Sit down with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills) for any length of time and you’re likely to hear Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson or Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in one conversation.
Verbatim.
The eight-term Congressman, who is seeking a ninth term with California’s open primary just six days away, was in Turlock on Tuesday to visit Pitman High School civics students and answer questions that were sent to him as part of a class project.
“(History) offers us enormous guidance,” said McClintock. “I just told the high school kids this: there are very few new ideas in the world. They’ve all been tried many times before. Perhaps the next time we’re trying out a bold new idea, we ought to look back in the history books and see how that bold new idea worked the last 10 times we tried it.”
When asked what was at stake in the 2024 election, McClintock leaned on America’s 16th president for the answer.
“The same that was at stake in Lincoln’s time, when he said that their generation would be remembered in spite of itself,” said McClintock, who graduated from UCLA in 1978 with a degree in political science. “Because theirs would either ‘nobly save or meanly lose this, the last best hope of mankind on this earth.’ I think that wheel has come full circle. We’re deciding the future of the country in a way we have rarely done in past elections.”
Of paramount importance to McClintock is the crisis along the southern border. He credited Trump-era policies with having slowed immigration “to a trickle,” and said that President Biden currently possesses the tools necessary to stem the tide of illegal immigration, which is one reason he voted against the recent border-security bill that was tied to aid to Ukraine and Israel.
“Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the president has huge discretion to simply say we’re not admitting anymore aliens from any group, for any reason,” said McClintock. “This bill would’ve made the implementation of those policies impossible. This bill would’ve said to a future president, ‘You no longer have that discretion to secure the border as long as illegal crossings do not exceed 4,000 persons a day. So, the next president would have to, under law, accept 4,000 illegal entries every single day before he even had the option of taking any action. And it would not be until it reached 5,000 a day that he’d be required to.
“Now, the argument is, that it’s better than under the Biden Administration, and that’s true. But it would make it impossible for the next president to actually use the authority that’s in current law to secure the border. That’s a huge problem to me.”
McClintock paid a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border last year and said he had conversations with Border Patrol officers.
“I was in Eagle Pass (Texas) with a group in January, and the chief of the Border Patrol there said, ‘Look, I am standing front of an open fire hydrant with a bucket. I don’t need more buckets. I need you to turn off the hydrant,” said McClintock. “The House has passed H.R. 2, which is largely the bill that I introduced in the judiciary committee. It tightens up asylum definitions; it raises the standard for credible fear; it would give the new president a lot of additional tools to secure the border. But the problem is not new laws, the problem is the enforcement of our existing laws.”
According to McClintock, there’s only one way to solve the crisis.
“It’s not going to be solved by bills that won’t be passed or laws that won’t be enforced,” said McClintock. “The only way it’s going to be fixed is by the American people electing an administration that is actually determined to secure the border and enforce our laws and protect our people.”
Despite the defeat of the border-security bill, which was tied to aid for Ukraine and Israel, McClintock favors sending arms to both nations.
“I’m not interested in paying for the pension plans of Ukrainian bureaucrats; I am not interested in sending aid to Gaza, but I believe that both Ukraine and Israel desperately need American arms and that we need to provide those arms for our own security,” said McClintock. “Because if we allow (Russian President) Putin or Hamas to succeed, the signal to every other rogue nation — Iran, North Korea, and especially China — is going to be unmistakable. So, yes to arms, but only for arms and not to pay their internal bills. We have $34 trillion of our own internal bills to pay.”
McClintock considers the U.S. national debt a crisis on par with border security.
“Our interest costs now exceed our entire defense budget, which is $800 billion, give or take,” said McClintock. “The debt is a clarion warning that we don’t dare go much further down this road.”
McClintock sited President Truman’s post-war strategy of slashing of federal income tax, abolishing the Excess Profits Tax, and cutting the federal budget by more than 60 percent in a single year, and firing 10 million federal employees.”
“They Keynesians at the time were predicting 25 percent unemployment and a second Great Depression,” said McClintock. “Instead, we got the post-war economic boom.”
McClintock represents California’s solidly red 5th congressional district. In the March 5 primary, he faces Independent Steve Wozniak and Democrat Mike Barkley, whom he defeated handily in 2022 to win the redrawn 5th, which includes portions of Turlock.
McClintock would be 68 years old at the start of a ninth term, and was asked how much longer he’d like to remain in politics?
“A newspaper editor once asked Winston Churchill that very question,” said McClintock. “And Churchill’s response was, ‘Mr. Editor, I fight for my corner. And Mr. Editor, I leave when the pub closes.’”
McClintock is fond of quoting the former British prime minister, but Lincoln seems to be his personal favorite.
Is Honest Abe a personal hero?
“Yes, but I was just a little kid at the time,” joked McClintock. “I think Lincoln understood the principles of the American founding as well, or even better, than the American founders. … And those principles are ageless and offer us a great deal of guidance in our age.”
“So, you can’t go wrong quoting Lincoln.”