Tiberi looks forward to new works as a congressman

Tiberi

DUSTIN ENSINGER

Staff Writer

Despite spend­ing 12 years in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. as a con­gress­man, U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Genoa Town­ship) feels as though he has plenty of work left to do.

It is not that he feels that his accom­plish­ments from his first six terms are lack­ing. It is just that he believes he has a lot of work to do in order to clean what he sees as a mess left by the poli­cies of Pres­i­dent Barack Obama.

“We have to con­tinue to fight the president’s lib­eral poli­cies and get a new pres­i­dent in the White House to accom­plish our goals and solve our prob­lems,” he said.

If sent back to Con­gress for a sev­enth term, one of Tiberi’s top goals is to repeal the Afford­able Care Act, oth­er­wise deri­sively known as Obamacare.

He pointed to the recent con­tro­versy over a por­tion of the law that requires even reli­gious insti­tu­tions to cover birth con­trol in their employee health care coverage.

“There is now a reg­u­la­tion that’s going to go into effect that trumps the reli­gious free­dom that we have his­tor­i­cally abided by,” he said. “It’s really outrageous.”

Tiberi also plans to focus on less­en­ing the reg­u­la­tory bur­den put on busi­ness by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, he said, which he believes is the key to get­ting the econ­omy back on track.

“This admin­is­tra­tion has made the econ­omy worse because of inter­ven­tion into the pri­vate sec­tor,” he said.

“This admin­is­tra­tion, though its reg­u­la­tory poli­cies, has cre­ated a stub­bornly longer reces­sion than we needed to have,” he added.

Also on Tiberi’s con­gres­sional to-do list is tack­ling the national debt and reform­ing the nation’s enti­tle­ment programs.

“Our bud­get is going to try and reform our Medicare sys­tem,” he said. “Hope­fully we get a pres­i­dent in the next year that will work with us on it.”

But to do all that, he will first have to defeat pri­mary chal­lenger Bill Yarbrough.

Tiberi said that he doesn’t know much about his oppo­nent, but he is con­fi­dent that his track record will pro­pel him to vic­tory over Yarbrough.

“I don’t know a lot about my oppo­nent other than the fact that he’s a reg­is­tered Lib­er­tar­ian run­ning in a Repub­li­can pri­mary,” he said.

Yarbrough has been on the offen­sive in the cam­paign, set­ting up a web­site dubbed TiberiTragedy.com that high­lights a hand­ful of the six-term congressman’s votes over the years.

Tiberi said that many of the votes his oppo­nent points to are taken out of context.

“Over the course of my years there in Wash­ing­ton, I have cast about 7,800 votes,” he said.

He also pointed out that he has got­ten things done in the form of leg­is­la­tion over the years, even if it the final bill that passed was not always exactly as how he wished it were written.

“You can’t let the per­fect be the enemy of the good,” he said, adding that he has had to deal with divided gov­ern­ment vir­tu­ally his entire con­gres­sional career. “You have to gov­ern in Wash­ing­ton D.C. I’m one of 535. I can’t get my way every time.”

Tiberi said that he stands by his con­ser­v­a­tive cre­den­tials, point­ing out that his office has refunded the U.S. Trea­sury more than $2 mil­lion in unused funds over the years, and he has done it with­out seek­ing fanfare.

“I pride myself on not being a show horse or a show­boat. I just try to qui­etly get the job done,” he said.

Despite his con­gres­sional dis­trict being recon­fig­ured, Tiberi is still con­fi­dent that vot­ers will send him back to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to fin­ish what he started.

“I’m a con­ser­v­a­tive,” he said. “The most con­ser­v­a­tive county in the dis­trict is still Delaware County.”

Posted by Dustin Ensinger on Feb 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.