Rep Mikie Sherrill on Whether the Bipartisan Consensus on Foreign Policy Will Hold and on Threats to American Democracy

Yeah, I get asked that a lot, especially in these times. You know, it’s really troubling – the state of our political system right now and the partisanship and the people that really are working from within, and I’m talking about far-right Republicans working from within to undermine our system of government. We have, for example, a president who stayed in office despite a democratic election. We’ve never seen a non-peaceful transfer of power in this country. We’ve seen it now. Instead of having a bipartisan revolt against that when we moved to impeach him, having every single member of Congress vote in favor of that, we’ve seen a lack of desire on the right to grapple with that. And now he is the presumed nominee for the Republican party once again.

So, it is a really partisan, difficult time to serve, but that’s why I ran for Congress quite frankly. I’ve been told by several people, ‘Oh, you military members, you veterans, you’re all crazy. When there’s a fight, you run to it instead of running away like everybody else.’ I think it was actually the concern I had for the government that led me to run for Congress, because in normal times as a mom with four kids and living in a state I love like New Jersey with so much going on and so many things I could do there, running for Congress would not have occurred to me. It would have not have seemed like something that I wanted to do.

But I think largely because of my four kids and the future I want to make sure they have and what this country is going to look like for them, that’s why I decided to run. When there were so many attacks on the things I valued, I needed to step up and fight hard to keep our democracy intact, to keep our values intact and to preserve that for my children.

You know, it’s been a surprise to me actually as to how much my military service has affected my thinking and my background. I say that because I think I entered the military at 18. I left home. I went to the Naval Academy. I then went off into the fleet, served all over the world with people from all over the country and all different backgrounds. Then I left the military. I got married. I had kids. I went to law school. I got a civilian job. And northern New Jersey is not a big military area. It’s not like when I lived in Norfolk, Virginia, for example, or even in Northern Virginia or now Washington DC. The people in my district often work in Manhattan. It’s a different economy up there. So, I don’t think I had thought too much about how that background might have impacted me.

But coming into Congress and knowing that our nation was struggling with divisions within our population and feeling deeply that we needed to work together to solve this, I think that military background actually has lent so much weight to the way I think about it. I say that because I graduated from high school in Northern Virginia. If I hadn’t gone to the Naval Academy, I probably would have gone to UVA and I would have gone to school with a lot of other people who were getting a college degree, probably a lot of them from Northern Virginia. Maybe I would have ended up working in Northern Virginia or on the hill or somewhere in DC with a lot of other people who grew up in the area and went to college. And my world would have been a lot smaller.

Instead, I went to a college with people from every state in the nation, many who were coming from overseas where their parents were serving and went to college with people from our nation’s most revered boarding schools with kids with opportunities many of us can only dream about, as well as people who, if they had not gotten into the Naval Academy, could never have afforded to go to college. So, you see people from all over the country and then that’s compounded because you graduate and you go into the fleet and you’re serving with people from all over the nation, many of whom, most of whom, haven’t gone to college and have very different backgrounds.

Yet you learn that no matter how different your background is… I mean, you can come from New Jersey and you can be working with someone from Alabama. You can come from a town of 100,000 people and work with somebody that comes from a town with 300 people. And yet you find that you have so much in common. There are those core things that you both believe deeply in and maybe you have disagreements about how to implement things or how to best perform the mission, but you can make a decision and all come together around it and have success. I think that experience of working with people that are so different from you and yet finding that common ground is so lacking in society today.

I was just laughing yesterday with somebody who was saying studies show that historically Democrats and Republicans married each other in the 60s and now they would never. So, I said, well, thank God my parents were able to get in under the wire because I’d never been born, because my dad’s a Republican and my mom’s a Democrat. I just think that we now are choosing teams and choosing sides. What is not apparent to me is that people understand that we’re all on the same team and all on the same side as Americans. I think that gets a little lost.

Yeah, I think that background, that experience – It’s easy to get cynical as you get older, as you have different experiences that don’t go the way you want them to or not the way you think they should. But I think if you truly believe in this country, then you know that experience just gives you the tools you need to fight harder and make better change. By that I’m often reminded of my friend, Cory Booker’s statement that if this country hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough. There are some days where I’ve said I must like love the crap out of this country because my heart is breaking over this right now.

But there are times when I think we’ve gone in the wrong direction. I’ll tell you one of those times that changed my life. When I was serving in the military and I had been through a POW training program, because I was a naval aviator and all of our aviators go through what’s called SERE school. If you are shot down beyond enemy lines, you know what to do and can handle yourself and can handle interrogation and torture, et cetera. I was told at that time, don’t worry. These techniques we’re teaching you and what we’re training you for are things that only our adversaries, only our enemies have ever done. The United States will never do this. We’ve made a commitment that we don’t use torture. So, because of that, we have the moral high ground to argue for your release.

That was something that meant a lot to me because I was serving in the United States military. So, to know that we were fighting along with our values, that we did not do those sorts of things for an organization I was committed to was incredibly important to me. So, when we were torturing people and engaging in rendition and opening up black sites, I was so incredibly disappointed and appalled and I couldn’t believe that the things that I held sacrosanct and I thought everyone did that we had sort of flipped the script.

