U.S. Congressional District 19 covers a portion of the Texas panhandle from north of Lubbock down to Abilene. For ten years, the district has been represented by Congressman Jodey Arrington.
Arrington is not running for reelection and there are seven other candidates hoping to earn the spot to represent the Republican party in the November general election.
KTTZ in Lubbock and KACU in Abilene have partnered to provide in-depth interviews with the candidates. KACU attempted to reach out to candidate Ryan Zink, but did not get a reply before deadline.
Jason Corley is a Lubbock businessman with a history in oil and gas. He currently holds a local office within District 19. Corley has served as a Lubbock County Commissioner since 2019.
You can find interviews with other District 19 Republican candidates here.
Early voting runs Feb. 17-27 and Election Day is March 3.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Brad Burt: Thank you, Mr. Corley, for joining us. Just to start off with, folks in Lubbock County are familiar with your leadership style, given your serving as the county commissioner and some of your positions on the local issues, but how have you been reaching out to the people outside of Lubbock County? Because District 19 is big.
Jason Corley: Oh yeah, it's huge. 33 counties, so yeah, just a lot of shoe leather, a lot of driving. And, you know, just any little group that's meeting, you know, show up you hope there's 100 people there. There's usually 10-15. So, yeah, just take every meeting. You can talk with anybody and everybody. I give everybody my personal cell phone number, so we'll give that out to your listeners. It's 806-577-9778, and, yeah, feel free to give me a call. I'll talk about the issues.
Brad Burt: What are some of the messages that you've been hearing from voters, particularly in those rural areas in the district?
Jason Corley: Man, it doesn't matter where you're at in this district right now, affordability is the number one question. You know that's, that's, that's the number one thing everybody's talking about, if you're talking about, if you're talking about farmers, talking about, we know the afford is input costs. If you're talking about a college student about to graduate, how am I going to afford a house one day? Talking with families, how are we going to afford to send kids to college? You're talking to elderly person. How are we going to afford medications and just trying to get into the doctor's office, basic medical services. So affordability is the number one question, and inflation is the number one cause, so it's the main issue Congress needs to be tackling right now.
BB: You're the only candidate that is currently holding an elected position. You've been elected as the Lubbock County Commissioner for Precinct 2 twice now. What is something that you feel like you've accomplished in your time as a county commissioner?
JC: Oh, man, you know, I've always been a solid vote for lower taxes. You know, we did the tax walk out and did that in '19 with Commissioner Seay at the time, and then again with Commissioner Jordan in 2024, but you know that saved Lubbock County taxes. It also saved Houston a bunch of money too; Harris County Republicans down there on the commissioner's court said, ‘What are they doing up in Lubbock?’ And they did the exact same thing back in 2019 so, you know, we got teach the state of Texas how to keep your taxes down. Local issues, you know, one of the ones that I'm proudest of is getting the game room ordinance passed. We went from 100 game rooms operating illegally down to 31 that have to have a permit now. And you know, it didn't take a SWAT team, it didn't take a task force, it took a clipboard. The county has a new medical examiner's office. You know, it's been a busy seven years, that's for sure.
BB: What we're seeing in West Texas in particular, recently is these data centers that are promising some economic opportunity, but there's concerns like, particularly from Ag Commissioner Sid Miller, that they're going to be taking up resources, both water and land from some of our agriculture. Do you share the concerns for these data centers? and do you think there's regulations that could be put in place?
JC: So there's always going to be good actors and bad actors. It doesn't matter what it is. Anything that you do, you know. Amish people don't get many car wrecks, but then again, they don't drive cars either. So you know, there's a lot of benefits to the data centers. One: the economic impact, which is going to be huge for Lubbock County getting one of those built here, the value, the valuations on those will generate a ton of tax dollars for the county, which would allow them to lower their tax rate on everybody else, having a new very expensive piece of property like that get built here. So there's those tax advantages are there that will help everybody.
