“I feel like the country is getting pretty tired of Nancy Pelosi,” Cass County’s congressman, Fred Upton, said in Dowagiac Thursday afternoon.

“I’m encouraged with what’s happening around the country as it relates to the November election. Should the Republicans pick up 39 seats, our objective is to show we’ve learned from the mistakes of the past.”

Upton, his voice raspy from fighting a cold, said, “I’m not afraid to vote against the leadership when I think they’re wrong. I bet a year from now, if we take the majority in the House, we’ll be able to say with confidence that the deficit will be lower and spending will be less.”

“There’s not a single Democrat out there bragging about their vote for health care,” Upton said. “Not one. The president’s promise on that bill — if you like your health care, you can keep it — Provident Mutual, which insures 980,000 Americans, just said it���s dropping health coverage. Period. Forty-seven percent of seniors in Michigan who have Medicare Advantage were told it’s not going to be around after Jan. 1. The shoe is yet to drop on health care. If (President Obama, who said in an interview Rolling Stone published Oct. 14 that halfway through his term “we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do” with “two years left to finish the rest of the list, at minimum”) got the stimulus bill, unemployment would be less than 8 percent. A lot of things were left undone, but my little crystal ball says that two big issues we have to deal with, this is the first year since passage of the budget act of the ’70s that the House failed to pass a budget, let alone reconcile it with the Senate. For the first time ever, not a single appropriation bill was conferenced with the Senate. We took up the veterans appropriation bill, which has never been passed in the Senate. None of the others made it to the House floor for debate, let alone a vote.

“When we left town a week and a half ago, to avoid a government shutdown, we passed a continuing resolution freezing things at 2010 levels. That includes all the plussed-up spending from the stimulus and all of the other supplemental appropriations bills of the last two years. In essence, freezing a higher spending baseline for 2011. We passed that until Dec. 3. In lame duck session, it will have to be extended. My guess is Pelosi, who will still have a 78-vote margin because the new members don’t come in until January, we’ll probably pass another short-term continuing resolution into January, again freezing things at 2010 levels. I’m convinced had she opened the bill for full debate and vote, we’d have taken that spending down to 2008 levels” before the Obama administration inhabited the White House.

“Freezing spending at ’08 levels instead of ’10 would have probably saved $100 billion — b as in big,” Upton said. “When we come back, and when the new Congress comes in January, my guess is we take up the continuing resolution to finish the fiscal year through Sept. 30 we’ll be able to drop it down, knowing we had the votes, but Pelosi said no. Under Speaker Boehner we’ll do it at ’08. As a consequence, it should go a remarkable way toward the pledge that we’ll spend less and the deficit will be less a year from now. We knew for eight years that the tax cuts were going to expire. Pelosi didn’t bring it up for debate, so they all expired. All the tax tables revert to the old higher level, which really delays, I think, the recovery from recession. Whether you’re making $40,000 or $140,000, your taxes are going to go up. The argument was for a two-year extension. President Obama’s former budget director, Peter Orszag, who just stepped down in August, wrote a column that the tax cuts should be extended for two years. A tax hike is the last thing our businesses need. I think about half of that ($787 billion stimulus) has been spent in terms of back of the envelope. At some point Congress has to say no. We’re borrowing 43 cents on every dollar. The deficit has gone from $316 billion in ’06 to $1.5 trillion now.”

Upton continued, “Part of the pledge Republicans embraced is we want to identify programs that really aren’t justified with federal dollars. Do you realize the Department of Education spends $150 million a year on overseeing safe transportation routes for K-12 students? What does the federal government have to do with telling Dowagiac or St. Joe or anyone else what routes their kids ought to take to school? Over 10 years, that’s $1.5 billion. Isn’t that totally a local responsibility?”

Upton headed from Dowagiac to Three Rivers for a March of Dimes fundraiser after stopping by the Daily News for an interview Oct. 14.

With no more votes in Congress until Nov. 14, Upton has been “cruising the district bigtime.”

Mood of voters heading into the homestretch before the Nov. 2 midterm elections?

“Jobs and economy, that’s what it is,” Upton said. “We saw (anger) all summer with this relentless spending in Washington. The president asked for $50 billion more yesterday for infrastructure, and the question is, where’s it going to come from?” after a $787 billion stimulus bill.

“It seems like any project involving federal dollars, they put that big American Recovery Act sign on it,” the St. Joseph Republican said. “I was here in a coffee shop in Cass County last week, talking to a guy who works for MDOT (Michigan Department of Transportation). He wanted to know where in the world we got money to start spending for new highway mile marker signs every two-tenths of a mile. When cars hit those signs they’re going to go through the windshield and decapitate people. This guy said they did it because so many people hit the little median fence they had to predict accurately where the accidents are so they can collect the money to repair the fence. How many millions of dollars does this cost? I thought we were broke.”

Asked about reports that Fortune 500 companies are sitting on $837 billion in uncommitted cash while 14 percent of Americans live in poverty and 1 percent control 38 percent of the wealth, Upton replied, “I’ve heard that story.”

“They’re waiting to see what’s going to happen,” Upton asserted. “I went to this little company the other day” with 52 employees in Schoolcraft.

