The Right to Life

As a proud mother and grandmother, I am profoundly aware of the precious value of every God-given life. The right to life is the most basic right given to us by God, as our Founders rightly recognized.

Defending innocent, voiceless lives at all stages and promoting family values is of utmost importance to me. That’s one reason I am a proud member of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, Congressional Prayer Caucus and Values Action Team.

As a pro-life champion, I will never waver in my support of efforts to halt the scourge of abortion, including banning elective abortion on developed, unborn children capable of feeling pain and ending federal funding of the abortion industry.

A nation that glibly aborts its unborn children is a nation that is destroying its future and best hope for flourishing. I am committed to celebrating and protecting life from conception to natural death, so that we pass on a heritage of life to coming generations, with the knowledge that every person is made with dignity in the image of their Creator.

Religious Liberty

I am also strongly committed to protecting the religious liberty of Americans of faith. Today too many Americans are being coerced or punished for simply living out their sincere and deeply held religious beliefs.

Tolerance is not a one-way street. Rather, it is a wide boulevard where people of many different beliefs or worldviews can live, work and worship alongside each other. Our nation was built on Judeo-Christian values—including the value of loving our neighbors regardless of how they worship—and we would be wise to continue to honor these values.

The First Amendment clearly states that Congress shall make no law establishing a state religion. But it also prohibits Congress from prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That means our Constitution guarantees Americans the freedom to worship, think, speak, and believe as they choose. Forcing Americans to conform to state-approved and politically-correct forms of expression, or to check their religious beliefs at the door when engaging in any sort of public debate is wrong. So, I will continue to fight for religious liberty and to honor and carry on our long-standing religious heritage.

I am the granddaughter of Italian immigrants who came to America seeking opportunity, liberty and prosperity. We are a nation of immigrants, and this is a great strength of ours. We are also a nation of laws, which is one thing that sets us apart from so many despotic regimes throughout the world and throughout time.

It is our rule of law—the right of every American to equal protection under the law—that makes us great. In fact, this rule of law is part of what makes our nation so attractive for anyone seeking to escape injustice, poverty or oppression around the world.

While our immigration system is broken, we must not seek to reform it by destroying the very thing that makes our nation strong, our rule of law. Thus, our guiding light on immigration reform should be to secure our borders, uphold our laws, and protect our national security. This is why I support President Trump’s efforts to enforce our current immigration laws and secure our border.

If we start with these principles, we can make progress to reform our immigration system, so that it works for everyone: for families, workers, employers and taxpayers.

One of our nation’s founding and Constitutional principles is your right to keep and bear arms. These Second Amendment rights are enshrined in our Constitution for a reason: Americans must have the ability to defend themselves and their loved ones from those who wish to do them harm.

As a lifelong supporter of your right to keep and bear arms, I am dedicated to fighting government efforts that infringe on law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights. Importantly, the right to keep and bear arms is not just for hunters and sport shooters. If the Second Amendment means anything, it means that this is an enumerated right for all American citizens who wish to arm themselves and to defend their property and the people they hold dear. If we want to remain a free nation, this is a right that must not be infringed.

Every single American, especially those with disabilities or other pre-existing conditions, deserve access to affordable coverage that puts patients in control of their health care choices. I am committed to lowering costs and offering more choices to make our nation’s health care system work better. I have voted for real solutions to lower health care costs, including lowering drug prices, ending surprise billing, reducing premiums, cutting out-of-pocket costs, and providing tax relief.

I will continue to oppose radical policies like “Medicare for All,” legislation that would eliminate private insurance and disrupt coverage for hundreds of millions of Americans. Medicare for All would cost at least $32 trillion, effectively bankrupting our nation. It would kick employees off their employer-sponsored health care plans and end popular Medicare Advantage plans.

I will continue to advocate for patient-centered solutions that increase access, lower costs, and protect the vulnerable in our society. I have consistently supported legislation to that end, including

• The Pre-existing Conditions Protection Act of 2019 to prohibit application of pre-existing condition exclusions and to guarantee availability of health insurance coverage in the individual and group market
• The Association Health Plans Act of 2019 to expand access to association health plans for American small businesses and working families, including self-employed business owners
• The Health Care PRICE Transparency Act to provide for hospital and insurer price transparency
• The 21st Century Cures Act to increase the discovery and development of life-saving treatments
• The Lower Costs, More Cures Act of 2019 to lower the cost of prescription drugs for Americans
• The Ban Surprise Billing Act of 2020 to protect patients from devastating surprise medical bills

Providing for our national security is the most critical and constitutional role of the federal government. That is why I enthusiastically support President Trump’s work to strengthen and rebuild our military. A strong, well-trained and well-equipped military is the cornerstone of defending our country.