The other thing that's going to help in, like you mentioned, the jobs; these are not, I mean, this ain't sacking groceries. These are good paying jobs, good-paying tech industry jobs, so, you know, things that we want here in West Texas, but, like I said, Good actors and bad actors. On the bad actor side of this, Google has an old data center that's in, I think, Washington state. It uses up 40% of the state's fresh water. Now, they have so much fresh water they don't care. It's not an issue. Here in Lubbock, you know, Lubbock County and the rest of District 19, we look at this and kind of go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, it needs a lot of water. Let's talk about that.’
But the technology is getting a whole lot better. So the water usage is greatly reduced, mostly with the closed loop systems. You know, they have almost zero loss. So that style of Data Center makes a lot of sense. So the big question on the data centers is, it's not even, where does electricity come from? That's usually what we worry about. It's actually, where are they going to get the natural gas to make the electricity? I'm looking at these things going, okay, everybody's looking this is a problem, but here's the solution that I think they're going to provide. So you've got data centers are doing a couple things [to] get their electricity. They're going to your local power plant and saying, ‘Here, man, we'll give you the money [to] build on and supply us electricity we need.’ Then the other thing that they're doing too is some are building their own power plants and then paying the electric company to run it for them, and then any extra power they have they sell to the grid.
The other thing too on that is they're throwing around a lot of money for that land. So, you know, some of these farmers are, yeah, looking at that, going, ‘you know, I can do a lot of farming with 50 grand an acre, if I sell off a few a little bit of space over here.’ Now, if we start jumping off into the nuclear like what they're working on down in Abilene, and we don't – flare gas, we're flaring trillions of barrels, or, excuse me, a CFM of natural gas every single year. So the thought idea was like, why don't you run it through a gas turbine, make electricity and just put it on the grid? So what we need to do is go ahead, change the rules and the regulations on the utility companies that if you've got an energy producer that wants to put power on the grid, you know, through, I don't know that I call it renewable energy, it's more like recycled energy, you know, they should be allowed to do that. So, I mean, it's entirely doable. It's not like it's anything new. We just got to get government to, you know, get on board.
BB: What are your views on President Donald Trump's tariffs, and do you think that they've been helpful to the US and the West Texas economy specifically?
JC: So I call it ‘shock and awe… shucks’, so sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not. So the tariffs on oil and gas, or tariffs on that, as far as how they're affecting oil and gas has been getting tubular. So any of your casing and your drill pipe, your drill collars, those kinds of things, a lot of those are coming out of China. That steals coming out of China. So, yeah, that's been a that's been a bit of a problem. There's some things that Trump slapped the tariffs on, he's in the middle of a trade war. I mean, it is what it is. And there's going to be, you know, there's going to be some sacrifices, there's going to be some casualties of war too. And, I mean, you know, we, we just kind of got to figure out what, what do we do in the meantime, you know, a lot of that stuff, what happened at first was kind of tough, but now it's starting to, starting to lift. You know what I would like to see the government, do we need to – we, in this work prior to civil war, I mean, I know our government's bigger than that, maybe it probably shouldn't be, but we used to finance this whole country on a 10% tariff, and other nations did too. 10% seemed reasonable. It gives your local domestic suppliers a little bit of an advantage, but not a whole lot. You know, if you go to the store and you're looking I want to– do I want to buy the BMW, or do I want to buy the Ford Explorer? 10% increase? I think I want to save some money. Or maybe I really like that leather, and I'm going with the BMW. But the other thing that that does when you have those tariffs in place is you have businesses that are going, hey, you know what? Why don't we move our manufacturing into your country, and then you don't charge the tariff? You're like, that's great. You want to build the BMW here in the States? Wonderful. Come on in.
BB: You kind of touched on one of my next points was, beef is a big piece of the economic picture in District 19, and we've seen some struggling both on the cattle-raising side and on the meatpacking side, President Trump has attributed part of that, and he's asked the DOJ for investigations into some of the monopolies that have handled the meatpacking industries. Do you support better regulation on some of these companies?
