Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, Chancellor's professor of political science and director of Community Engagement and the American Democracy Project at Indiana University, South Bend.

For over 36 years, Fred Upton served as a United States representative, shaping policies and representing Southwest Michigan.

Join us as we delve into his remarkable political journey and his insights into the current state of Congress.

Thank you for joining us today.

Well, nice to be with you again.

We did this every year a couple of times.

And so thanks Thanks for what you do.

It is a great Sunday program.

Thank you so much.

We love having you and are delighted to have you back today.

I want to kind of start from the beginning and ask for you to talk a little bit about what motivated you to go into politics and how that motivation might have changed over the years.

Well, it was really you know, I wanted to be a sportswriter.

I was a journalism student at the University of Michigan, and I thought I'd cover the bears or the Lions or the Cubs, and I didn't get any calls.

It was I was I was a sports editor at the Michigan Daily, which was the student run newspaper.

But I met a young guy that was running for Congress.

He had some good ideas.

I had never been to Washington.

His name, of course, was Dave Stockton, and I volunteered to help him.

So I ran his campaign here in Barrigan County with a good friend of mine from Niles and a couple of other counties.

And we won.

And I went to Washington and I was in charge of constituent service.

It was a great job.

I came back quite a bit helping.

You know, if you could solve it in three words, you could solve it in three jobs.

That was sort of our view.

And so whether it was passports or working with local community leaders on roads and highways, U.S. 31 was one of the things that I worked on from a staffer through a member of Congress.

So one of the last things I did was cut the last segment with Governor Whitmer.

I would cut the ribbon back just a year or so ago.

But it was it was that life as a staffer never, never losing that, I think, and then running for office, I was encouraged to run by local leaders and first said no.

I said, gosh, I'm working at the White House.

I've got a great wife, still do two black labs meetings weekly with the president, President Reagan back then.

Why would I want a different life?

But they convinced me a second time to come back and run for office or say I beat the only incumbent to lose in a primary.

Then it was Mark Siljander and a pretty big margin.

56-44.

I said I'd serve only a few terms, but then Republicans took the majority and I ultimately became chairman, of course, of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee and with a lot of issues that we dealt with all in a bipartisan way that President Obama signed our last bill into law, which was 21st Century Cures a bill to speed up the approvals of drugs and devices.

That was coupled with $45 billion more in health research.

So the fight on cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc..

So it was a great career.

I had a wonderful team with me.

Some of my staffers were with me all 36 years, but we had a we had a good team, well respected.

But of course, with redistricting, they even took up the middle school out of my hometown, out of my home district.

I lived north of the river in St. Joe and so made it pretty impossible to run again.

So I'm happy my wife's happy.

That's the good thing.

I'm still engaged in a lot of different events and very involved with No Labels, but I'm also on a couple of boards and I travel back and forth to Washington quite a bit.

That's interesting.

It sounds like really helping people, whether it's one on one, dealing with that Social Security check that just didn't come or dealing with bigger issues of finding cures and getting things to people that they need and a policy level that that really kept motivating you throughout your career.

Well, that's right.

And, you know, as I found out, you know, today, members of Congress represent about 750,000 people.

So our district was a perfect square, county by county, a southwest Michigan swing district, for sure.

I always ran ahead of the presidential nominee for the Republicans by quite a bit, actually.

But at the end of the day, I felt that people didn't care if you had an R or a D, Republican or Democrat next to your name.

They just wanted the job done.

They wanted you to listen.

They wanted you to deal with their problems.

Sometimes even rewarding with you and reward you when they when you voted against your party, because sometimes that might be too one way or the other.

And as a consequence, we did pretty, pretty good on the political scene.

But, you know, our our our theory was always, you know, when your family comes first, you do your job second.

You know, I came home virtually every weekend.

No one made more.

No one made more votes than I did.

So I signed my name.

You know, I signed all my mail, I signed my name more than a million times.

But believe it or not, just something, Fred.

But people knew that I was going to listen.

And again, we had a great team both back in Washington and here at home in terms of casework and dealing with the issues.

The economy was always a big issue.

The Great Lakes are always a big issue.

Getting US 31 all the way done.

That started with my career back in 1977, and I finished it up in in 2022.

But it's a it's a great district, a lot of good people.

And I know today when I was over at Meijers getting a few things for my grandkids, a lot of people stopped me, recognized me and said, thanks for the job that he did.

My wife was with me.

We said, well thank her, too.

She was the one that really gave the most sacrifice, I think, for me.