We must continue to ensure our brave warfighters have the resources they need to tackle the current and future threats facing our nation. That’s why I’ve consistently and proudly supported the National Defense Authorization Act. This legislation strengthens our military’s readiness, provides our troops with a well-deserved pay raise, increases the number of men and women in uniform, and ensures that our service-members have the equipment and skills necessary to protect our country.

A strong military means a strong America. But without our men and women in uniform, we cannot have a strong military. We owe it to them to honor their sacrifices and keep our promises to them. That means we should reform our veteran’s healthcare system to ensure that affordable health care remains available to our military members and their families, both while they are serving and after. This is a basic obligation we have to those who willingly serve our nation, and I will continue to fight to see that this obligation is honored.

Lastly, the world is in desperate need of strong leadership to stave off threats to peace and security, and American leadership is the remedy to these threats. I strongly supported and voted for the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a forceful and bipartisan bill to impose economic sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea. These regimes threaten U.S. national security and undermine global stability through their aggressive acts, and this legislation has been instrumental in holding them accountable in the 21st Century.

Economic growth and workforce development are the cornerstones of prosperity for North Carolina families. If our nation and state are going to thrive, we must ensure North Carolinians are given the opportunities they need to support their families and achieve the American Dream.

While the federal government isn’t a job-creator, it can help foster an economy where there are plentiful jobs by lowering taxes, reducing red-tape, and creating economic certainty.

Another issue vital to a modern, competitive economy in North Carolina is workforce development. Helping workers obtain the skills necessary to fill the technology-based and service jobs that make up the modern economy will put us on a path towards a strong economy for decades to come.

As with traditional education, efforts to promote skills development should be led by the states and local communities. I am proud to be a leader in helping these communities ensure they have the authority they need to succeed in building strong workforce development programs.

Thomas Jefferson said, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

As Jefferson knew, without world-class education we cannot hope for our republic to endure, which makes education one of the most important issues facing our nation. The best fixes to our education system will come from parents, teachers, and local and state leaders. These people must be the driving force behind ensuring students of all ages in North Carolina and across the country receive the best education possible.

As the U.S. Constitution reserved authority over education to the states, the federal role in education should be reduced wherever possible, and the federal government should never be allowed to impose top-down dictates like Common Core on states. North Carolinians know best how to invest in education that ensures student success and I have great trust in our state’s ability to be a leader on education.

If we want strong economic growth and increasing economic freedom we need a fair tax system, which starts with low taxes. That’s why I strongly supported President Trump’s tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This tax legislation overhauled our tax system to simplify our tax code and lower tax rates for North Carolina families and small businesses.

While we can still do more to make sure our tax system works to incentivize job creation and a strong economy, this legislation was the most sweeping overhaul of our tax code in more than 30 years and has put us on a path that rewards hard work, job creation and innovation.

The other side of the tax coin is federal spending, which must be kept in check. To ensure our children and grandchildren have the same opportunities we have enjoyed, I am fighting to move the federal government toward a balanced budget.

We must continue to cut wasteful federal spending and redirect limited funds to federal priorities such as national defense and protecting programs Americans rely on such as Social Security and Medicare. Taking these commonsense steps now will ensure that the federal budget gets back on sound footing and that our children and grandchildren face a future of opportunity, not debt.

Over the past decade, the United States has moved from being utterly dependent on foreign sources of oil to become the world’s top oil producer. We’ve moved from being a net importer of natural gas to become a net exporter of natural gas. In short, we are now a global energy superpower. This has resulted in lower energy bills for all Americans, less costly stops at the gas pump, and most importantly, hundreds of thousands of new, well-paying jobs for American workers.

I believe it is important to protect our environment for current and future generations. I am committed to a serious, solutions-oriented approach to environmental protection. Rather than top-down regulations that stifle growth and innovation, we should build upon the principles of innovation, conservation, and adaption. And this approach has been working. In 2017, U.S. carbon emissions were the lowest since 1992, thanks to strong competition in the private energy sector. We want America’s innovators to develop the next technologies that will improve the environment and create jobs here at home, but that won’t happen with overly prescriptive federal regulations.

The federal government is simply too big.

The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The Framers of our Constitution wisely believed in a limited government and the principles of federalism.

Today the federal government has outgrown its constitutionally enumerated authorities and much of the power it currently wields should be returned to the states. At the very least, the federal government should cease its encroachment on the authority of state and local governance, and that is why I have consistently introduced and gained support for the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act in the House of Representatives. This bipartisan legislation would help alleviate the burdens of harmful federal mandates on states, local governments, and the private sector.

I will continue to fight to halt the growth of the federal government in its tracks and return to the states their constitutionally granted governing powers.