Contact: Ian Martorana

Washington, D.C. – This morning, Congressman Ryan joined WTAQ’s Jerry Bader, WTMJ’s Jeff Wagner, and WBEL’s Stan Milam to discuss the House’s focus on doing work for members’ constituents. Excerpts of these interviews follow:

The House has been active: We’ve passed two big down payments on the military; we’ve passed Kate’s Law; we had a huge down payment on border security.”

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“We passed a lot of veteran’s bills this year already, 
but the one we passed and is now in law is the [VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act]. If you remember, because of a congressional investigation, we uncovered these waiting lists . . . and the VA was telling us there’s no waiting list. They basically were lying to Congress and the public about this. So, we’ve passed a new law to hold people accountable, to be able to fire people for malfeasance, to protect whistleblowers, to streamline the VA and to get these waiting lists under control. That bill is done, that’s in law.”

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We passed a complete overhaul on career and technical education. I think one of the important parts of getting people out of poverty is getting people skills they need to get a vocation, to get a career. And we have to emphasize that you don’t have to go to a four year college and get a Bachelor’s degree to be successful in life. You can go and get a good skill at Blackhawk Tech, at DeVry, at Parkside for two years if you want to. . . . I mean just over at United Alloy in Janesville they’re training welders themselves and after a few years you can get a really good living. You know, I was talking to the people over at Seneca Foods just the other day. They’ve got openings over there that can give people good starting wages with benefits, [and] 401ks, but we’ve got to make sure that people can get the skills they need to get those kinds of jobs.”

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We passed opioid legislation that is now being deployed and up and running. The day Jim Comey testified in the Senate was the day the House passed the bill to repeal and replace Dodd-Frank. In Wisconsin, our economy is financed by community banks. You name the town: Kaukauna, where my grandma’s from, or Fond du Lac where my mom’s from, or Janesville where I’m from—Community banks are what make those communities go. And Dodd Frank is just strangling these banks and strangling credit in our economy. We said to these banks: Get a nice conservative reserve ratio of 10 percent, and then you’re out of Dodd frank. We passed this.”

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What matters at the end of the day are results. Whether we get credit or not or whether we get attention or not, it really at the end of the day, doesn’t matter as long as we deliver. And that’s what we’re focusing on doing.

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