“They make  a polymer sealant for driveways and roofs. It’s green and has no toxic fumes. They want to expand, but his accountant said he couldn’t tell him to invest that money and hire more people until we know if these tax cuts are going to be extended or not. The economy’s too rough. If taxes go up, it’s better they don’t do it and wait. That spills into that story. Businesses want to know what the rules of the game are going to be. Tool and die folks who came to see me are beginning to see promising signs in the economy and they’re ready to hire people back, but they don’t know what tax rate they’re going to be at.”

“It’s like immigration,” Upton said. “That’s certainly an issue on the front burner, and the first hearing we have in four years is with Stephen Colbert two weeks ago on a day Congress wasn’t in session. Testifying in character, no less.”

Maybe given the need to package everything from politics to tragedy as food-fight entertainment to latch onto shrinking attention spans makes it necessary to run Donald Trump for president in 2012 so he can turn the White House into a reality show. Text this number to invade Iran, that number to invade North Korea.

“There’s your column,” Upton said. “What does Colbert know about immigration that he can come testify, cracking jokes at the beginning? Rachel Maddow even came out against him. She ripped him left and right.”

Upton said he doesn’t know if Colbert ever tried to profile Michigan’s 6th District, but he would decline.

Upton will be here in his district when Colbert and Jon Stewart rally to restore sanity on the Mall Oct. 30, just as he was in Michigan at the Republican convention during Glenn Beck’s Aug. 28 rally.

Asked about the Tea Party and Sen. Sherrod Brown’s, D-Ohio, observation in USA Today Oct. 4 that the movement is “faux populism” because its vision of 21st century America “would gut Medicare and Social Security, ignore the minimum wage and scale back consumer protections and regulations that keep Wall Street honest and our food supply safe … Tea Party populism is driven by anger at our government and at our country. Real populism fights for all Americans, while Tea Party populism divides us.”

Upton responded, “I’m proud that people are out there, looking at the issues versus being part of the Silent Majority. They’re part of educating the electorate. The more people who participate, the better we are. As I look at what happens in November, and Republicans hopefully take over, particularly with the pledge that we’ve outlined, I want us to be held accountable — which wasn’t done before — as it relates to transparency in government and cutting spending to get our fiscal feet back on the ground. We’re way out of bounds in terms of making it a leaner, more efficient government with what’s happened over the last couple of years. (The Tea Party) will be a good force to try and get us back on track. Obama won this county, Berrien, Van Buren and Kalamazoo. Our district, the way it’s configured today with Kalamazoo, has gone for the winner in the presidential election with virtually one exception in the last 100 years — Obama, Bush twice, Clinton twice, Reagan twice. The one discrepancy is it went for (Michigan native) Ford instead of Carter in ’76. I represent people he represented. Allegan County was in his district. It wasn’t a surprise Obama won 54 percent because McCain pulled out of Michigan. Now the polling shows (Republican governor nominee Rick) Snyder’s up 20 percent. His focus was jobs and the economy. The others got off on tangents.”

“Tax cuts help get there,” Upton insists. “But a couple of things I want to work on” if given a 13th two-year term. “I’m the top Republican on the energy and environment subcommittee. We’re going to need 30 percent to 40 percent more electricity before the end of the next decade and we’ve done nothing to prepare for it. As you look at the Cook (nuclear) plant (on Lake Michigan in Berrien County), they’re actively thinking about how we can address the needs. China right now is shutting off power to whole communities because their growth rates are so high. We have to prepare for the needs we have. We’ve only permitted one new coal plant in the last number of years, primarily because we don’t have clean coal technology yet. That’s something we need to push for. On nuclear, I had an amendment we tried to offer on the Cap and Trade bill last summer that we thought was going to be allowed that would shorten the time frame for a nuclear reactor from start to finish to four to five years to match the French, instead of the 10 or 12 years it takes the U.S. today. Shrinking that time frame reduces the cost. You’re talking about thousands of jobs per reactor. When Cook and Palisades were built, 85 percent of components were manufactured in the United States. But because we’ve turned the switch to red on nuclear power over the last 25 years, when the president broke ground on that reactor in Georgia in March, 85 percent of those parts are going to come from outside the United States. We’ve started to (reverse that) with batteries, like the new plant in Holland and on the eastern side of the state. It’s imperative that the new Chevy Volt be assembled here in Michigan. Before the end of this decade, we’re hoping some states will have perhaps 20 percent of their vehicles on the road be electric hybrids. We want those jobs here. It appears we’re going to get a lot of those battery technology jobs, which will help.”

On energy jobs, Upton said, “Whether it be nuclear, renewables like wind and solar, last week I was at Western Michigan University. One of the things I worked on successfully is building a partnership between Eaton and (WMU) to develop a new electric hybrid for trucks. Western has a new lab. It’s a multi-million-dollar project that means jobs that will stay here. Long term, it will help us rely less on foreign oil. Galesburg, just south of I-94, has hundreds of engineers working there. This is a very exciting new venture. Wind turbines, I’ve worked successfully with KVCC (Kalamazoo Valley Community College) to develop a wind turbine school graduating classes of folks who are going to be technicians and engineers. Scotland two weeks ago announced 100 new big wind turbines that will produce enough electricity for 2,000 homes. We’ve got to be doing the same thing.”