Melanie Oliva: What motivated you to run for this office?
Andy Maidment: So politics have always interested me, I went to Missouri State and I studied history. Politics is a huge portion of history. I'm no longer in the military. You know, I retired with 21 years of service, now's the time to get something done.
Melanie Oliva: What do you like about Missouri politics?
Andy Maidment: Let me just say I don't like politics. I like studying it. You know Missouri politics, one of the big problems is it's deeply red, and trying to convince people, you know, to change, not just change, but you know, choose something, you know, choose gold instead of blue, you know, is, is very difficult. You can have people that you agree with them on 90% of everything and they're like, 'Yeah, but you're gonna lose.' It's like, yes, because you have that attitude. If people would just take a chance, like, you know, like just, I said in another interview I did was, you know, just give me two years. You know, if after two years, you don't like what I'm doing, you can fire me. My opponent Sam Graves has been in office for 22 years. You know, he gets the farm bill done. He does infrastructure. He's very good at that. What about the other bigger issues that are out there? You know, we're $31 trillion in debt. That's, that's a huge issue. You know, somebody needs to go out there and actually say, 'No, I'm not gonna vote for the spending bill.' We spent, was it $9 trillion in the last two and a half years, that we don't have. And that's, that's ridiculous. That's half of our economy. And that's not sustainable.
Melanie Oliva: Your slogan is, quote, 'Less government more liberty" could you talk us through what that means to you?
Andy Maidment: Big thing is, again, you know, the government does a lot of stuff, it doesn't need to. There's a whole lot of regulation that comes along with that, you know, you have situations where, like I said, the government tells schools, this is what you need to do. And this is how you need to do it. And, you know, like, some of these rules were created 20 years ago, and they don't work. You have other situations where, you know, the government creates a regulation, and, you know, you try to operate within that regulation. And then someone new comes into office or into whatever, you know, they say, 'Oh, I don't like that.' That's not how our system is supposed to work.
Melanie Oliva: If elected, what is like the first thing that you want to tackle in your position?
Andy Maidment: Libertarians often say that, you know, 90% of what the government does, maybe more, it doesn't need to do and shouldn't do and probably isn't even constitutional. So, we need to look at, take a hard look at some things and, you know, like, do we need 700 or whatever it is ridiculous number of military installations around the world? No, we don't. The War on Terror is essentially over. They want to, there's certain factions that want to keep it going. We don't need to be, you know, handing over billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine. I'm perfectly willing to sell them all the weapons they need. Even at a discount. They are definitely on the right side of the war. But you know, we don't need American taxpayers funding this war for them. I look at $31 trillion and I look at my son, who is a teenager, and I'm like, your kids are gonna be paying this off. And that's not fair.