Well, you've mentioned a few times idea of working across party lines to find solutions to big problems.

You mentioned No Labels.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that group is and what your goals are, including potentially even finding a third presidential candidate?

Well, this is really been interesting, actually.

No Labels has been around for about 15 years.

I was I was a vice chair of the Problems Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in the Congress, nearly 60 members in my days and we got a lot of things done, a lot of issues like the infrastructure bill and other things that we worked hard on.

And then there was a larger umbrella organization called No Labels, bipartisan, bicameral.

We had meetings in the Capitol virtually every month.

And during COVID, we had a lot of zoom meetings, just like what we're doing here today.

I'm doing this on Zoom, even though I look like I'm sitting right next to you there.

And I know that the camera folks will do the job, but No Labels.

It is a group that we came out and we started looking at what the ticket is going to look like in 24, 2024.

And today, as we as we talk it, it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee.

And it sure looks like Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee.

And we do some polling, you find out that nearly 70% of the American public does not want a rematch between these two.

And in fact, if you if you look at their own popularity numbers, it's it's under 40% for both.

And so we said, what about a unity ticket?

What about if we had a Republican and a Democrat on a bipartisan unity ticket?

How would they do if, in fact, it's Trump and Biden for the Republican and the Democrat and the numbers actually work out pretty well that a unity ticket could win.

So our focus right now so I guess you could call me somewhat of an insider.

So I'm trying to help as much as I can.

I was in New Hampshire, Maine, just a week or two ago on the campaign trail for them.

And we launched what I thought was a very good set of principles that we stand for, and anyone can find it on online.

It's on nolabels.org, nolabels.org pretty pretty easy to remember.

It's common sense principles, a little bit like the Contract with America that the Republicans did back in 94.

But we're beginning to do well.

Our big focus right now is to is to get on the ballot.

And so already we've collected the signatures and have been approved on a number of ballots, state ballots across the country, Michigan, Indiana.

We're not in the in the queue yet, but we just got out, I think was Mississippi's ballot in last week Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, etc.. We're on about over a dozen ballots now, and that's our focus for the end of the year.

We're going to have a national convention in March in Dallas.

And we looked about them to be on all 50 states ballot, just like Ross Perot was back 30 years ago when he ran.

But we actually think that there's a pathway to win, particularly if it's Biden and Trump, knowing that most of America doesn't really want that rematch to happen.

And when you see this chaos that's going on in Washington the last couple of weeks, for sure, you name the issue, it's like, can't we do better than this?

We think that we can, and that's why I'm involved with No Labels and think we can have a ticket just to close on this.

The national chairs are pretty big.

And Joe Lieberman, of course, he ran on the presidential ticket back in 2000, is one of the two Democratic chairs, Ben Chavis, the former head of the NAACP.

Then we got to Republican former Republican governors Larry Hogan from Maryland and Deb Gore from North Carolina.

There are four pouvons, I guess you could say, but there's a lot of folks that are willing to try and help so we don't have a rematch of Trump and Biden really have a bipartisan unity ticket knowing that the numbers are there.

Of course, Ross Perot got about 19% of the national vote when he ran, didn't cover any states.

Some people think that he might have swung the election results.

What do you say to people who say without a ranked choice voting system, without a majority runoff, what could happen if you split into three parties Is the least preferred candidate of the majority of the people actually becomes president with a small plurality of the vote?

Well, we actually think we can win some of these states.

You know, Ross Perot at one point was 30%.

And then, if you remember, he dropped out.

You know, maybe he would have won if he had stayed in.

And who knows, it was a long time ago.

But unlike being a spoiler or like we saw Ralph Nader with, what, two or 3% and some of these other folks that have run Stein and others under 5%, we actually our numbers show that we could we could be in the in the upper twenties, maybe break 30%.

And if you've got to show that we can win and that's before we even really push us big time is our focus again has been really just collecting the signatures to get on every state's ballot.

That's, you know, every state is different.

It's not a national standard here in Michigan.

You need 47,000 signatures.

In Maine, you need 5000.

So that's what our focus is been.

I think we'll get that accomplished, particularly if it ends up being Biden and Trump.

But the other thing is, you know, this organization, as I said, it's been around 15 years instrumental in getting the infrastructure bill done of jettisoning a lot of the stuff that Biden wanted on entitlements.

So we really had a focus on roads, bridges, airports, broadband and replacing lead water lines.

That was one of my initiatives, is part of this group.

Of course, we saw Flint here in Michigan sort of be the poster child of what what we needed to do.

So, you know, we we got it.

We got a real shot at this.

