Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Congressman Duncan Hunter. Here are some excerpts of that interview…

On border security:

HOC: Another question for you about the fence, if I could Congressman. About two weeks ago I wrote a story on the Conservative Voice. I called the story “Bush Fails on the Fence”. I know that you were one of the primary sponsors of the Secure Fence Act.

DH: I wrote it.

HOC: Yes sir. As the article states, and your quote in that story, you basically stated, “I drafted that bill and doggone it, it’s the law. Follow the law”. Can you give me a little bit of your thoughts on how this administration has watered down border security and kind of swept that part of national security under the rug, so to speak?

DH: Well, first I do consider border security primarily a national security issue. And I built the double fence when the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, between San Diego and Tijuana. Which at that point was the number one smuggler's corridor in America through which most of the illegal aliens and narcotics that came into our country were smuggled. We built the San Diego border fence, and it’s a double fence. It’s not like that little scraggly fence that you see on CNN with everybody climbing over it. If anybody can climb our fence, we will send them to the Olympics immediately.

On the Fair Tax:

HOC: Well, God love you for that Congressman. I don’t want to spend this entire time on immigration because your stance on that is fairly well known. But you’re positions are quite conservative and I tend to agree with you on a lot of those issues. What I would like to do is talk about fiscal discipline and some of the things that you’ve proposed. On your website, it quite clearly states that we must “aggressively attack the creation and funding of duplicative federal programs” and you want to do that by reforming certain departments. I want to ask you, is that going to include reducing or taking steps to eliminate agencies like the Department of Education and the IRS?

DH: First, lets take the last one first. I’m a sponsor of the Fair Tax. Now we spend about $250 billion a year plus preparing, defending and shaping our lives around the tax code of the United States. That’s money that doesn’t go to feed anybody. It doesn’t go to send any kids to college. It doesn’t go to create new jobs. It’s just paperwork money that is a cost to the American citizen. And if we have the Fair Tax, we eliminate that massive overhead, that massive bureaucracy. I like that. Another thing I like about the Fair Tax is it gives a more level playing field on trade. Because our dumb bunnies, the people that negotiated our trade deals with the rest of the world, said this: Every other trading partner in the world gets to refund its taxes to its manufacturers, they have value added taxes. So, they all work tax free. Every country can do that under the deal we signed except one country. Guess who? The United States of America.

Don’t be mistaken. Duncan Hunter is a true conservative. And he deserves a good, hard look. The entire interview can be heard here, in the pod-viewer.