In fact, many of those SERE school instructors in that training program were now training our military on how to interrogate people and how to torture people. I was beside myself really and decided that I was going to go to law school because at that time, the only part of our government that seemed to be making headway in this area was the Supreme Court. I was going to go to law school so that I can engage in this and ensure that we do a better job living up to our values.

That’s a lot of votes. That’s a lot of votes and that shows you where the majority of the Congress is. So, that consensus does appear to be holding. Again, we’re going to test this, I believe, because I think we are going to pass the supplemental. So, we shall see if that is still the case. When I speak to people like Mike Rogers, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Republicans who are in the majority, he’s a Republican, or Mike Turner, the Chair of the Intelligence Committee, certainly they are in support of passing the funding for Ukraine. They’ve said that not just to me in back rooms. I mean, they say that quite publicly and there are quite a few Republican members who agree with that.

I think that’s good to see, but what I’m always concerned about is leadership because there are a lot of people across the country who aren’t getting intelligence briefings, who aren’t in the hearings day in and day out, who aren’t tracking the success of the Ukrainians and what’s going on in the Russian economy and how this is impacting them and where we could go for success should the supplemental pass and how it’s so critical and what a rollback of democratic norms across the world might mean to people here at home. What’s going on in AI and quantum and other technologies that if we don’t engage now and if we don’t engage leading with our democratic values, how that could roll back so many of the freedoms for people here at home.

I know there’s a lot of people that aren’t engaged in that on a day-to-day basis, but you know that’s my job. So, I do. And that’s Mike Turner’s job. And that’s Mike Roger’s job. I mean, we’re all focused on this. So, that’s why we are in part so focused on passing the supplemental for Ukraine and making sure that they have the tools they need to support democracy. What I get concerned about is that there are people in the extremes and while their numbers are small in Congress, their platforms are often quite large and many of them have seemed to be alarmingly pro-Russian or pro-Putin.

So, while the consensus is holding in large parts of the Congress, I do find the growing power of the far right very concerning. I know my moderate Republican friends do as well, because there is this narrative somehow that is pushing for more support for dictators and strongmen and autocrats. So, this consensus in the center is still very strong. Like I said, we’re going to find out how strong, but any bleeding of support there to me is concerning because that is undermining our US values, our US power and people in Congress are leaders in their communities and people in some parts of this country are, in my opinion, being led astray.

In fact, we tested that yesterday. We had a big vote on a statement that many people feel denotes a lack of support for a state of Israel to exist. That was a hugely bipartisan vote. So, I think what you see is that there is a large amount of support for the safety and security of the state of Israel. But I also think what you are hearing are very important conversations about the future of Gaza, the future of the Palestinian people and the future of a two-state solution. I will say that I don’t think there is a path forward for safety and security for Israel without determining what the path forward right now looks like for a two-state solution.

The 30,000 people killed in Gaza, many of them women and children, and now the beginnings of a famine taking place in Gaza, is unacceptable at this point. We need to come up with a better path forward. The constant attacks on settlers in the West Bank, ongoing and constant and growing, is unacceptable. We have to move forward on a better path. I don’t think supporting a strong and secure Jewish state in Israel and supporting a strong and secure Palestinian state are two contradictory things. I think they both need to happen for either one of them to happen. I think it’s more broad than that, because I think we are now talking about the future of the region as a whole, not just Israel.

We’re talking about Iran and there was an op-ed this morning and I thought the statement that really spoke to me was this idea that Iran is funding the 5 percent of the extremists around the region that are making life miserable for the 95 percent of the people in the region who want peace. So, we’re talking Lebanon and Syria, Yemen. All throughout the region, we are seeing Iranian based extremist terrorists really hold large portions of the population almost hostage to this extremism. We’ve seen them shut down the Red Sea for commerce impacting global supply chains. Iran is a very bad actor.

So, we need to have a better, more secure, stable plan going forward, including a really strong economy, which with Israel and the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt there is a great deal of opportunity there right now, if we can support a strong two state solution for the future.

Well, these states are threats in different ways certainly with Russia, China, and Iran. I think the threat you see coming from the Iranians is their funding of terrorism and extremism throughout the region. You see, just to name a few, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, all these groups with values contrary to freedom and democracy. Groups that want an extremist Muslim state. What does that mean for people living there? That means very few rights for women. It means no rights for LGBTQ people. When you have these terrorist groups running states, it means that they are taking all the resources for themselves to put into their military building or their weapons and leaving the rest of the country in poverty. There’s no future for people in these states run by extremists. You’ve seen famines in Yemen.

I remember someone saying after October 7th, let’s not forget the first victims of Hamas, the Palestinian people. You see in Gaza the lives that people had and the lack of opportunity they had because of Hamas. So, this is constraining people flourishing throughout the region. As the weaponry is growing more sophisticated, as the attacks are growing more sophisticated, we are seeing then the ability, like I said, to shut down the Red Sea. I mean, that’s striking.

