Jim Renacci, a former congressman from Ohio and chairman of Ohio’s Future Foundation, was a guest of Stuart Varney’s on Fox Business Thursday where the two discussed the ongoing “dysfunction” in Washington.
Renacci is the author of a new book called “The GOP’s Lost Decade: An Inside View of Why Washington Doesn’t Work.” In the book, Renacci opens up about his eight years in Congress, where he found that lawmakers “are only there to help themselves.”
Varney began the interview by asking Renacci why more business owners like himself aren’t in Congress.
“In 2010, a number of business people came in—most of them left and that was the problem because there’s dysfunction that causes people to get frustrated and leave,” Renacci said. “That’s what I found even after eight years in Washington. We had a good class of business people coming in but, again, Washington is dysfunctional because it doesn’t operate like a business.”
“Many times in leadership, if you look, there are not business people who are running Congress,” he continued. “The issue is, I’ve said this all along, if you ran a business like you ran Congress, you’d be fired. If you’re the CEO or CFO of a business and you continue to fail, fail, fail—you’d be fired. You would inject people in who can change things. The problem is we don’t do that.”
Renacci said the dysfunction was part of the reason President Donald Trump was elected because “he was going to change things.”
“Too often, we talk about the people on the left and the right. There’s so many good people in the center who aren’t getting the attention needed. In the end, there are so many good policies that don’t even make it to the table. I talk about those in the book. Too often leadership is so worried about keeping their power they forget about getting the job done for the American people,” he added.
Renacci said he was told on a number of occasions that he couldn’t push for certain legislation because it would cost his party the majority.
The full interview can be watched below:
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News, The Ohio Star, and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Fox Business Studio” by Inside Cable news. CC BY 2.0.
