High-profile U.S. Senators continue to hit the campaign trail in Michigan to boost support for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) recently made a stop in Saginaw to co-host a round table event with college Republicans at Saginaw Valley State University with former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who's running to fill Michigan's open Senate seat.
Cornyn said Trump is the right candidate on immigration and that federal subsidies for electric vehicles are wrong for the free market.
He spoke about these issues and more with WCMU's AJ Jones.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
AJ Jones: I want to start out on foreign policy, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voters here in Michigan are paying very close attention to the Middle East. President Trump said that he would support Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. Would you as a senator support such strikes and would they potentially lead to a wider war in the region?
Sen. John Cornyn: Well, I think unfortunately, on October the 7th, we saw the attack use of Iranian proxies against innocent civilians in Israel, and unfortunately that's provoked a humanitarian crisis, with Gaza with a lot of innocent people being killed. And that's tragic. If Hamas put down their arms today, the war would end. If Israel put down their arms today, there would be no more Israel. That is the goal of the stated goal of the supreme leader of Iran.
So, should Israel try to deter further attacks? I believe Israel should be given the freedom to do what they need in order to survive, and if they believe that the stopping nuclear weapons development by the number one state sponsor of international terrorism, which is Iran, that that's necessary to assure their survival, I would support it.
AJ: Moving on to a question on immigration. President Trump says that he wants to deport up to 11 million people. Economists and also Democrats have raised concerns that it will cause supply chain issues and job shortages in industries like agriculture, which is a big deal up here. What do you have to say to those concerns?
JC: Well, I think they've got it exactly backwards. First of all, legal immigration has been one of the best things that's ever happened to our country. Virtually everybody who's in America came here from somewhere else, or at least their parents, grandparents, or forebears did, and it's because we've had a legal system of immigration. It's orderly and humane, and it doesn't outsource our immigration policy to the cartels or criminal organizations that traffic in people, and drugs.
The problem is when you don't have an orderly, humane system of and legal system of immigration, when you open the borders up, you're opening them up to virtually anybody and everybody. You don't really know who's coming into the country and what their intentions are, and we know that there's probably around 2 million illegal immigrants who've evaded law enforcement, they're called the got-aways is what border patrol calls them. And I'm confident among those are people who are convicted criminals.
There are people who are drug mules, moving product like fentanyl into our high schools and which is now the leading cause of death for people between the age of 18 and 45 in America. So it's been an unmitigated disaster. Are immigrants important? Yes, they are, but legal immigration is, to me, the right way to do it. What the President and Vice President Harris have done is an unmitigated disaster, and we'll be paying for that for years and years to come.
AJ: Moving on to a question about housing policy and then I just have a couple more. Michigan is dealing with a housing crisis. What is the GOP's plan to address it?
JC: Well, first of all, one of the biggest causes of higher housing costs has been inflation, so that's primarily the responsibility of the federal government for spending way too much money recklessly for too long. We saw even after COVID, our Democratic colleagues on a party line vote spent $2.7 trillion dollars of additional federal funds.
That's a lot of money sloshing around the system, chasing limited resources and services. That's invariably going to cause inflation. So that's the primary reason why, housing costs have gone up, but I think there's a lot we can do in terms of permitting reform to allow new and different ways of meeting that need.
Obviously it's a, you know, it's a huge challenge. One of the things that reasons why I support more choices for students is because every time my wife and I have moved the first question we ask is, where are the best schools? But of course, those are usually the most expensive places to live, and we need to make sure that education is equally available to all students. Regardless whether they can afford to live in the wealthiest neighborhoods in their community.
AJ: American auto industry, obviously a big deal up here. If Trump cuts subsidies and mandates for electric vehicles, like he's promised, foreign automakers will obviously keep producing EV's. How will American companies keep up with foreign competition in the market?
JC: Well, I think I heard Congressman Rogers say he's for markets, not mandates. And I think that's the right answer. If people want to buy an electric vehicle, I think they should be free to do so. In my state and where I live in Austin, TX, I've been to the Tesla Giga factory, where they're ginning out all the electric vehicles you can imagine, but people are buying them because they want them and not because they're forced to buy them.
But to me, there's something fundamentally wrong with subsidizing, you know, let's say somebody like you having to pay to subsidize a wealthy person to buy electric vehicle that you may not be able to afford yourself. There's something fundamentally wrong with that, and plus it's exposed a lot of our vulnerabilities of our supply chains to things like critical minerals that are necessary to build batteries, and obviously those supply chains tend to go back to China, where we've over the years we've been sort of would let our guard down and become too dependent on them.
I think there's things we can do with our trade policy to make sure that foreign countries like China can't flood America with cheap EV's, and I think that's something we should look at. I'm generally in favor of free trade, but even more than free trade, I'm in favor of fair trade.
AJ: My final question, Senator, you've come all the way from Texas, what happens to voters here in Michigan, if Kamala Harris wins this election?
JC: Well, my view is you're going to get more of the same. If you look at public opinion polls, most people in America believe that we're on the wrong track. And so the only way you can't change things by doing the same thing over and over again, and so I think if people want change, then if they want to give the Republicans a chance to show what we can do, they can go back to the four years that President Trump was president, which was one of the best economies we've had in my lifetime, where our enemies feared us and where our friends trusted us.
We're in an environment where it's the most dangerous world we've seen since World War II because all these tyrants and autocrats and dictators from Russia to Iran to China to North Korea. They don't really fear us anymore, so they're going to keep coming, and that creates a very dangerous environment, and as you know, it doesn't take a lot to create the next war. And if we want prevent wars, then we need to establish deterrence, and the way we do that is to have a strong economy and the strongest and best military in the world. I just don't have any confidence that Kamala Harris, based on her performance over the last four years, is capable of doing that.
