Jim Hagedorn Post-Debate Full Interview

Oh, it went great. We had a fun time. It was a clear contrast on the issues, and I think I showed that the congressman's been out there 10 years, things have gotten worse, some of the votes he's cast have made them worse, and I stand for the big bold solutions needed in order to defend the country, get the economy rolling, and protect our God-given rights.

It just means protecting the country, securing the country, staying true to the ideals of the country. So when I talk about securing our borders, protecting our country from coming from areas that, for instance, hate America, having a refugee settlement timeout, that's what I mean. Take back our country, make sure that we're protected and we're secure. One of the things that we didn't get into tonight that I wish we had had more time would have been, I support the concept, for instance, on refugees of safe zones over in the war-torn areas to make sure that they're close to their homelands. We can protect them. We can do that a lot cheaper than bringing them here. It's $220,000, I think, per refugee. We can care for 10 or 15 people for that kind of money over in their areas. We can repatriate them then to their home countries. It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I think any group like that that's organized, that they're funded, they have professionals that go out and protest and riot. We've seen on a number of occasions that they've been out supposedly protesting but they didn't have a permit, blocking traffic. Look what happened in Minneapolis, in St. Paul after the State Fair in 2015. You know, I think it was the 28th or the 29th of August, the Democrat National Committee met in Minneapolis. They passed a resolution in support of Black Lives Matter. My opponent, Congressman Walz, was at that meeting that day. When the Democrat Party is on record of supporting Black Lives Matter, the next day they went to the Minnesota State Fair and disrupted things. They said, 'Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.' Unacceptable. Every Democrat in the country should have denounced the organization and taken back their endorsement. They didn't do that, unfortunately. But when you see across the country, I believe that the group Black Lives Matter has contributed to social unrest, to the deaths of police officers, to rioting, to the loss of commerce and all sorts of other things, and they've done it in an illegal manner in many cases. So I'm a law and order guy. I think that everyone in our society has the obligation to maintain law and order, to obey the law, to respect authority, respect the police, and also anyone who makes mistakes, including the police, should be prosecuted under the law, and it should be equitable and the law should apply to everyone the same.

Well, I'm responding to the problem. The problem in Minnesota is we have a terrorist recruiting problem from existing refugees that came here mostly from East Africa under the current vetting process. That's not my opinion. That's Andrew Luger, the U.S. Attorney from Minnesota appointed by President Obama's Justice Department. Minnesota has a terrorist recruiting problem. We just had an attack in St. Cloud of an extremist supremacist Muslim who attacked eight people, nine people. And why can't that happen anywhere else? Unfortunately, it can. Minnesota has had something like 14 people that wanted to join ISIS and go halfway around the world to conduct operations for Islamic radical jihad. And luckily they didn't want to do that here. They wanted to travel all the way over halfway across the world. Unfortunately, we have a problem. And so I look at that and what is the problem? The problem is that we have people who are Islamic supremacists who adhere to the ideology of radical Islam. That's my belief. I believe a lot of people share that. And that's just identifying the enemy, identifying the problem. You know, my opponent was a National Guardsman. I respect his service, but one of the things that almost every military person is told is if you can't identify the enemy, you're never going to defeat the enemy. And I believe that our country is at war right now with Islamic supremacists.

I don't understand bipartisanship. To me, I mean, look at our neighboring congressman up there in the Seventh District, Collin Peterson. He supports regulatory reform, he supports pro-life positions, he's against amnesty for illegal aliens. Those are all positions that I share. He and I are very bipartisan. Collin Peterson and I agree on the issues. Congressman Walz is the outcast. He's the partisan over there with President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the others who oppose those programs or are on the other side of them. So, you know, it just depends which way you want to look at it.

In the House, the way it works is that you have one vote more than half controls the body. And so you put your bills together, the committees are run by the majority party. I'd be in the majority as a Republican. You put your bills together, you pass them, you send them to the Senate where the compromise comes in is when the Senate then moves on that bill and sends it back and they go to conference and there may be ideas here and ideas there. It's still run by the majority in the House as to who compromises, but ideas are what matter. President Reagan rebuilt our economy by cutting taxes across the board and deregulating. You know, 10% of the Democrats in the House joined him. Were they bipartisan? Was he bipartisan? I don't know how you want to look at that. He rebuilt America's defenses. There wasn't a lot of compromise in those areas. He had ideas, he sold them to the people, he made it happen. I think that you just go, you stand for principle, you fight for what you believe, you bring ideas to the table, you make it happen. You know, when I was an executive in the U.S. Treasury Department, I had an idea. I looked at my agency and said we can be more efficient. My boss gave me the go-ahead. We put a proposal together, a bill, took it to Capitol Hill. I worked with Republicans, Democrats, I worked with the Clinton Administration, I worked with interest groups. We brought it all together and we passed what was called the EFT 99 Act. And it made the Financial Management Service, the agency that I represented as their Director of Legislative and Public Affairs, it closed their check-writing centers, it eliminated the use of checks and moved towards electronics. It saved the taxpayers about $200 million a year and improved service. That's a way to identify a problem, work with people, make it happen. So I think a lot of it is just the will. Do you have the will to go reform Washington, reform the agencies or not? And so in this case, I may have an advantage because I know where those bodies are buried out there.

No, we had a great debate. We had a lot of fun.

Okay, you bet. Good to see you.

Sure. You going to follow us around? You won't be in Rochester tomorrow?

They're taping it and then playing it back. Half hour. First half, I think, is because what time are you actually?

Okay, so it's actually at 6:30 then tomorrow night?