JC: So what never should have happened is allowing these four companies to buy up everything. So you have three beef processors, and all three are foreign, except for one, there's one left that's still American, and they control the price at the grocery store. They also control the price that the rancher pays. So okay, well, why did they all consolidate? How did – What do you mean it's more efficient? How did all this happen? So what happened is your government started raising your regulations up, and they start making it harder and harder for the little guy to one: gets started, or two: to compete. So you’ve got four processors, and the way that you got, the way that you got four processors is they all have lobbyists, and those lobbyists go and they buy congressmen, then they, oh, I'm sorry, ‘contribute to their campaign.'
So what they did was say, ‘hey, we want you to raise these regulations. It'll be safer. We'll make everybody safer.’ That's how they're controlling the market, but it's through bad regulation. So what do we need to do? You know, we just need to start removing some of these regulations that it's like, okay, is this reasonable? Does this really make sense? And a lot of times in government, it's the reporting that is killing people. It's so hard to to keep up with the reporting, or you've got to buy very expensive software to do it. Talk to anybody in the medical industry, they'll tell you the exact same thing.
BB: It sounds like the bigger companies seem to be taking advantage of whatever the state of the regulations are. Is it really the level of regulation, or is it just the way that we are regulating?
JC: That's where we need reforms on lobbying, on what you're allowed to do, you know, because that's what you're seeing. You're seeing these lobbying groups you can get together, raise a lot of money, and then they're going to congressmen and saying, ‘hey, you know what you ought to do? Maybe, maybe we don't need a congressional investigation in these meatpacking plants merging. Maybe we just let that happen.’ You know? I mean, 'do you want to get reelected? Because we have some money, we could help with that.'
BB: The Farm Bill, obviously a big responsibility of Congress, but there have been some complaints that it doesn't do enough to help struggling farmers. What do you think West Texas needs to see the most out of this Farm Bill?
JC: We need to make a decision: do you want to – who do you want to work for? Who do you want the farm bill to work for? Do you want the farm bill to work for farmers? or do you want the farm bill to work for the people that sell the inputs? And right now, the people that sell the inputs, they're the ones that have, they have all the money, they have all the, they have all the lobbyists, and they are the ones that drive the Farm Bill. And they're like, ‘but the money goes directly to the farmer.’ It's like, yeah, that's right, but the seed company will tell you all day long: ‘if the farmer makes $1 off our product, we expect 85 cents of it.’ So that's, you know, that's what your farmers are up against.
So we're looking at this farm bill, we start talking about that, what are we going to do to one: keep our producers? Because now, average age of farmers over 60, that's scary. Young people are not getting into farming because they're looking at this going, I don't want this level of insecurity. I don't know what I'm dealing with from year to year. One, you're dealing with the government, which is fickle. You're dealing with the weather in West Texas, which is fickle. So, I mean, you don't know, is it going to be up or down? And so what you're seeing is a farm bill that's driving us towards consolidation. So you've got the same number of acres, you've just got less farmers. We've got some programs that help get people into farming, but when you're talking about the scale that we're at now, you know, I mean, I think a farmer is going to need to farm 2,000 acres, and he's probably going to need, you know, a million dollars worth of equipment to do it. So, I mean, that's a pretty high price to get into this.
So what are we going to have to do is change up, or start changing up our policies to benefit, one: lower the entry cost to get started; two: we've got to protect our smaller producers. But when I say we're talking like massive farms, talking over 50,000 acres, I'm talking about corporate owned farms, like this is what Bill Gates is moving towards. You know, he's like, one of the largest owners of farmland in America. You know, we're seeing that stuff. That's the corporate farms that we're looking at. Well, big corporate farms have big corporate money. They can buy lobbyists, they can buy congressmen, so who foots the bill at the end of the day? the taxpayer. That's the stuff that worries me, as far as the district is concerned, that's what we need to be looking at, is making sure we're changing those programs up.
So simple, easy fixes that you can do if you want to help the beef industry. Right now, we've got CRP grass. This is land that's taken out of rotation, planted in grass. You can't graze it. You can graze it once every 30 years in a drought condition. Just let people graze it. It's not that hard, you know. Just let the ranchers graze it. And then that way you'll have landowners that own it, that have CRP, now those ranchers will be knock on door, going, ‘Hey, you want to make a, you know, you want to get another check? Let me go ahead and graze this land.’
