions are altering, you know, how our planet heats and cools itself. You know, we live in Michigan, we're defined, our state is defined by its connection to the environment and the Great Lakes. We have a large fishery economy. I mean, as a country, we are a benefit, a beneficiary of our natural resources. We are a beneficiary of the world as it is. And we need to be mindful of doing everything we can to steward it. I don't support the Green New Deal. I don't support, to the earlier points we were saying, any policies that tend towards centralization, socialization, nationalization. But we also need to make sure that we're connecting cause and effect, that we're holding folks to account who are polluting, while at the same time creating the incentives to minimize that. And for sure, making sure we're not subsidizing or underpinning industries that are costing us a lot more than the benefit they may be providing. Does that mean, you know, one way of reading that is to say, you know, we shouldn't be subsidizing oil and gas manufacturers. On another, it's maybe we shouldn't be subsidizing solar panel makers if they're not delivering the product that, you know, they say they're going to. You know, should we be, should the government be in the business of heavily subsidizing attempts to create new forms of energy that would be less polluted? Well, I do support, you know, a lot of the basic and advanced research that has frankly driven a lot of American economic innovation. So I don't want to kind of go, I want to set that aside. But more broadly, you know, it can be very hard to disentangle the web of subsidies and penalties and how that creates incentives within the structure. Solar panels have gone down. They tenfold in terms of price per watt in the past decade. I mean, just incredible gains in efficiency. No doubt some of that was because of investments spurred by subsidies. But the challenge is you're operating in a web of subsidies and it can be very hard to get a non-distorted view of efficiency. I do believe you have to bake in to those costs. You know, once you pare down all the subsidies, what are the negative externalities that you're ultimately going to have to pay for? Right. I mean, if you have a toxic chemical on the one hand that you're selling for cost plus a small margin, but not baking in the societal impact on the back end of cleanup, you know, you are just setting yourself up to have those costs be socialized by the entire country. And that I don't support either. I mean, that is where rationalization must take place. What is your view of things? You know, this was something in the, I guess, 2016 election, you know, the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin where, you know, the state, local and federal government, Donald Trump is a big supporter of this. People like Scott Walker, who at one point bestowed the Republican presidential field as a colossus, right? You know, they were going to, you know, through smart money and kicking a bunch of homeowners out on eminent domain. We're going to bring in a big foreign company that was going to create, you know, massive jobs, factories. It didn't work. In general, are you against that kind of deal making by governments at the state, local and federal level? Well, let me just say, to me, one of the greatest problems in our political system is the maturity mismatch between short-term electoral incentives and long-term governing incentives, right? So Scott Walker or anyone can go up on the dais, you can be there at the ribbon cutting, you can get all the kudos and credit, you can ride that to the next election. But you're not held accountable when, you know, the project doesn't go through when the funding is pulled, when, you know, something goes wrong on the tail end. I think especially when it comes to economic incentives on a state-by-state or regional basis, you know, it really becomes, you know, mutually assured destruction. You know, some of the per job costs have been, you know, greater than the net present value of 10 years of that individual salary would have been. At what point you say, well, why? I'm sure there was some fancy study that was commissioned and said, well, you're going to lose money on this, you're going to make money on ancillary industries coming in, yada, yada, yada. But you start to go down that road and it, to me, it's just the definition of inefficiency. And you're also opening up decision makers who are not necessarily incentivized to be finding the right deals for their state in the long term, but are looking for an easy win and a way of claiming to create a jobs. Politicians don't create jobs except for jobs that probably shouldn't exist in the first place. Does, does Meyer, when, you know, when you open a new store, and I lived part and full-time in Ohio for a number of years, so I am very familiar with Meyer, which I have to tell you is a fantastic store. It's a fantastic chain. It really, really is. But do they go in like Walmart and like Target and all of these places and say to localities, hey, you know what, we're thinking about moving here, but you know, there's this other town on the other side of the mountain that is going to, you know, they say we won't have to pay taxes. They say, you know, they'll do all the hookups for us, so we don't have to actually build out