8th Congressional District - The House and Senate will officially be sworn in for their next term in January and there is a lot of work to be done. In the next Congress, I will be working with a larger House majority and new Senate majority, and we will hit the ground running on day one to provide relief to Americans throughout the country, especially in rural America.

With the House and Senate finally working together, I anticipate many more bills going to the president’s desk. He has been able to hide behind the Democrat-dominated Senate for far too long. With good bills and conservative solutions coming to the president’s desk, he will soon have to decide if he is more interested in moving America forward or continuing his “my way or the highway” style.

One of the first bills we plan to send the president will be a repeal of Obamacare. Though it is unlikely the president will repeal his namesake bill, Republicans in the House and Senate will have many opportunities to send the president legislation that will fix some of the most disastrous portions of the law. I continue to hear story after story of folks being dropped from their plans, their premiums skyrocketing, and businesses laying off employees just to comply. In the 114th Congress we are going to work diligently to repeal this atrocity and offer people some relief. Hopefully our president will also be interested in alleviating the burdens that Obamacare has produced.

I am also working to make The SCRUB Act another bill that comes across the president’s desk in the 114th Congress. I’m hearing more and more stories of government regulations strangling businesses as I travel throughout the district. They are facing potential EPA regulations on every puddle of water, new ozone standards not even national forests can achieve, and the list goes on. This flood of regulations makes it difficult to do business, but The SCRUB Act offers some hope for relief. The SCRUB Act would identify and eliminate outdated and ineffective regulations. It would create a bipartisan commission to review regulations and make recommendations for repeal. The bill has also been introduced in the Senate, and I am committed to getting it passed and sent to the president for signature.

Our tax code is entirely too long and complex. Working to make the tax code fairer and simpler has been a long-standing goal of mine and is a priority of the Ways and Means Committee I will be serving on next Congress. I am pushing to make rural issues a priority when it comes to the tax code. For example there is an equipment depreciation credit which allows individuals to deduct the cost of the equipment they use on their farms and in their businesses from their taxes. It was just extended for the 2014 tax year, but making it permanent will give folks more certainty in planning for the future. Reforming the individual income tax is also important, because that is how 96 percent of farms are taxed. With a tax code as difficult to understand as ours, it’s no wonder that more than three in five Americans pay for help preparing their taxes.

There is a lot of work to be done in the next Congress. The priorities I am pursuing in the 114th Congress are the priorities of our district and rural America. We are going to have to make up for lost time while more than 387 House solutions, including almost 50 jobs bills, have been stuck in the Senate, but I have confidence we can get it done.