The other thing too on that, that's an easy one to reach across the aisle because of carbon sequestration. When you talk to people that are really worried about the environment, you know, we're trying to get all that, you know, evil, you know, carbon out of the air. Plants kind of eat that stuff but okay, anyways, you know, hey, whatever, you do you, bud. But if they want, if you want to, if you want to reach across that, go, ‘Hey, look, let me show you how we can sequester six times more carbon by letting the cows graze it.’ And there you go, don't even make it about the rancher. Just tell them, it's just about dealing with the carbon. So to me, that's governing. You know, if you can get 90% of what you want, the other guy thinks it's his idea, you've done something. You've done well.
BB: A lot of the rural hospitals in our area have reported them experiencing staffing shortages. Do you think there's something that Congress could be doing to make sure that people in those rural areas have access to the healthcare.
JC: So we need to look at the funding. You've also got to have a tiered system. Your hospitals are inspected by CMS, but CMS is going to go in and they're going to look at Covenant and UMC, the same way that they look at Lynn County Hospital District, okay, but they're two very different ones. Or, you know what, let's, let's go a little further out there. Let's talk about like Anson, or, you know, much more rural county. Okay, so those burdens, then – you know, go actually walk into a doctor's office sometime and say, ‘Hey, I don't have insurance. Can I pay you cash and pull out actual cash? How much is it?’ The girl working the counter won't know, but the doc will know, and it'll be like, ‘Oh, what do you got? Oh, yeah, 60 bucks, deal’. And they're tickled pink that you're paying on cash so they don't have to mess with the medical billing. I've got a brother in Dallas – it's my cousin in Dallas. He's a ophthalmologist, and he's got three clinics, three doctors. He has nine women doing medical billing. That's what it takes to keep up with three doctors. And those ladies, they get the paperwork, they fill it out, they send it to the insurance company or to Medicare. Medicare can then kick it back go ‘No, it's not this.’ They look at it again, kick it back. ‘Yeah, it is.’ Three times, at least three times, before they pay it. And he's like, ‘This is ridiculous. I've got,’ he says ‘I've got more effort put into the back end of the business than I do the front end, just trying to get paid.’ So CMS is who regulates that. So your rural hospitals, what we're gonna have to do, we've got to back that down. They provide a good care before they up these crazy standards on them. The other thing too is the medical billing and reporting is just atrocious. What they're requiring for that. So those requirements need to be less severe in the rural areas. And you know this well, you're opening yourself up to more fraud that way. It's like, yeah, but you've got less customers, so it's easier to maintain, it's easier to track, so that that risk is a whole lot less.
The other thing we need to sit down and start having a reasonable discussion about what what level of care should I be able to expect to get from a rural hospital? And that's, I mean, you're not going to be able to provide all the services that you can get over here at, you know, a Covenant and UMC. And actually, you know what easy way to think about it, Pappadeaux. You ever eat at Pappadeaux?
BB: Oh yeah.
JC: It's my favorite seafood restaurant. If I could get one thing done in Lubbock, it would be to get Pappadeaux here. Yeah, I would trade every other success I ever had, you know, as county commissioners, for Pappadeaux. But there's my level of commitment. But anyways, Pappadeaux won't go in unless you have a population of a million or you have an interstate and then you can have a lower population threshold there, because they go by the number of cars driving by. Alright, it's the same thing with your hospitals. So when you start talking about a smaller hospital, there's just not as many people. So, you know, what services can you afford to offer? That's where we're going to have to have the basic minimum saying, ‘Alright, look, we have to have an ER. We have to have, we want to have at least one medical doctor on staff, 24 hours a day. We want to have at least, you know, one or two nurse aides. I ought to be able to come in here get x-ray, stitches, CT scan.’ You know, decide what this basic level is going to look like, and then go from there and say, ‘Okay, we're going to fund to this level.’ The other thing too, most of these rural hospitals, they're either funded by a city or county. If you if you got a broken arm and you're in Garza County – well, no, let's say Borden County, because they don't have a hospital – you're an hour drive to Lubbock. Okay. You know that's rough, but, I mean, but you're not riding in the back of a covered wagon for two days to get to the doctor. So start having a conversation of what these medical districts need to look like size wise. What is an acceptable distance for a certain service? Your emergency services? Yeah, we need to be able to provide that in every county. So we start looking at CMS: one, back the regulations down to where you can provide those services cheaply. Here's the other thing, if you live in Lubbock and you drive to Austin – this is how we got some of our legislatures to work with so on improving ambulance services in the counties – we'll say, ‘Hey, if you drive from Lubbock to Austin, you drive through five counties that do not have an ambulance.’ So, yeah, you better hope that state trooper drags you off the side of the road and puts you in the car and gives you a ride in town. Or you're riding in the back of a pickup, if you get a car wreck in some of those counties. That was pretty eye opening down in Austin. They're like, ‘Oh, yeah, we better throw some money at these ambulances, because that could be me on the side of the road.’ You think about how many deer and hogs are between here and Austin.
