Is Nick Freitas the future of the GOP’s libertarian wing?

RealClearPolitics classifies the race as a toss-up. And because the district went for President Trump in 2016, Freitas is bullish on his chances of joining the ranks of libertarian-leaning Republicans in Congress. I sat down with the candidate to discuss his background, pitch to voters, and broader ideological and policy worldview.

Freitas comes from a military background, and his service informs the foreign-policy agenda he is campaigning on. He enlisted in the Army Special Forces after Sept. 11 and served two terms in Iraq.

“We have to have the most powerful, best-equipped, best-provided-for military in the world,” Freitas told me. “I believe in peace through strength.”

“But by the same token, we are not the world’s police force,” he went on, striking a somewhat Trumpian, “America First” tone. “Nor do I think that the objective of the United States military should be focused on nation building. Ultimately, one of the things I understood from serving in Iraq was that this idea that you’re going to impose a type of government or type of economic system on a particular culture is a little bit absurd.”

Overlap on foreign policy is one of the reasons Freitas is running an ardently pro-Trump campaign.

“[Foreign policy] is one of the things I’ve admired about the Trump administration, the idea that we are going to have a powerful military,” he explained. “But we are not going to go through the process of getting ourselves involved in more wars for which we don’t have a clear, strategic objective in mind.”

Freitas stressed the need for Congress to reassert its constitutionally mandated war powers.

“Congress wants to vote to fund wars but not to declare war,” he said. “I think the men and women in Congress need to display at least an ounce of the courage they expect of our [troops] we send overseas.”

Freitas said he fully supports Trump’s stated desire to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and Syria. This sets him apart from the typical Republican politician with military credentials, a subset of Congress that has historically skewed toward more hawkish foreign policy views. In this, Freitas represents the new, young Republican Party and its more nationalist, anti-interventionist approach to foreign policy.

But on the domestic side, Freitas’s agenda harkens back to the Tea Party era.

He tells me his top legislative priorities would include reigning in federal bureaucracies, cutting red tape and regulations, and expanding school choice.

Education reform, in particular, is an issue close to Freitas’s heart.

“When we look at what’s going on with COVID-19 right now, we see the problem when the government tries to monopolize our education system,” he told me. “If we’re serious about having an education system that is as diverse and effective as the student body it seeks to serve, then we’re going to need a system where we actually have a marketplace of ideas.”

Freitas is deeply concerned with deficit spending, two words one rarely hears from Republican politicians these days.

When I pressed Freitas on the fact that Trump promised to eliminate the entire debt during his 2016 campaign but has actually overseen record deficits, he argued the real blame for that rests with congressional Republicans and that they can’t afford to make the same mistake again.

“If we get a Republican Congress and we keep the White House and still don’t get our deficit spending under control … we’ll have a lot to answer for to the American people,” he said. “If you look at the fiscal status of our country right now, it is going to require people who are willing to take unpopular votes to do what’s right.”

On social issues, though, Freitas is threading the needle between the cosmopolitan beliefs of young Republicans and the more socially conservative orthodoxies found in the halls of the Heritage Foundation.

The result? He’s staunchly pro-life but also voted to decriminalize marijuana. He takes a neutral stance on gay marriage, preferring to get the government out of marriage altogether, but opposes adding anti-discrimination protections for gay and transgender people to the law.

Freitas’s mix of libertarian inclinations and conservative roots similarly manifests itself in his criminal justice reform platform.

“My father was a police officer and a homicide detective … but unfortunately, criminal justice reform has taken on this tenure of being anti-law enforcement,” he said. “And that’s why I haven’t been able to support a lot of the bills in our special legislative session here in Virginia.”

Freitas does support moderate criminal justice reform, though.

He said he would support reforming and rolling back, but not eliminating altogether, qualified immunity, the judicially invented legal doctrine that often shields government officials, such as police officers, from civil liability for abuses of power. In the same vein, he would support rolling back, but not eliminating, “no-knock” search warrants, which have led to tragedies such as the death of Breonna Taylor.

As for Freitas’s disposition on the culture war?

“Just take [these issues] out of the hands of the government, and a lot of this just goes away,” he said. “We can all live our lives in terms of our own conscience and our own beliefs without having to force someone else to agree with us. Coexistence is not a bumper sticker you put on your car. Coexistence is resisting the urge to coerce those who you can’t convince.”

This stance is part and parcel of Freitas’s overall approach to politics.

“Every human being has inherent worth [even though] we’re going to disagree on some things,” he stressed. “[We should] maximize individual liberty and allow people to make choices. Let the best ideas rise to the top.”

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a freelance journalist and Washington Examiner contributor.