For the past month, Rep. Dave Brat (R., Va.) has had one of the nicer offices in the Cannon House Office Building.
The newest member of the House spent his introduction to Congress in the digs of former Republican majority leader Eric Cantor, who he replaced just days after being elected by Virginia’s 7th district.
The rest of the House freshmen will have to wait ‘til January to join Brat, who is getting a head start on learning the ropes around Congress during the current lame-duck session.
Brat’s still incomplete staff does not come close to filling its current space. The boxes remained packed and the walls are bare. They are holding off on fully unpacking and making the office their own because they will soon move down the hall to a new office in the Cannon building.
Brat does not aspire to fill Cantor’s shoes. Cantor ascended to the Republican whip and then majority leader. This is the first time Brat’s held political office, and he has pledged to spend a maximum of 12 years in Congress.
"In this city, the logic revolves around money and power, and a lot of people achieve power through being chairmen of committees," Brat tells the Washington Free Beacon. "The first thing on my mind is not achieving power and becoming chairman."
"I think it’s freeing, where you’re not always jockeying for the next career move," he says. "I ran on certain issues, I got 12 years to get things done on these issues."
For Brat, those issues are tied to the economics lectures he has been giving for the past 19 years to his students at Randolph-Macon College; they are the same lectures he was giving to voters on the campaign trail.
"The main thrust of why I ran is having an economics background and I want to bring that to bear."
Brat hasn’t gone native. He was one of 16 Republicans who voted no on the procedural vote to bring the party leadership's omnibus spending bill to the floor. Then he voted against it again once it made it there. The day before the vote he proposed an amendment to the bill that would have cut off all funding attached to President Obama's executive amnesty.
"I had two opportunities to try to prevent the omnibus bill from becoming law, and I exercised both of them," Brat said in a statement late Thursday night. "Without the amendment that my House colleagues and I proposed yesterday, this omnibus bill allows funding for President Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty for approximately five million illegal immigrants.:
He also voted no on the National Defense Authorization Act, arguing that he couldn’t vote for a bill that had non-defense spending tacked on to it.
"This is the problem with Washington," Brat said. "We don’t have enough money to fund our troops and our national security priorities, but somehow we find the money to tack non-defense, unrelated pork projects onto a ‘must pass’ bill that is supposed to fund our national defense."
Keeping things local is a central theme for Brat. He remains committed to his pledge to meet monthly with every county in his district and to constantly have his entire staff "communicating back to the district." Cantor, on the other hand, was criticized for abandoning his constituents for Washington, D.C.
Brat wants to educate his constituents on the real economic challenges.
"In economics, you study efficiency, and efficiency requires that you rank problems in order," he said. "You spend your time where it will have the biggest impact."
Number one on Brat’s list is the federal government’s more than $127 trillion in unfunded liabilities created by entitlement programs.
His hope is to get on every economic committee that he can and use his appointments to push Congress to address the "big macro issues that have the potential to be catastrophic."
Brat wants Congress to approach major problems with "rational, ethical analysis" and avoid the distraction of political grandstanding that gets in the way.
Without a growing economy, however, Brat says political arguments that don’t rationally address the major problems facing the economy will continue to prevail.
"The reason we have so many problems right now is because there is no economic growth to pay the bill," he says. "When the economy is not growing, then the government piece of the pie does not grow. Everybody fights harder to get a piece of the shrinking pie, instead of growing the entire pie."
No economic growth also means setbacks to defense. "The generals say we are not able to fight wars on two fronts any more," Brat says. "They know that their success is contingent on economic success. It all comes back to the economics."
The United States needs to create a long-term plan for sustained economic growth and it starts with addressing education. "The economy is basically your people times their productivity," Brat says, and our education system is failing to create a foundation of workers as productive as workers in countries like China and India.
Brat points to local solutions to education problems, like one in Lynchburg, Va., where area corporations are partnering with schools to create curriculums that match business needs.
"Kids get skilled up, and the businesses get skilled workers," he says. "It’s a win-win that doesn’t cost any more money."
The nation’s education system is in "economic survival" mode right now, and as programs get more local, they can get more efficient.
"The state chamber and local chambers are more in touch with what the business needs are. If you bring the education logic to the federal level, they don’t know what’s going on in Lynchburg, and the state barely does."
On top of Brat’s requirement that his staff never lose sight of the constituents back home that elected Brat to office, he also demands that each member be "philosophically aligned to both James Madison and Adam Smith."
"The Constitution and free markets: If you put those two together, you’re in pretty good shape."