Florida Republican Congressman Greg Steube left his home in muggy southwest Florida early Friday morning to catch the only nearby flight to Washington, D.C., so he could vote on legislation he said had no chance of becoming law, Democrats’ $3 trillion coronavirus economic relief package.
Meanwhile, the bills that he cares about, to help veterans like himself and to demand answers about the coronavirus, languish while the House is led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat.
“I mean, I don’t understand the thought process of Pelosi,” Steube told the Washington Examiner Thursday by phone from his home in Sarasota.
“It’s like we’ve been clamoring for months for us to get back to work, and she’s going to force all of us to come up there for basically a day,” Steube said about the Democratic bill, which would, among other things, fund state and local governments and forgive some student debt. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Trump White House say the proposal is a non-starter.
The former Iraq interrogator’s district, which he has represented since January 2019, is the second-oldest in the country by average resident age. But he believes things are getting better on the coronavirus front with a reported drop in cases since Florida largely reopened, he said.
Steube, who served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps from 2004 to 2008 while in the Army, even visited his local Walmart recently with his family without wearing a mask.
“We have all these people going to the grocery store on a regular basis, and you haven’t seen a spike in cases,” said Steube, 41. “If you are high-risk by virtue of the fact you’re over the age of 65, mine is the second most high-risk district in the country, and you haven’t seen this huge spike in cases.”
One piece of legislation he has proposed, the Veterans’ True Choice Act, was endorsed by the bipartisan For Country Caucus of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans that he is a part of. It would give disabled veterans like himself the option to choose TRICARE health insurance for life if they are over 30% service-connected disabled.
“You could go to any doctor in your community that you want to go to that you have a relationship with that you know and have the procedure done and TRICARE will pick it up,” said Steube, who sustained a knee injury during training that accounts for his disabled status. “I don’t have a [Veterans Affairs] hospital in my district, and the closest one is about four hours away.”
But getting that kind of legislation enacted is unlikely under current conditions in Washington.
Instructions from House officials, Steube said, required that he stay in his office, without a staff, until his voting block was called before returning to his office.
“Until Pelosi decides to get us back to work on more of a regular schedule where staff and committees are meeting in person,” he said, “I don’t see much passing unless it’s COVID-19 related.”
The congressman said he would be voting against proxy voting and the new, Democratic-authored $3 trillion coronavirus relief package.
For the Veterans Affairs committee member, neither proxy voting nor virtual meetings and markups would be effective. Meanwhile, he said, veterans are suffering from lack of access to treatment and procedures.
The congressman said Florida VA hospitals were still being held back from performing elective surgeries even though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis started allowing state hospitals to perform elective surgeries Monday.
“You’ve got a lot of veterans who wait a significant period of time to get procedures done at hospitals, and we’re going to put a huge halt on those elective surgeries,” he added.
Steube said he had not received a response to his May 7 letter to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie.
VA spokeswoman Christina Noel told the Washington Examiner that the agency would respond to Steube’s inquiry and that the VA was following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for resuming elective procedures.
“VA has not determined a specific system-wide date for resuming nonurgent, elective procedures, however, VA is developing a phased recovery plan for local facilities that takes into account patient and staff safety as our top priority,” she said.
Call to investigate the WHO
The Florida conservative, who was a state legislator in Florida for eight years before winning his congressional seat when the incumbent Republican retired, also described his skepticism for multilateral organizations, and new legislation to investigate the World Health Organization.
“One of the very early votes I took was not funding NATO,” he said. “We are the largest supplier of taxpayer dollars to these different organizations, and they certainly don’t have the United States in mind when they make decisions.”
Doubts about the U.S. benefit, the potential for foreign influence, and even corruption that may exist at the WHO led Steube to co-sponsor another piece of legislation that he does not think will get a fair look until the House is allowed to get back to work.
“Clearly, the leadership has been basically parroting Chinese propaganda,” Steube argued, referring to the WHO and citing confusion about human-to-human transmission as late as Jan. 14.
Steube dismissed criticism of the Trump administration for not acting sooner to stem the coronavirus and said Congress should call on the State Department and Department of Health and Human Services to do an investigation on the role of the WHO on the COVID-19 spread.
“If Congress decides that the WHO is corrupt and basically just propagating propaganda from the Chinese government, that’s not something we want to be involved in,” he said.
