Indiana’s new senator, Mike Braun, says his first order of business will be working on the budget. Braun was on Fox’s Ingraham Angle Wednesday night, the day before being sworn in as a freshman senator.
“We’ve got to get back to where we pass a budget under regular order and do things that I think most Hoosiers and Americans expect. And, that’s not to have a $4 trillion budget that we can’t seem to get balanced year after year,” he said.
Braun cited Indiana as a “functional state”, saying Hoosiers are able to work with the money they have.
“Where I come from, when I was on the school board, when I was in a functional state government and when I ran a business for 37 years, you’d have been laughed out of any one of those institutions if you were operating like the federal government does.”
Braun ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility. He said he believes the Senate and House need more members who are from “Main Street America”.
Braun also said he believes the government shutdown, which is only partial, will not cause the collapse of the government.
“Most of the government is funded. It’s a misstatement that the government id gonna fall apart. And, we’re gonna have to get used to having less government in the long run anyway, if we’re ever gonna balance a budget,” he said. It was unclear whether Braun was saying we can do without the parts of government that are being affected by the partial shutdown.
He also said Democrats need to show what border security they would be in favor of, and how much they’d be willing to spend on it.
Braun criticized freshman Sen. Mitt Romney’s attack on Pres. Trump, in an op-ed., saying it had a “political calculation” to it.
“For a Main Street entrepreneur like myself, from a functional state like Indiana, we were looking for something refreshing that was different from the past two or three decades, which Mitt Romney and others have been a part of.”
He called Romney’s statements peculiar.