Now, you mentioned the Problems Solvers Caucus, which was a part of that larger No Labels group.

And one of the things that is notable about your career is the extent to which you really focused on putting politics aside and putting policy and people above politics, describing yourself as a commonsense conservative and working across party lines toward policy solutions.

As you look at the current state of Congress, including the recent struggle just to find a Speaker of the House, what are your thoughts on the sort of future of bipartisanship in the Congress?

Well, I'm alarmed.

You know, is this thing was ongoing.

I thought I was missing being in the fray to pick a successor for Kevin McCarthy.

I you know, I know the Gang of Eight was there.

And actually, if you go back to the beginning, the Problem Solvers Caucus actually changed the rule that for a lot of years any single member never happened could could offer a privileged motion to take down the speaker, which is what that Gang of Eight did.

The Problem Solvers Caucus said we had to change the rules of the House to be more bipartisan and to have more constructive dialog and get, you know, different different products to move on down the line.

But we actually back in 2018, changed the rule that took away the right of a single member to vacate the chair.

Nancy Pelosi was a speaker and she agreed to the change.

The problem was Kevin McCarthy reversed himself to get the votes to be speaker last January.

This little gang, a group of eight group, saw that as is a real tool that they could take down the speaker and they they got Kevin to agree to it, in essence, giving him the shovel to dig the hole that that buried him and used it.

And I would expect that we're going to see that rule change now that didn't matter who is who his successor was going to be.

Of course, it's Mike Johnson.

But I think that rule is going to change.

I bet it changes perhaps in the next couple of weeks.

It will be bipartisan to change it.

But the but but the Problem Solvers Caucus, we met every week during COVID.

We met by Zoom.

We talked about issues that we could agree on.

There's no partisanship there.

We we agreed not to campaign against each other because what we said at those tables should stay there.

But that's the only way you really build a trust to get things done.

And, you know, you look at the chips Bill, you know, I was at the Detroit Auto Show a year ago, September.

The chairman CEO of GM gave me a bear hug.

She said, thanks for saving our industry.

They had fleets of cars, thousands of vehicles that they couldn't get to the dealerships because they didn't have the chips to finish the production for your turn signal and everything else that we needed in America, we built about or we constructed about 40% of the chips 20, 30 years ago, and today it's about 14%.

We passed the bipartisan chips bill, actually Indiana, Todd Young did a wonderful job.

He was the leader of that, getting that through it.

And more than 70 votes in the Senate and it got stalled in the House.

It was our Problem Solvers Caucus that got the bill done.

And we took a lot of pressure, particularly when the Republicans, they they they knew who was going to vote for it all was honest.

Everyone's going to vote for it and put us in a room.

And they said, know, we'll get a lot better bill, in the next Congress.

So why don't you just vote no on this one and we'll start over next year, 2023.

We said we can't wait or our industries need the chips.

I mean, it's talking about billions of dollars of investment in couple of our states, Arizona and Ohio, a few others.

But whether it be the auto industry, the appliance industry, they all made those microchips and we got to get this thing done.

And thank goodness we were the ones that did it.

Infrastructure, roads, that's how Governor Whitmer won her race five years ago to fix the damn roads.

And it's nice to see US 31 down and, you know, all the proper resurfacing, lead lines, service lines, every community's got those issues, whether it be in South Bend, St. Joe, Benton Harbor, Flint, We need them.

Americans deserve safe drinking water that, again, was included.

And you know what?

We found a way to pay for it rather than just tack it on to the debt.

So that was a bipartisan issue.

And but back to your question, I'm very alarmed about where we are today.

It was it was a miracle that we didn't get a major default last June.

The problem solvers that actually saved the day, it was their proposal that got through the House and the Senate.

President Biden signed it into law for three weeks.

We had real chaos in the House trying to pick a Republican speaker.

What to do, what 20 different candidates I think, ended up having votes and we ended up course with Mike Johnson.

I know him, very, very conservative for sure.

He came out of that and no one would have picked him in Vegas early on.

We'll see how it goes.

But, you know, we got a looming shutdown in a couple of weeks when the continuing resolution expires.

Yet this issue of Israel, Ukraine, our southern border, all need their attention.

And we can't sit on our hands with those issues before us.

So he has a big job and the only way to get it done, what I think is going to have to be to do work in a bipartisan basis.

So we'll see have me on a couple of weeks, we will give these guys an A or a B or a flunk based on what they were able to do.

But I'm very worried and big agenda that's got to get accomplished.

And again, take the R and the D out of your name.

