As he makes a second bid to represent Southwest Washington in Congress, Republican candidate Joe Kent told roughly a dozen supporters at the Midway RV Park in Centralia Tuesday night that Americans are struggling to afford necessities like gas and groceries.
“This cycle of inflation that we’re experiencing right now is driven by Biden’s economic policies, fully supported by Marie (Gluesenkamp) Perez,” Kent said. “We get a double whammy here in Washington. So there are the bad economic policies that come out of Washington, D.C., with out-of-control government spending. Biden’s horrible energy policies. And then Jay Inslee in Olympia said, ‘Hey, we’re going to go ahead and make this even worse,’ and they hit us once more with Inslee’s gas tax etcetera.”
Kent made the comments as he again seeks to represent Washington’s Third Congressional District in Washington, D.C. But to set up a potential rematch against Democrat Gluesenkamp Perez, Kent must first advance out of a top-two in the August primary that includes one other Republican, Camas city councilor and attorney Leslie Lewallen.
Following an endorsement by the state party last month, Kent said he doesn’t want to pit Republicans in the race against each other.
“I’m looking to take down the Democrat,” Kent said Tuesday. “Because the Democrats are destroying our country. So I have no desire to get into a back and forth with another Republican. Republicans need to unify if we want to win.”
The desire to unify the Republican Party early in the election cycle is a new tone for Kent, who repeatedly challenged Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler during the 2022 election cycle, specifically for her vote to impeach President Donald Trump.
Kent has since endorsed Herrera Beutler’s campaign for public lands commissioner during the current cycle.
“I think there’s a big lesson for Republicans there, ‘Look, we’ve got to unify,’” Kent said, citing the late primary.
Though public polling on the Third District is scarce, Americans narrowly favor Democrats in a generic congressional election, according to political polling aggregator 538. On Wednesday, their rolling average showed that 45.3% of Americans would support a generic Democratic candidate compared to 45.1% who would support a Republican.
“I want to run heavily on her record, because when you’re untested, she could essentially say whatever she wanted to last time,” Kent said of Gluesenkamp Perez. “So highlighting her record is key, because her voting record is part in parcel with the Biden agenda that’s destroying the country.”
During the discussion, Kent criticized Gluesenkamp Perez for her support of a $95 billion foreign aid package last month that provided support to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific Region.
“The only time that D.C. can work overnight, it’s not for us, it’s not to fix our bridge, it’s not to fix our roads, it’s not to stop the flow of fentanyl and secure the border,” Kent said. “The House and Senate worked overnight because they wanted to send $95 billion overseas … as opposed to actually taking care of the American people. That’s when they actually had a great consensus, and they all patted each other on the back.”
With the country nearly $35 trillion in debt, Kent said the problem is only to get “worse and worse and worse.”
“And the government continues to be undisciplined, and wants to spend billions and billions of dollars that we simply don’t have, that compounds into trillions and trillions of dollars that we don’t have,” Kent said.
According to Kent, Congress should return to passing individual spending bills to appropriate funds, rather than a larger package typically known as an omnibus. While a “simple solution,” Kent said the return to individual spending bills would not be “easy to fix.”
Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass additional spending bills to avert a government shutdown.
“Marie (Gluesenkamp) Perez has signed off on all of this, she’s signed off on all of the Bidenomics,” Kent said. “So fiscal discipline is really essential.”
The next concern, Kent said, is the increase in undocumented migrants and fentanyl crossing the southern border, an increase he referred to as an “invasion.” Following two visits to the border, it’s an issue Kent said he knows firsthand.
“It was quite the experience to watch all of these folks come into our country without being stopped,” Kent said.
According to Kent, the uptick in undocumented immigration is a Democratic “power play” to increase congressional representation during the 2030 census.
While Gluesenkamp Perez joined a bipartisan group of seven representatives in introducing the Defending Borders, Defending Democracies Act to implement a “remain in Mexico” policy for one year and required the Secretary of Homeland Security to “suspend the entry of inadmissible aliens at a U.S. land or maritime border” if necessary for operational control, the proposal was ineffective, according to Kent.
“She proposed one that allocated zero dollars to the border,” Kent said of the proposal Tuesday. “The remain in Mexico portion that she proposed was literally just ink on paper because the next paragraph said, ‘unless you seek asylum.’”
This Sunday, Kent will host a barbecue fundraiser at Lake Lawrence in Yelm, located at 15735 Topaz Drive SE. The fundraiser is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m.
