U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, says he wants to hear more from the GOP presidential hopefuls on China.
The Allouez Republican also isn’t ruling out voting for former President Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.
“I’ve said I want someone else to be the Republican nominee right now, someone younger who can actually carry on some of the Trump policies on China in a way,” Gallagher said on WISN’s “UpFront,” which is produced in partnership with WisPolitics. “But I have a no-boomer policy right now. No boomers for nominees.”
Gallagher and the ranking Dem member, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, hosted a roundtable in Stoughton last week as the committee continues to work on a bipartisan package targeting China.
“I’m cautiously optimistic we can hammer out an agreement,” Gallagher said. “We may not yet have agreement on the right solution, but given that the Biden administration has at least conceded the principle that there should be guardrails on the flow of U.S. capital to China, I think it’s just a question of how do we build those guardrails in the right way.”
Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are also pushing a nationwide ban on TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, or legislation that would force the sale of the company.
“There’s still a lot of work we’ve got to do,” Gallagher said. “No doubt it’s gotten more difficult in recent months, but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the issue.”
Also on the show, Don Millis, the GOP chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said Senate Republicans should keep Meagan Wolfe in her position as administrator at least through the 2024 election.
“I think the best place to continue is just either if the Senate were to confirm or just not act until the 2024 elections are over,” Millis said. “I don’t think removing her is going to resolve anything right now. I think that would be bad for the election process. I think it would be bad politically for Republicans, so I just think it would be unwise. Election security is an important issue, and we should be on the right side of it.”
Millis says he wished Wolfe would have testified at the confirmation hearing surrounding her appointment last week to push back on “fabrications and conspiracy theories.”
“My biggest disappointment was the attorney general advised Meagan Wolfe not to attend,” Millis said. “What we need here is truth about election processes, and I think a lot of the testimony that was produced at that testimony were fabrications and conspiracy theories that have no basis in law. And we need to fight back. We need to push back on that, and the fact there were very few people there to be able to push back on that, no one is probably better able to push back on some of the conspiracy theories that are out there than Meagan Wolfe.”
See more from the show here.