the infrastructure. Does Meyer compete for that kind of, you know, municipal or state largesse? I'm sure that they do. I will be very honest in that my only professional experience at the company has been stocking shelves and getting carts in the summer. So I've never worked there in an executive or professional capacity. I have spent time in real estate development, and this is where when it comes to incentives, I think there's a big difference between here's a grant, right, or here's a forgivable loan, and some of the incentives that are, if you build this store or you do this development, you know, the city or the county or the state will see an increase in taxes of X. And so here's a way that you can get access to a portion of that. So funds that never would have been created in the first place and could be clawed back if they aren't created. To me, that's in a different category because it's not taking taxpayer dollars. It's something that wouldn't have existed in the first place. I don't believe, I can't speak to the company's policies on that, but this is also the problem is if it exists in a competitive landscape, people are going to take advantage of it. Sure. Let's talk about a couple of more social issues or things that intersect with that. You know, and I want to harp on, you know, I guess I'll admire Superstore, and this is positive light. They went from being a chain that in the early 21st century was not that highly regarded by various kinds of LGBT associations that looked at hiring practices. By 2020, they are considered to be one of the very best companies to work for if you are lesbian, gay, bi, trans, etc. What is your feeling, you know, in the Republican Party, there is a culture war still. I mean, the Republican Party has lost most of the culture war battles over things like gay rights. Is this something the Republican Party needs to hang on to or is this something that they should be giving up kind of, you know, thinking that there is a state interest in people's sexual orientation? So if I may just say on the company's human rights campaign, LGBTQ equality, I think it was just LGBT and then probably Q and now IA plus on that survey, we're getting very low scores back in the day because we weren't returning the survey and paying the $10,000 that, you know, the folks wanted. I think 90% of the improvement was just filling out the survey and complying with demands and probably maybe 10% was evolving personnel policy. Oh, no. So it's like the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. It's not an objective reality check. It's more kind of. I'm sure that will come as a shock to many reasonable listeners. Yeah. There's more to those stories. But specifically, you know, to me, and this is where I come back to individual liberties, I have to be equal in the application of beliefs and in the content, neutral standpoint. And I would rather the government not be determining and not be inserting their nose into places where there's no compelling state interest. I guess I struggle to reconcile conservative beliefs and limited government with this belief of an imposition of values because if I believe the government can impose my values, I'm creating the precedent for it to impose values on the other side as well. I'm also a very big believer in grace. And then, you know, leave that poor baker alone, you know, don't make this a cause to let the issue. Can we just be the bigger people here? But at the end of the day, you know, I think the party has pretty solidly moved away from that and I give Donald Trump a lot of credit. I think Donald Trump was more progressive on LGBTQ issues in 2017 than Barack Obama was in 2009. I mean, just how that shifted is I think both a recognition of how much the landscape has changed and also, you know, the Republican Party moving to where it really should be. Michigan passed recreational pot in 2018. Are you good with that? I supported the legalization of marijuana. I support at the federal level, the, you know, federal decriminalization and allowing states to, you know, choose how they wish to apply that. I think, you know, we're in an upside down system where states are legalized and this clearly falls within traditional police powers that should live at the state level. That having been said, I still hold a security clearance, so I have not been able to partake. I was going to say that was my next question. Have you ever used marijuana or what the government calls illicit drugs? I think once prior to joining the military and it's public record because I put it on my security clearance adjudication forum that the Chinese hacked in 2013 anyways. So I can't say that I was ever actually high though, so that is not an experience. That is not necessary. You know, I've read that in Michigan possession of ecstasy or MDMA and basically any amount could lead to 10 years in jail. Is that a problem that needs to be addressed? I know this is solidly within your wheelhouse pretty firmly out of mind. You know, I do think that pairing up negative societal or health consequences with legal infractions is right and rational. I think we've been moving towards that and frankly on a lot of criminal justice issues, Michigan has been in a very good position. We did away with most forms of cash bail, but unlike New York, we're smart enough to