Bristol Times - Griffith's Agenda Includes Rules for Congress, More Jobs

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By Debra Mccown

If 9th District congressional candidate Morgan Griffith is elected, he plans to improve the rules of Congress, help block what he calls job-killing legislation, and find ways to bring more jobs to places like Southwest Virginia.

Those were three goals he laid out in an interview Friday with the Bristol Herald Courier editorial board, amid answering questions on energy issues and health care.

Griffith, the GOP nominee for the job, is challenging 14-term Democratic Congressman Rick Boucher, who will speak with the editorial board Tuesday.

On Friday, Griffith, who is from Salem, argued that every elected official has a shelf life -- and Boucher, who is from Abingdon, has reached the end of his.

"I want to go and ask questions that I'm sure haven't been asked in the last five or six years, look at data and just ask questions, explore, figure out, try to problem-solve," Griffith said Friday. "That's what I do in the [state] legislature, that's what's made me successful in Virginia, and I want to do that up there [in Washington]."

A nine-term member of the Virginia House of Delegates who currently serves as its majority leader, Griffith said he decided to run for Congress because he's begun to feel that, no matter how much good he's doing in Richmond, the federal government is controlling more and more of what's happening in people's lives.

At the end of the day, Griffith still says Boucher is a nice guy. But Griffith thinks 27 years in the nation's capital have distorted Boucher's perspective.

Boucher has said he's very much in touch with voters in Southwest Virginia, and he helped write and voted in favor of a controversial carbon dioxide regulation scheme called "cap and trade" because it's in the best interest of the coal industry and his constituents who depend on that industry.

Boucher argues that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with authority from the U.S. Supreme Court to regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, will impose a worse regulatory program if Congress does not enact one first.

Griffith said Friday that the argument is a copout. He said the court decision was merely an interpretation of the law -- and Congress can simply pass new legislation restricting the EPA's power.

"We're not going to control global warming by the United States unilaterally," Griffith said, adding that he believes the science behind climate change theory is shaky and the technology isn't available yet to absorb carbon regulations without severe harm to the economy.

If carbon regulations are put in place, he said, "We will have raised the cost of all goods, we will have raised the cost of electricity and we will have put a lot of people [including coal miners and factory workers] out of work."

"I think no answer is probably the right answer, and I think it ought to rest in the hands of Congress [not the EPA] to make those decisions," he said. "It's not inevitable; it is in the balance. A change in Congress can change the balance."

Griffith said instead of taking unilateral action to reduce carbon emissions at home, U.S. leaders could do more with an effort to export existing air quality regulations to other countries, particularly China, one of the world's largest economies and a country where factories and power plants operate with little environmental regulation.

On health care, he said the federal legislation passed earlier this year should be repealed and Congress should go back to the drawing board to develop better solutions to health care system problems.

"I think we need a lot of little fixes that hopefully will make the system better," Griffith said.

Among the fixes he proposed: allowing policies to be created across state lines, creating incentives for health savings accounts, developing insurance pools for small businesses and capping the amount that can be awarded in malpractice suits.

He also said health care would be less expensive if doctors, like lawyers, could be found on every street corner and efforts should be made to train more of them. Also, he said, certain medications, such as allergy drugs for chronic suffers, should be available from pharmacies without unnecessary doctor appointments.

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