Miller: Say goodbye to pork

MAT-SU — Joe Miller has been running at top speed for months now.

Wednesday, with his race for U.S. Senate coming down to the wire and having been up since 4 a.m., he stopped by the Frontiersman editorial board, diet Mountain Dew in hand, to talk about what he thinks sets him apart from his opponents.

“There really is a clear choice,” Miller said of the race, which includes Lisa Murkowski, who he beat in the primary, but who has mounted a write-in campaign, and democrat Scott McAdams. “Neither one of them can recognize what’s coming.”

He said the old Alaska-style politics of sending representatives to Washington, D.C., who fight for pork-barrel spending to bring back to the state is over. Alaska needs to change what it’s fighting for, Miller said. Instead of fighting for federal cash, representatives are going to have to fight battles necessary for Alaska to build its own economy.

Which is why he wants to roll back the federal government, to hack away at regulations that get in the way of development.

Responding to a question sent in by a Frontiersman reader about food security in the state and whether he’s concerned that Alaskans cannot feed themselves for more than a few days, Miller said he is concerned, but, “I believe it’s a state issue. It’s not a federal issue.”

That answer became something of a refrain for Miller, who has spoken on the campaign trail about taking the federal government out of Medicare, in favor of an expanded state role.

Where the federal government does fit in, though, is in regulation. Miller used the example of the nuclear power plant idea in Galena and noted that the plant almost got a permit, but the process dragged on and eventually the military left the area and the whole deal went south.

He would like to streamline that process.

“I’m not talking about taking away the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ability to regulate nuclear power,” he said.

And, maybe, to get those permits through faster, what’s needed is an expansion of the NRC, adding more workers so applications can be processed more quickly.

One place he would play hardball, though, is on the subject of endangered species protection. Referencing the fight over a listing for the Cook Inlet beluga whales, he said the Endangered Species Act has been misinterpreted to say that if a group of whales is disappearing then development near them should stop, even if the same type of whales is flourishing elsewhere.

“If you’re going to continue to misinterpret the law, we’re just going to defund you,” is the message Miller hopes he can persuade Congress to send to environmental regulators.

Another thing he wants to do is educate people in the Lower 48 about Alaska issues and, among environmentalists, combat “the perception that Alaska is their great national park that nobody has a right to do anything with.”

And how does he do that, knowing that if voters send him to D.C. he would be met with a Decmocrat as president, and could be a member of the minority party?

Miller said he sees himself as part of a revolution that is going to sweep in reform-minded politicians like himself.

“The American people know that the federal government is broken,” he said. “They’re still looking for the system to be fixed.”

And, he said, if only a dozen or so in Congress agree with him after this election, more will come. And with them will come change.

“The people that are coming into Congress today are uncompromising in their view,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.