have some judicial inputs. You had scenarios where there was discretion. We moved towards expungement laws where prior we still had expungement, but you had to actively go and petition and you could get someone to do it for you for a couple of hundred bucks, but what you were doing is leaving behind folks who otherwise couldn't afford that and so there was a disparate impact and moving towards a system where you still have a judge being able to ultimately say, well, there's a public good being served by keeping this on the record, but also allowing folks who had moved on or who had minor infractions that weren't of an enduring nature to be able to rebuild and move on with their lives. I can't speak to where we should go on other recreational substances though. That's again, a little out of my wheelhouse. Talking about criminal justice reform, the past year has been a year of COVID and lockdowns and I want to get your opinion on some of that, but also on criminal justice reform and particularly racially disparate impacts and outrage at the way policing is done. This is also something that Donald Trump's temper tantrum really obscured, which is that in this past election, Trump did better than average, much better than average and increased his shelling among blacks and Latinas. What does the Republican Party, what should it be doing to broaden its appeal to people of color? What you just said always, it cracked me up so much when I would knock on the door in a predominantly white upper class suburb and have someone yelling at me that Donald Trump was a racist and that I would go to award in the city and find folks who loved him. And it was just such a mismatch because for any number of reasons, but I think we were talking a little bit ago. I mean, one of the things that I took away from the November 3rd election was, wow, the country is maybe a little bit tired of Donald Trump, certainly isn't in love with Joe Biden, but definitely doesn't like Nancy Pelosi. I mean, it was this kind of blended response. And I think that's what a very bipolar politics often obscures is things in the middle. So you have trends like Trump strongly overperforming in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, especially among Hispanics, which again, as someone who went to NYU and lives in Brooklyn right now, no offense, I did my MBA at NYU and went to undergrad at Columbia so I can talk back on these folks if they think that that is something in the realm of possibility, because there's a very big difference between being extremely online and seeing a stronger economy, even with the pandemic. And I think that's where when we pay too much attention to the noise and not as much attention to what is occurring, we can lose sight of that. And now you can also lose sight of what will occur by ignoring the noise. And that's what we saw on the lead up to January 6th. But the GOP absolutely needs to build on that record of saying, if you actually talk honestly with folks, if you reach out to them, if you are engaged in an honest conversation, they don't want to have a disquisition on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. They want to hear about how you're going to serve them as you would serve anyone else in the country. What do you think contributed to Trump doing better than a typical Republican? I mean, he did much better than John McCain or Mitt Romney among minorities and he did better the second time than his first time. Is it a school choice? Is it general economic growth? What were the things that had him make gains among communities that if you listen to the media, he has completely alienated because he's the face of white supremacists? I would say shocking transparency. The belief that here was a fighter. My wife is an immigrant watching her parents especially kind of go through the process for Brazil. Going through the process of getting their citizenship, of seeing that pathway, they had a very difficult upbringing. And so viewing politics as something that happens to you, not something you can participate in, I think is the frame set that a lot of folks who immigrate to this country naturally arrive at. And so then getting that sense of agency becoming more informed, I think Trump, if anything, was a challenger of assumptions in so many regards. And that's where especially immigrants to the country might feel well, Trump doesn't like immigrants or the Democratic party is the party we should belong to. And then you kind of scratch the surface and say, well, I haven't really seen really great immigration policies. There's a lot of talk, but not necessarily the action. And I think over time, Mitt Romney wasn't saying, why the hell are you voting for a Democrat? We got better policies. What have they ever done for you? And Donald Trump did and actually forced that question. And I think some asked themselves that and came to a different answer than expected. You know, a traditional split in Congress and in talking to you this, I mean, it seems to me to be rising more and more to the surface. The traditional split in Congress and politics is between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. There's also a generational divide that seems to be growing. I looked this up before talking with you. The average age in the Senate is like 61 or 62 years old. The average age