Republican Rep. Charlie McClintock joined Rep. Steven Holt’s Zoom conference call earlier this week to discuss vaccine mandates.
McClintock provided some of the strongest comments of the night.
“These people that are affected here are affected mainly because they’re looking at losing their positions and their employment,” he said. “And that employment is based upon some of the federal jobs that are coming down. They didn’t do anything. They didn’t ask for this. They didn’t go and get in anyone’s face — they didn’t do any of that. They were affected because of the requirements that came down from the federal government.”
McClintock took President Joe Biden to task for claiming the vaccine mandate isn’t about freedom or personal choice.
“That’s not correct,” he said. “This is exactly what that’s about — freedom and personal choice. This country is based on that. Government exists because of the consent of the people. We build the government, we mandate the government, we as elected officials represent the people. And as I talk to the people in District 95, none of them, none of them, not one has come to me and said ‘I really want you voting to mandate vaccines. I really want you to go and grab people and tell them you have to take this, we’re going to inject this into your body.’ And as I talk to people around Iowa and anywhere else, no one wants that. I don’t want that.”
McClintock said he’s not anti-vaccine at all, but he will never vote to force someone to take a vaccine.
“On Sept. 9, when he said you want to work for the federal government then you’re going to get vaccinated– he does not have that right. That is not privilege of the executive level,” McClintock said. “Article 1, Section 1 of the United States Constitution clearly states that all legislative power is granted and vested in the Congress of the United States. He knows he didn’t have the votes. He doesn’t. Otherwise he would’ve ran it through that process. And so, because he didn’t. Because they all think like we do, he knows he couldn’t get tit passed, so he’s using executive privilege. And it’s wrong.”
McClintock also bashed Biden for saying police officers and emergency responders should lose their jobs if they’re not vaccinated and sarcastically saying ‘freedom’ as though it was “some sort of joke.”
“Like it was a punch line,” McClintock said. “That they want to use their freedom to kill you with this COVID. It is unacceptable. I am glad that our colleagues are standing up to it and I hope the people in Iowa understand that freedom does mean something, it means something to me, it means something to the people in my district and I think it means something to all of our colleagues and to the people of Iowa and I hope we all stand up and do the right thing.”