BB: One of the big priorities for the Trump administration has been immigration. The ICE activity has drawn some protests. Polling is showing some low approval of these current efforts. Do you support the approach that the president is taking now and what reform would you offer for the immigration system?
JC: So Trump, he's not doing anything that wasn't already in law, and I don't know that he’s surpassed Barack Obama on deportations, either. But you know, the media is putting this stuff out here. They're blowing this up. But you've got a lot of people that are profiting off of illegal immigration. And we need to put a stop to it 100% and the way that you do that is you take away the draw. So during the Carter administration – I don't brag on him very often, but he got this right – it was a $30,000 fine for anybody caught hiring an illegal immigrant. *whistles* Stopped. That was the end of that. You know, for quite a while nobody would hire somebody that was illegal because you couldn't afford it. Now, that shut it down. That took away a problem. But we had a problem because we quit managing the solution, which was the old brassario program. We had a partnership with Mexico. If you're from Mexico, you want to work in the United States and agricultural related jobs, you join, you went to the brassario program. They had offices set up all along the border. And we bussed 3 million people all over this country working in agricultural based jobs. They had to provide housing, they had to provide set wages, set hours of work, and certain standards that all had to be met in order to participate in the program. Worked great. People in Mexico came here, made good money, made good money for their families, then went home again. And we needed the labor at the time, so we worked. We kept track of 3 million people with a pencil. And you're telling me with everything we've got, you're telling me we can't keep up with a couple of workers. I don't think so. Like everything else in government, follow the money.
So illegal immigration does a couple of things. One, it drives down wages for American workers. Two, it also exploits labor, usually, from people that are coming from pretty rough places. The other thing too, people like, ‘Oh, well, you know, I mean, you know, this is something that's just anti-Mexico.’ Majority of the people that are coming into United States right now, our immigration is not Mexican. You know, we're seeing an influx of people that are coming here from a lot of the countries. Military age men is one thing you need to be paying attention to that’s very concerning, at least on the terroristic front. The other thing too, you do have a lot of people that are dumping people over here, and it's trying to change culture. I mean, look at Minnesota. They kept bringing in all these Somalis, over and over and over again and to where they've really changed the ethnic make up in that state entirely. And I would say, I would argue, not for the better. You can't bring that many people into one place and expect them to be able to Americanize, because you've created Little Somalia over there. You know, we saw this at the Quality Learning Center. And you know, you have people that are smart enough to look at government programs and policies take advantage of those. You know, we find out we're funding terrorism through these Quality Learning Centers. Every time a different agency touches that money, there's a handling charge and a handling fee. So that's why, by the time it gets to where it goes, there's not that much money. So, those are the things that we've got to keep an eye out for on this illegal immigration, because the majority of our enemies realize, militarily, they're never going to be able to beat us but they can manipulate us. They can work through our policies. We can dump tons of people on you, or we can just get them in there and bleed you dry. So you know now you've got more Medicare, Medicaid fraud as well too, and nobody's going in and checking and audit it. So how do you solve this problem? When you take those 84,000 IRS agents that Biden hired, and why don't we have them audit where the money's going instead of where it's coming from. Simple things, if it's not working, turn it off.
