Representative Nick LaLota of New York’s First Congressional District came out swinging at a prospective opponent in his first re-election bid in November, referring to the former CNN anchor John Avlon as “a Manhattan elitist attempting to parachute into Suffolk County to try to buy a congressional seat.”
In an interview on Friday, Mr. LaLota, a Republican who has endorsed former President Trump’s re-election bid, echoed the statement issued by his spokesman upon Mr. Avlon’s announcement of his candidacy last Thursday. In addition to his re-election campaign, the congressman discussed a range of topics with The Star, signaling his continued support for the impeachment inquiry aimed at President Biden and including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its third year, and the migrant crisis at America’s southern border.
“It may take burning millions of dollars of his friends’ money to realize that NY-01 has a solid history of rejecting elites from outside Suffolk County,” Mr. LaLota said of Mr. Avlon.
In Congress, Mr. LaLota twice voted to impeach Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security, with House Republicans’ second effort, on Feb. 13, succeeding by a single vote. In a statement, he said Mr. Mayorkas had “willfully and systematically ignored our nation’s laws and done more damage to America than any other cabinet Secretary in our nation’s history.” (A conviction in the Democratic-led Senate is unlikely.)
In a Feb. 7 letter to President Biden, Mr. LaLota was among New York’s House Republican delegation charging that the administration’s “open border policies” and New York State and New York City’s “sanctuary policies and taxpayer-funded housing and healthcare for migrants” were responsible for “our state’s migrant crisis.”
This month, Senate Republicans narrowly scuttled a bipartisan border security deal that would also have funded support for Ukraine and Israel, following Mr. Trump’s declaration of opposition to it, which as The Hill reported “marked a dramatic shift among Senate Republicans, who for months have insisted that any funding for Ukraine must be paired with reforms to secure the border.” Though it did not make it to the House of Representatives, “there are parts about it that were problematic to me,” Mr. LaLota said. “It granted the president authority, rather than requiring him to do that which he hasn’t done in the last three years. I don’t have a lot of trust in Biden and Mayorkas when it comes to securing the border.” Mr. Trump “did not have a policy of mass parole” into the United States, he said.
Mr. Trump’s opposition to a border deal, reportedly because it could have benefited President Biden politically, was “inconsequential,” Mr. LaLota said. “I’d prefer each of these issues be treated independently. Lumping all in one gives too many people an excuse not to do the right thing.” He said he encourages the president “to reinstate some Trump-era policies like border wall construction, canceling mass migration. The solution won’t just be political rhetoric, it will be policy actions. The president can take those actions today.”
Regarding Russia, President Vladimir Putin is “a ruthless dictator, an autocrat who has no regard for human life,” and who “must be held accountable for starting an unprovoked war,” Mr. LaLota said. He anticipates a bipartisan military aid package — “bombs and bullets,” and not humanitarian aid — to be considered when the House reconvenes next month.
House Republicans have led an impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden, a former F.B.I. informant’s claims about the president and his son’s business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company held up as “the most corroborating evidence,” in the words of Republican Representative Jim Jordan. The former informant has since been indicted for making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record, and more recently it emerged that the informant’s claims were given to him by Russian intelligence officials.
Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a Republican, told CNN, “We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known, and yet my colleagues went out and talked to the public about how this was credible and damning.” Instead, he said, the subsequent revelation “really undercuts the nature of the charges.”
Mr. LaLota maintained that “many Americans are highly skeptical on how the Biden family made money overseas from entities in China and Ukraine. Biden family members who had no professional background were paid tens of millions by entities in those countries for very dubious work. I remain skeptical on how the president’s family made its money.” That extends to the president himself, he said, but “with respect to impeachment, we have a presidential election around the corner, and the American people will serve as the jury toward Biden and what he did or didn’t do.”
He was disappointed that former Representative Tom Suozzi won the Feb. 13 special election to succeed Representative George Santos in the Third District, flipping the seat from Republican to Democratic control following Mr. Santos’s expulsion from the House in December. “But credit to Tom Suozzi for addressing, or at least attempting to address, issues many Democrats have avoided,” such as the border, Mr. LaLota said.
With his 2022 victory, Mr. LaLota was among several Republican candidates in the state to help his party gain control of the House in 2022. Nationally, he is among more than a dozen Republicans representing a district won by Mr. Biden in 2020 whom Democrats are targeting in their effort to regain a majority in the upcoming elections.
Mr. LaLota “caught some flak from some colleagues” for insisting that Mr. Santos be expelled, he said, which further reduced the Republican majority, but he has “zero regret for having done so. If policymakers are going to hold members of another party accountable like I am with Biden and Mayorkas, I think it is required that the same policymakers like myself hold people in our own party accountable.”