Think about the country first.

It is interesting, of course, as a political science professor, one of the things we teach about is the way that the Constitution created all those checks and balances to try to force compromise and conversation.

And that sounds like what you're saying is that is still what's needed to solve these big problems.

But we're just not seeing a lot of it.

Now, I want to ask you about an issue that has become very partisan, even though it is an issue that has a lot of support from the American people, which is the topic of gun violence and doing something to reduce it.

And October 26th, you tweeted or rather posted to X, I guess would be the correct terminology these days.

Thoughts and prayers not enough.

Again, in 22, the House passed Amber Alert for active shooter.

It must have alerted folks at second sight.

You can imagine who opposed it in the house but blocked it in the Senate.

Very sad.

If not now, When can you talk a little bit about what inspired that post and how this fits in with your broader agenda of sort of common sense solutions on issues that a lot of Americans support moving forward?

Well, let me say a couple of things.

I support the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

But I also supported way back in 94, 1994, I was one of the few Republicans that supported the background check, the Brady Bill.

Of course, that's been the law here in Michigan for a long time.

But we've seen this gun violence really stay in our country in a lot of different ways.

For me, we had a mass shooting in Kalamazoo.

You might remember the Uber shooter a few years ago.

I went to all of those funerals.

Very, very sad.

Of course, here in Michigan, we had the Michigan State shooting that just transfixed our whole state.

And everybody, my neighbors, most of my, most of my staff would the Michigan State, when I would talk to reporters going through that, we all had real connections to Michigan State a fine University, but it paralyzed our state.

Oxford High School another mass shooting on the other side of the state.

Over in Oakland County, we see these things and of course we saw what happened in Lewiston, Maine, a week or two ago or two weeks ago, and I was the Republican lead on a red flag bill with Debbie Dingell, which we actually signed into law to encourage states to have red flags.

That is, if someone suspects that someone is going to do something bad with with a firearm, make it reported to the police, they would due process.

Very important.

They can they can actually see those weapons removed from that individual where, of course, they have some recourse to make a different point.

But hopefully get that mental health in that system actually had a yellow flag law in Maine that actually failed.

The police said no, at least early reports show that they went to the home.

But bottom line is, we need background checks.

I was the Republican lead on an Amber Alert bill.

Sort of funny that in the US Capitol you get a lot of threats.

There is you know, whenever there was an active shooter and we had some threats on my cell phone, I would get an alert from the sergeant of arms office warning us about an active shooter.

So wouldn't that be nice if we had that in every community, frankly, had it been there in Maine?

May you remember that shooter went to two different sites, two different communities that were close by, sort of like if St. Joe and a Stevensville or maybe in Elkhart and South Bend, Niles and Buchanan.

And if there was an active shooter, you'd get a signal.

And guess what?

You might not go to that bar or bowling alley or wherever it is.

You you take some cover and you want to make sure that you're safe.

Even the NRA was not opposed to the active shooter bill or the Amber Alert for an active shooter bill.

Yet it was defeated in the house.

Jim Jordan, it was a candidate for speaker, led the opposition.

He controlled the time in opposition to the bill.

We ended up getting it done on the second round.

He again led the opposition.

But we didn't we couldn't get it done, though very literally in the very last day in the Senate to get that signed into law.

But we got to make our community safer.

What we saw happening in Lewiston, Maine and other places is is a real tragedy with where we know some steps that we could take, that we could make our communities safer for sure.

So that was very active in there.

The what turned out to be a bipartisan effort for gun safety, but still allowing the Second Amendment, still allowing people without a criminal record.

Now, hunters, you know, I just before we started this program, I talked to a really good friend of mine, and he is going off to go deer hunting in the next two weeks, which I wish them luck at dinner last night playing euchre with a guy who's going deer hunting know that's fine.

You don't have to worry about people.

Most people like that.

But you know, a background check.

It I think is important.

Something that I supported virtually all my career that few death notices, support from folks at police protection as well because of some of the threats.

But I'd like to think that, you know, actually, as we take this Friday, two days ago now, people watch and there is going to be a bill on the House floor that will restrict funding for background checks.

I hope that they can remove that provision in that appropriation bill because it would be a major step back versus a step forward, particularly after what happened in Lewiston, Maine.

Well, protecting those Second Amendment rights while also keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people and protecting the public safety remain to be seen what actually happens.

But unfortunately, that's all the time we have for this week's Politically speaking.

So I want to thank my guest, former Congressman Fred Upton, for joining us today.

I'm Elizabeth and reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time.

This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.