BB: You talked about affordability, water, these are issues that are non-partisan. Are there issues that you would be willing to work across the aisle with Democrats if you were elected?
JC: Sure! I'll work with anybody that'll work with me. I'm not that picky. You know, the it's about it's about policy. It's not about party. So, you know, water availability, that's definitely one that, you know, we need water. I mean, if I'm talking to a Democrat from Nevada, and he's like, you know, I need to build a dam. I need to build a dam too. Let's talk. What can we work out here? Let's get some good policy in place to start meeting these needs. You've got too many people are too hung up on being R's and D's, and they need to be more focused on being Americans. You know what works out well?
You know, we start talking about education. That's another one that comes up along the way. My wife's an assistant principal at a school, it's 100-150 kids total and you have very different conversation when we talk about school that size versus LISD. But, you know, we start get talking on education. Okay, is as education gotten better since the 70s when we created the Department of Education? No. Okay. Well, why are we still doing this? I mean, if it doesn't – that's the problem with government programs. They're good – they started out with good intentions, but when they quit working, we just keep on doing them. We're like, ‘Well, maybe throw some more money at it. That'll work. Yeah, throw some more money at it that'll that'll solve the problem.’ It never works. End the program. Just shut it down. Shut it off.
I don't think early voting has worked out well. I think we need to go to, you know, Donald Trump has put this idea out there: Okay, Election Day is a holiday. Done. Over with. Every person. Your employer has to give you four hours off to go vote. You know, that's – just be done with it. Let's get this knocked out. Let's get this done. From a county commissioner standpoint, early voting is so expensive to operate just because you've got to staff all these locations. Yeah, you know that to me, that's one of the driving costs on that. Man, go to one day. Give everybody the day off. You know, if you care enough to go vote, go vote. If you don't, you're going to the lake, well, fine. We probably don't need you thinking for the group anyway.
So the other thing, campaign finance reports – or campaign finance reforms, another one that comes up. The PACs need to go away, the Super PACs need to go away, because I can't afford a pack. I don't know if you can afford to ‘Hey, man, I'm gonna hire a guy is set up a little group and we're going to throw a bunch of money into it, and that way nobody knows it's you me that are, you know, putting money into it to go help this other candidate.’ Currently, federal elections are capped at $3,500 per individual donation. I think that's perfectly fine. You know, set it at that and just go, move on. And what that does, it forces those campaigns to have to go out and talk to individual people. It was never supposed to be big mega corporations going in there and buying congressmen to give them grants and, you know, all these freebies and hand over your money. That's not what it's supposed to be. Should be individual people donating to it.
BB: We see this with some concerns with what President Trump has done in terms of, in terms of executive orders and how our other branches of the government have responded to that. Do you think that Congress is as powerful as it has been in the past, especially when it comes to kind of controlling other aspects of the government?
JC: So… Congress moves slow. You know, there's previous county commissioner who’d say ‘government works best when it works slowly.’ And, you know, especially with markets and things like that, volatility. Yeah, you don't want somebody yanking the steering wheel when you're all the time go trying to drive straight down the road. So, yeah, Congress tends to move slowly on things, and sometimes it ought to move a little bit quicker, but it ought to probably start taking back some of the taking back some of the authorities. One of the ones that we deal with a lot of times is activist judges, and that's where I'm looking at with this going, okay, we need to be able to rein that power in. Some of these guys ought to be getting drug before Congress. For congressional hearings on this and saying, ‘Okay, are you interpreting the law, or are you making the law?’ You know? That's kind of what I'm looking at with it on the judicial side, I think Congress is not – they're not putting their foot down on this.
The other thing too, when people get called Epstein Files. I mean, I want… We should be hanging people from light poles already on this thing. You know, other countries are already doing it. What was King England kicked his brother out of the palatial palace. He's like, ‘Guess what? Here you go. Yeah, you're gonna be working at Subway by the end of the week, because I'm taking your money and taking everything. Yeah, you're out.’ So that's the stuff that I'm looking at going, okay, this needs to be dealt with. That's where Congress ought to be taking back that power, dragging people in there that you know are committing crimes against – I mean, it's crimes against children. Who's not on board with this? You know, that's something bipartisan. We ought to be reaching across the aisle, going, ‘Okay, this is going on. Is this happening in your community?’ Because if I find out this happened in my community, we're not having this. We can't allow this to go on.