So, I think Iran presents a grave threat and we are now seeing they have moved to a place where after we pulled out of the JCPOA under Trump, we had no ability to monitor their nuclear program. Now they have grown it and it’s a huge threat in the region. They have been working to coalesce support for their regime in Iraq. So, they’re really not only a destabilizing force, they’re a core source of misery in the region and a huge threat because of their weapons programs.

So, I was asked to be on the new Special Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party by the former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Chairman Meeks. He said, I think you should consider this. So, I went up to Mike Gallagher, who is the current, he’s leaving I believe at the end of the month, but he’s the current chair of the Special Committee. I went up to Mike Gallagher, who I worked with before. He’s on a bipartisan group of veterans that I’m a part of. I went up to him and I said, you know, Mike, is this real? I don’t need to be on some special committee where we’re fighting over who’s tougher on China and I don’t do partisan committees if I can help it.

I really like to get stuff done. You’ve kind of pointed out the committees I’m on and the work they do and that’s by choice. I really do want to address these critical issues, so he assured me. He said, no, this is going to be a bipartisan committee and he has certainly been true to his word. He works very well with the ranking member, Raja Krishnamoorthi, who’s done a fantastic job. The two of them have quietly and purposefully handled some really big issues. I would point out TikTok, which really is very interesting. That came about because the Senate had tried to put forth legislation on TikTok and once the company ByteDance and TikTok became aware of what the Senate was doing, they moved very quickly and spent over $100,000 to kill it.

So, we saw that happening in the House and we decided we really need to do something about this because all of the briefings we were having about the risk of TikTok were incredibly concerning. Then we were starting to see over time, some of the briefings we’d had about potential threats coming true. We were moving forward, but quietly. It is very unusual in Congress for members of Congress to be handling a really big, important issue and not be talking about it nonstop in the press about how important the issue there. You know, I’m handling this important issue. It’s so important. I’m so important and this is great. You know, that is rare.

But everyone was, I think, just committed to actually getting something accomplished here and knowing that to do so, we just had to put our noses down, understand the scope of the problem, get the briefings, write the legislation. It wasn’t going to be about Mike Gallagher, Raja Krishnamoorthi, or Mikie Sherrill being the star. It was really going to be about making sure that we could enact a piece of legislation that was going to force the sale of a foreign adversary holding a company that was doing such damage and was such a national security threat. So, the bill was introduced. It passed very quickly through Energy and Commerce, who’s been slow to move on some of these issues of technology, but we got it through there very quickly. I think really surprised everyone.

It was really a point of pride for me because I think in these tough times, we are facing some of the most partisan times our nation has ever seen, we are seeing attacks on our democratic form of government like never before, and yet Congress is continuing its work. We are continuing to pass major pieces of legislation. We’re continuing to work. It’s not pretty. It’s maybe not the way any of us would want to do it, but we are continuing to make sure we pay our bills, that we keep the government open, that we pass the supplemental that’s necessary, and I’m knocking on wood now, that we address things like a major threat to our nation and TikTok.

So, we’re continuing to do the work of the people. I think the China Committee especially is kind of a bright spot in bipartisanship and people coming together in a thoughtful way. You know, we just did a hearing on fentanyl, which is very scary and it put out information on China purposefully manufacturing the precursor materials to fentanyl and other drugs that are killing Americans and knowingly doing that, knowing that they are illegal everywhere and yet manufacturing these illegal chemicals, exporting them to Mexico, and giving tax breaks to people who do. There are such bad actors on this in this area. The China committee again came together to address this in a very thoughtful way in a very bipartisan way, in a way that wasn’t attacking the other political party, but simply trying to get this accomplished. I think it is a bright spot.

Of course, for me, the most black and white way I experienced it was on January 6th. I was in the chamber during the attack and saw the people in the hallways, heard the gunshot when the woman was killed in the speaker’s lobby, saw people handcuffed face down as I exited the chamber as we were going to the secure location, saw afterwards how close everyone, including the group I had left the chamber with came to running into these protesters who were carrying structures that looked like nooses and yelling about trying to find people to harm them.

In seeing the evidence that there was an attempt to get the vice president of the United States and attack him and others and after seeing people on the Hill the day before and seeing the lies that members of Congress told to suggest that that hadn’t happened, and then seeing the video evidence of the tourists, for example, who were leading and seeing all this stuff, to have a president who the American people voted out of office have a large attempt to have people keep him in office. Despite that, to me, there’s never been in our nation a greater attack on democracy because at its core, if nothing else, democracy is the ability of people to vote for the leader they want and put that person in office.

So, then to see a continued lack of people in the Republican Party coming to terms with that or understanding how that will never happen again and addressing how to ensure that will never happen again and still there’s been no desire or attempt by the Republican party as a whole to do that. So, to see now that the very president who tried to stay in office and sent a mob after his own Vice President and Congress and others is now the standard bearer for the Republican party… There are a million different ways I see it day in and day out, support for people like Putin and Russia, but really, I think that alone would be enough for me to know that our democracy is still under threat.