in the House is about 57, 58. You are 33, right? So I mean, you're like a full generation, 25 years below the average. What is the ground of generational solidarity? You on many levels have nothing in common with AOC or Ilhan Omar or young people on the left. But in another way, it seems like you have more in common with them than you might with a Nancy Pelosi or even a Kevin McCarthy who years ago was calling himself one of the young guns. I think he's the last of the young guns still in office. But you know, is there is there a generational split? And if so, what are the axes along that? I'd say one of the most challenging things about COVID is building those relationships has been hard. I've made some kind of in passing, but our new member orientation was distanced to masked. And you have a delta where the Democrats view it as a point of partisan pride to be 1000% COVID compliant. And I'm like 90%, right? I mean, I have no issue wearing a mask when I'm in an indoor confined space. If I'm walking by myself outdoors and someone gives me a dirty look, it's like, okay, we should be triaging our response here. But then I have colleagues who are, let's just say, you know, firmly on the other side of that issue and view any restriction as an unabridgable on the sale you assailment of their constitutional rights. So it's been hard to have the degree of interaction to actually build those relationships. But I think your earlier point, and this is what will never stop being fascinating to me is that the top three House Republicans are 54 or 55. The top three House Democrats are 80 or 81. And I might be 81 or 82 right now. I haven't double checked those birthdays. But there's a big difference in sort of where the average age is on the Democratic side and where their leadership is. And then where the average age and the leadership is on the Republican side. So I think you're going to see, especially once we get past, I'm sure there'll be polarizing political moments, but as Donald Trump isn't the lightning rod around which all the earth spins, apologies for the next metaphor, you're going to see alliances starting to shift in form. And frankly, the impeachment vote on the Republican side of the House was that in the nutshell where the ideological lines blurred pretty firmly, you had moderates, you had folks who are much more foreign policy hawks, you had folks all across the spectrum, those on the more libertarian side. That line kind of got blurred and there was a uniting around principle, around a belief and fidelity to the Constitution around serving a note of office that to me kind of showed what our politics kind of could be when we don't let those more abstract lines divide us in the first place. You know, can we talk a little bit about your upbringing? I mentioned you're the grandson of the founder of the Meyer Superstore chain. What was it like to grow up wealthy and but also geared towards commerce where, you know, the base, I mean, the way Myers gets bigger is by serving more people at cheaper prices with better service. What was your childhood like? And how does that factor into your worldview and your politics? Obviously, it's on a personal level a little bit bizarre to try to reconcile your individual self with a family that has a place in the community with trying to place and situate and build confidence and create an identity that both includes but is also separate from. I mean, to me, at the end of the day, it was seeing how much an institution can reward people who are inside of it, how it can serve folks who are outside of it, and how that ability to channel energy and towards a productive outcome can create a beneficial multiplier effect. You mentioned grace and passing and you come from a part of the country and a part of Michigan and a part of the country that is rich in a Dutch reform to Calvinist religious sensibility. What is your faith and how does that inform how you go about your work as a congressman? It's interesting. West Michigan, it's very, a lot of overwhelming Christian reform church beliefs. It's conservative, but it's both receptive to refugees and very involved in international humanitarian aid. It's strongly supportive and beliefs of redemption and of returning to society and criminal justice reform. It doesn't necessarily cut cleanly along partisan lines so much as it is about investment in the community of service of loving my neighbor and viewing your role and faith as being something that's exercised in acts, not just in speech, not just in word, but in how you carry yourself in the world as well. But to get a little theological, you are not preaching a covenant of works, right? I assume you are still firmly in a covenant of grace, but you do good works then. So I did not grow up in the Christian reform church. I very much enjoyed listening to arguments going back to some of the Piper and some of the old, or some of the theologians that were seminal in, oh boy, I'm so out of my depth in this current moment. But in generating the world that you grew up in, right? Yeah. What is it like to be a Dutch American? Because it's among the earliest colonial forces and presences here, but it's been minimized. I don't know. Is there something about being Dutch American that you want to bring to view right now? Frugality and thriftiness would probably be