BB: Congressman Jodey Arrington worked in that office for 10 years. How would you differ from Arrington?
JC: Okay, so one thing I want to do with Jodey's offices right here: the Lubbock office, the Abilene office, and we used to have a Big Spring office – we need to bring that back. You got 33 counties, let's give them three offices to deal with. Then you still got to maintain your office in Washington, DC. So you got about $2 million to work with on that. And I always had good dealings as a county commissioner with his office, but one thing I want to change, I want grant writers working there. I want to get people in there that are working with the cities, the schools and the counties, because you've already got all the demographic information. And majority of the counties in this district are under 10,000 people. So if you're filling out a grant for one county, you know, there's probably five others that qualify. So now you're basically filling it out one time, with just different names on the top of the homework. And, you know, go ahead and get that stuff filled out. Call the county up, say, ‘Hey, are you guys interested? Do you guys want this?’ And they're like, ‘Oh yeah, we'd love that.’ ‘Okay, great. Here's the letter of recommendation from the congressman. Here's this already. Let me give this to you.’ And just pass it over to them.
The other one, too, is a veteran liaison officer. I'd like to have a dedicated position that works with veterans to where – okay, ‘Hey, look, I'm putting in for disability. And, man, I don't know. I've put in twice now, I'm not getting anywhere.’ The other thing too on that, anything that you can do to attract veterans to your area, because the United States government, one thing they do right is every veteran they factor in, I think it's about $3,600 per month for veterans to pay out for disability claims. So, you know, get those guys – if they need the help, get them help. If they need that, let's make sure they've got it. Get that process done quickly and easily. My granddad fought in World War II, around nothing but mortar fire. Man was deaf the entire time I knew him, you know, my whole life. Finally, called me when I was in college. He's like, ‘Can you drive me over the VA in Amarillo and get some hearing aids.’ ‘Okay!’ You know, took grandpa down there, met this great lady, helped us out, get everything done. And we didn't know grandpa fought through the Ardennes. We didn't know about this ‘til she's pulling up his service records. We're like, ‘Oh my god.’ He's like, ‘Yeah, I just don't like talking about it.’ Until we got told it. Anyways, she's like, ‘Well, wish you had told somebody about it.’ But he got disability check going all the way back to World War II. Got him set of hearing aids. Got him taken care of, got him what the government said he was owed. But if we can go ahead and get that taken care of for our veterans, right off the bat, yeah, I think that's going to be a huge help to that community.
BB: Great. Anything else you'd like to tell our voters, oh, man,
JC: If you got any questions, you know, rattled off, talked about a lot of different subjects. I'm happy to talk about any of them. So if you want to meet up and grab a cup of coffee, happy to tell you anything and everything that I know about government. But experience matters. You need to send somebody – When you get to Congress, you can't be up there with training wheels. So that ain't what this is. So send somebody, one who has experience. Number two, the other thing that drives me nuts is having to deal with Republicans that – it's like some of them, they don't want to win, like the old neo cons, they just wanted to lose well. As county commissioner, I can tell you right now, I made a lot of people mad in this town with the tax walkouts, with voting for lower taxes, trying to keep that under wraps. And you know what? They didn't live in precinct two. So, so what? I don't represent you, not my problem. But you know, that's what I want to see. This is the reddest – one of the reddest districts in the entire country. I mean, you can go to Washington, DC, get up there, speak on conservative values all day long. You can go on The View and fight and argue with them old ladies every day and not have to worry about coming home to a challenger. But you can't do that in some of these swing states. So, those guys, they're a little more subdued with what they have to say. I have no plans of doing that. I plan to go up there and really carry forth the values and the beliefs of this district. But yeah, hey, thank you guys for having me on. I appreciate it.
BB: Thank you. Jason Corley, running for Congressional District 19 in Texas. Thank you very much for joining us.