‘Meet with Pete’ event draws crowd to downtown gathering
Just a year after being appointed to the United States Senate Pete Ricketts told local constituents Monday in Aurora that he is focused on pushing back against the Biden Administration on issues involving overregulation, overtaxation and overspending.
The Republican senator spent an hour in town as part of a “Meet with Pete” event hosted by International Workforce Services on the south side of the downtown square. A crowd estimated at 70-plus listened intently to a 15-minute presentation, followed by one-on-one contacts with Ricketts and members of his staff.
Ricketts shared that he is concerned by what is coming out of the Biden Administration, beginning with spending levels which he believes are driving the inflation factor.
“If you go back and look at their stimulus bill they passed, they spent $1.9 trillion,” Ricketts began. “You can tie inflation directly back to that and part of what that has led to is that a family today is spending $11,434 more to basically have the same standard of living that they had when Joe Biden took office.”
As for what he termed overregulation, Ricketts cited Biden’s directive that by 2032 two-thirds of all vehicles sold will have to be electric.
“If you’ve ever driven electric vehicles they’re cool,” he said. “They get super acceleration, but in places like Nebraska they’re not very practical.”
In the recent cold spell, for example, Ricketts cited reports of electric batteries not holding up in the frigid temperatures. That, he said, and the fact that members of the Environment and Public Works Committee on which he serves cannot answer what he believes are basic questions regarding the transmission lines, minerals and power generation necessary for nationwide EV use.
“They really are just printing regulations and throwing things against the wall to see what happens,” he said. “That’s not the way you run a business and that’s not the way they should work.”
“There are other solutions out there,” Ricketts continued, “like hybrids. You can build 60 to 90 hybrids for the batteries of an EV. Or we have some Nebraska solutions, like flex-fuel vehicles … that are great for our farmers and ranchers. And we actually have a distribution system already for that, called gas stations. So we have solutions, and that’s part of what I want to do is bring our Nebraska-based solutions to Washington to help solve these problems.”
Ricketts said he has introduced legislation based on programs that worked well in Nebraska, including a SNAP Next Step program designed to help people on food stamps, as well a proposal to reduce the taxes on Social Security and veteran’s benefits.
The third major issue he addressed Monday involves keeping people safe, which right now is a major concern on the southern border.
“We have a wave of illegal immigration that is coming across and the Biden Administration absolutely created this problem,” he said. “There have been 6.6 million contacts of people trying to come across that border by customs and border protection, and that does not include the 1.8 million “got-aways” of people who Customs Border Patrol could not get to.”
Ricketts said he has been to the Mexican border four times, where he learned of abuse of the asylum system, with people wanting better jobs falsely seeking asylum, as well as abuse of the parole system. He reported that approximately 5,600 people were paroled per year, on average, in the Obama and Trump administrations, while last year under Biden that total topped 1.2 million.
“That is absolutely abuse of the parole systems and abuse of the executive power to do this and it’s one of the things that we’ve got to stop,” he said.
The growing number of illegal immigrants is leading to other issues, Ricketts continued, including human trafficking of children, drug trafficking and national security concerns regarding the number of people on the terrorist watchlist.
“So for a variety of reasons the Biden Administration has allowed this to go on and it’s a catastrophe,” he added. “We’re going to continue to push back against this.”
Finally, Ricketts mentioned a 370-page border bill which he received Sunday night. He said he asked for at least three days to read and understand the bill, though he expects Sen. Chuck Schumer to bring it to a vote Wednesday of this week.
Ricketts is up for re-election in the fall, hoping to finish the unexpired term of former Sen. Ben Sasse.