Boone Chamber Candidate Forum: U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx Not Ready To Step Aside Yet; Josh Brannon a No Show

By Jesse Wood

Oct. 22, 2014. At the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce candidate forum on Tuesday evening, voters heard from U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, who is seeking a sixth consecutive term. While Foxx attended the forum, her opponent Josh Brannon of Vilas, who was invited, did not.

On Tuesday, Foxx spoke out against the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare. She also spoke out against the minimum wage, adding that lower paying jobs are “starter jobs” and with increased skills, people can work up the pay-scale ladder.

Asked about civility in Congress between the parties, Foxx said that the “media plays up anger and disagreement from the people in Congress, and it’s not like that in real life. It’s simply not like that.”

She mentioned 384 bills that passed the U.S. House and went onto the U.S. Senate the last year.

“Almost all of them passed with bipartisan support,” Foxx said.

On the topic of less government or more government, Foxx said that conservatives don’t believe in zero government because that would be anarchy. She mentioned that the primary governmental role should be the defense of this nation as local and state governments can’t defend the nation.

“But the greatest threat to this country is federal spending and the debt we currently have,” Foxx said, adding that those two things put our quality of life and culture in “great danger.”

“If we don’t do something about federal spending then we will lose our country as we know it,” Foxx said.

She also tackled questions pertaining to student loan debt being toxic – saying that students should look at attending community college the first two years – and immigration. She blamed unions for destroying the decades-old Bracero Program, which allowed immigrants to enter the country legally to work.

She noted that the current system needs reform because the “paperwork is terrible and very expensive for employers to bring people here legally.”

Her solution: “First we should secure the border and then talk about how to make it better” by bringing in people who have the skills U.S. employers need.

See her closing statement, in which she says she”s not ready to step aside just yet, in the video above.

In July when second-quarter campaign finance reports were filed, Foxx recorded that she had $2.1 million cash on hand while Brannon had just more than $5,000 in pocket. Foxx had also spent more than $300,000 during the election cycle, while Brannon’s campaign noted $0 in expenditures.