Holding seeks second term in U.S. House

Feb. 26--WASHINGTON -- He knows he can't singlehandedly fix Capitol Hill, but that hasn't stopped U.S. Rep. George Holding from trying.

The first-term Republican from Raleigh has emerged at the forefront of conservatives' fight to shrink government and cut regulatory red tape. The National Journal magazine this month ranked Holding the No. 2 most conservative of all 435 House members.

"I'm trying to do the best I can," Holding said by phone from his office Tuesday. "It's a broken system up here. Politics in Washington is broken, and it's more broken than even I anticipated it would be. Next year, we're going to keep plugging away."

Holding filed for re-election on Feb. 19 and faces a challenge from Brenda Cleary, a Democrat from Cary. He represents North Carolina's13th Congressional District, which includes portions of Wilson, Nash, Wayne, Edgecombe, Durham, Franklin and Granville counties.

The former federal prosecutor's first term in Congress has been productive. Holding is one of two freshman House members to have more than one bill heard on the floor and one of five to sponsor a bill that was signed into law.

"We have got to get a handle on this country's out-of-control spending, out-of-control debt and out-of-control growth of government," Holding said. "That's what I work on every day, and that's what I'll try to continue to work on every day."

Holding introduced H.R. 2922, a bill to extend the Supreme Court police's authority to allow them to protect justices and court officials off the courthouse grounds until 2019. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Dec. 20.

"I'm not going to say it's a strictly significant piece of legislation," Holding said, "but you do need to learn how to take a bill through committee, onto the floor and ultimately have it passed into law."

The first bill Holding sponsored, which would strengthen a law requiring federal agencies to post notices of new regulations at least 6 months before they take effect, has been combined with three other measures in a regulatory reform bill scheduled for a House vote this week.

"My bill says if you don't post them, you're not going to be able to promulgate them," Holding said. "It adds teeth to the existing law."

Partisan gridlock has led to a glut of bills that have cleared the Republican-controlled House but are not being considered in the Democratic-led Senate.

"We pass a lot of good legislation in the House," he said, "but we've got over 150 bills we passed in the House that are sitting over in the Senate, and Majority Leader (Harry) Reid will not bring them up for a vote."

As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Holding heard former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's testimony on the Benghazi terror attack that killed four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, in September 2012. He has sharply criticized the Obama administration's handling of the Benghazi attack.

Holding also has opposed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the president's signature health care overhaul. He said North Carolina health insurance premiums have increased 136 percent since the health reforms began taking effect.

"The stories that we're hearing from constituents are just legion with the horrors of Obamacare," Holding said, "the difficulty to sign up, the cost, the incredible deductibles of thousands of dollars. The system is not working as promised."

Holding said he met Tuesday with a grocery store chain franchisee that's reducing work hours for many of its 600 employees to avoid increased health care costs.

"Tell me how that encourages growth and economic development," he said. "That's pretty bad."

Holding said Republicans are doing more than criticizing the Affordable Care Act; they're proposing solutions to curb soaring costs.

"We can't just be against Obamacare," he said. "We have to come up with some solutions ourselves. Here in the next 30 days, I think we're going to put forward some pretty large proposals about how to repair the system."

Holding also criticized Obama for what he calls the president's unprecedented expansion of executive power. Obama has instituted changes to the Affordable Care Act's implementation and signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 per hour.

"We have a divided government with three branches, checks and balances, because the Founding Fathers didn't want any one branch to outmuscle the others," he said. "What we have now is an executive who's running roughshod over the Constitution."

Holding noted that Jonathan Turley, a liberal constitutional law scholar, has said Obama's unilateral actions violate the constitutional separation of powers.

Holding said he's also working on issues that affect Wilson and surrounding counties. He said the 13th District is the top tobacco-producing district in the nation, and he's working to ensure that foreign laws that require cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging don't trump domestic trademarks.

"I work on the intellectual property side to try to make sure that our trademarks will be protected in other countries," he said.

Holding said he also is working to limit tariffs on baby cucumbers imported from India for the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. based in the southern Wayne County town of Mount Olive. India has four growing seasons and produces the cucumbers year-round.

"We don't grow them over here, so it's not a detriment to our farmers," Holding said, "and it keeps our folks in Mount Olive busy in the offseason."

[email protected] -- 265-7821

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