the easiest stereotypes. The biggest impact of being a Dutch American on my life is that unless someone's from the Midwest, they probably can't pronounce my last name. So that's always enjoyable to kind of see them go through that process. But I mean, I think I'm a quarter Dutch, 30% German, though among my family, going back to great grandparents, I think I had one out of eight that was in the US before 1900. So it was kind of more recent wave of immigration, and that was a lot of the folks in West Michigan came across. I think the joke is that most people leave their country because it's too politically conservative, and they come to the US to seek more of a more liberty. And with the Dutch, it was the opposite that the Netherlands were too politically liberal, and they wanted to go and have a more conservative environment. As a final topic of conversation, you've talked at various places, and we've hinted at it in this conversation about the need to restore trust and confidence in institutions. Can you talk a little bit about what is the level of breakdown that you see, and then where are the places, especially that we need to start building trust back, and how do we go about doing that? I think you can broadly put that breakdown into just a sense of epistemological certainty in terms of our knowledge structure, how we view the world, how we arrive at a truth, and then also how we reconcile disagreements or resolve disputes in a civilized society. The former is the balkanization of our media landscape, the creation of echo chambers, which was nothing new. And though to me, it's especially shocking because I go between those chambers. I know there's a far right echo chamber, there's a center right echo chamber, there's a right echo chamber, there is a centrist echo chamber, and then vice versa on the other side. But I think, and we've seen this over the past nine months especially, and I think this underpinned the riots that we saw over the summer, and it also underpinned the storming of the capital, this belief that all of the institutions we rely on, whether those that help us define our world like the media or academia, or those that we view as a way that we can be agents of change, politics, the courts, all society more broadly, that there's something fundamentally corrupt and that those pathways are blocked, that the system is raked, that there's no point in engaging in them so you go outside. That's why, and I remember having this conversation with local law enforcement leaders during the Black Lives Matter protest which resulted in a destructive riot and Grand Rapids that had about half a million dollars in property damage. Their question was, what do we do? What do they want? Grand Rapids didn't have, there have been some regrettable incidents, but there was no George Floyd moment in the city of Grand Rapids. A lot of the frustrated outcomes were actually being slowly worked upon and improved through criminal justice reform and any number of other initiatives to try to correct historic injustices and their present day incarnations. That sense of disconnect between the passion and the achievable outcome invariably breeds distrust. That's where the violence comes into the system. How do you start restoring that? If you look back 50 years, it's partly because it's when we started polling and surveying this type of stuff, but it's been almost a straight line decline in all sorts of confidence in institutions, public and private. Even third space like the Catholic Church is less trusted than it was 50 years ago. The United Way is less trusted than it was 50 years ago along with the government and with big business and whatnot. How do you change that? What are things that you can be doing? I mean, you abolished section 230 of government imposed information. Frankly, what you have to do is connect cause and effect. That's where the ability to wheeze aloud of accountability and to always cast blame means that nobody's ever ultimately held responsible because it's a rhetorical exercise. There's no accountability. If somebody in the military is bad at their job, people die. You can't deny if they're alive or dead. If a business executive does a poor job, the company doesn't earn a profit or goes bankrupt. Those are concrete states. In politics, there's no real concrete state. When there's a negative outcome, you can always find a way to cast that blame outward. How do you solve that? In my mind is you need to collapse things down. You need to be focusing on the lowest levels of government possible. It's a lot easier to hold a mayor accountable for the budget that they worked on with the city commission if it doesn't line up because they don't have any choice but to resolve that dispute. You can see the tangible benefits. What are the tangible benefits at the federal level? Yes, we have security. Maybe you get a check in your mailbox, but the more abstract those entities are, the harder it is to connect their value and the harder it is to hold them accountable when they don't live up to the promise that's been fulfilled. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you, Representative Peter Meyer of Michigan's third district, the seat held by not only Gerald Ford but Justin Amash more recently. Peter Meyer, thanks for talking to me. Thank you, Nick. I deeply appreciate it.