Before his run for Senate, here’s what NC’s Ted Budd focused on in Congress
Voters have two main options in choosing a successor to retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr: replace him with a Democrat or a more conservative Republican.
Rep. Ted Budd wants Burr’s seat in the next Congress. He ranks 90% more conservative than the rest of the current House of Representatives and votes with his party 92% of the time, according to Voteview, a website mapping the ideologies of every vote and member of Congress in history.
Burr is ranked by that same website as only 68% more conservative than his Senate colleagues and as voting with his party only 81% of the time.
Budd told McClatchy this month that he doesn’t know what goes into political rankings but his conservative votes are not a calculation on his part.
“It’s either my convictions or what I think is best for North Carolinians and that helps them have great lives,” Budd said.
If Budd wins the election, he would serve alongside Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who North Carolinians re-elected in 2020 to a second six-year term. Tillis told McClatchy that when people ask him what kind of senator Budd might make he tells them that Budd reminds him of Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
“He’s a very, very solid conservative,” Tillis said. “But he’s a businessperson. He’s got a great personality. I’ve never seen the guy flustered, and I think he’s patient.
“Those are the sorts of things you need if you’re going to work in the sausage factory we call the U.S. Senate.”
Trump, Club for Growth boost
Budd, 51, a three-term member of the House, is campaigning against Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley, the former state Supreme Court chief justice. They face off in the general election on Nov. 8.
Budd’s nomination by the Republican Party this spring wasn’t a given. He competed against former Gov. Pat McCrory, a well-known figure in North Carolina politics, and former Rep. Mark Walker, an affable music minister with a background similar to Budd’s.
But former President Donald Trump came to North Carolina and endorsed Budd, and Club for Growth, a conservative super PAC with deep pockets, invested millions into his campaign.
The support from both pushed Budd ahead in the polls and then on the ballot.
Budd is a native of North Carolina. His family owns a farm in Davie County, and his father started a janitorial and landscaping business that now serves the Southeast and made his family wealthy.
Budd worked for his father’s business before opening his own in 2010: a shooting range and gun shop in Rural Hall, a town of less than 3,500 in Forsyth County. Then, in 2016, Budd ran for Congress to represent the north-central part of the state and won.
Budd’s bills and votes in Congress
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan swore Budd into office on Jan. 3, 2017. By Jan. 12, Budd was making his first floor speech.
“The debate over financial regulation is not just about more versus less,” Budd began. “It is also about the idea that financial liberty and personal liberty are connected, and they have been for most of history.”
Budd serves on the Committee on Financial Services and speaks often on financial issues, but otherwise his speeches often involve gun rights, border security and abortion.
He is a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is made up of some of the most conservative members of the House. He is also a member of the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and the Republican Study Committee, another group of conservatives.
In his current term, Budd has sponsored 46 bills, all of which are still pending. He sponsored another 65 bills in his first two terms.
Only two of his bills have become law, the Make PPE in America Act and a bill to name the control tower at the Piedmont Triad International Airport after former Sen. Kay Hagan. That doesn’t account for whether any of his proposals became law as part of larger bills that didn’t bear his name.
Until his Senate campaign, Budd had one of the better attendance records of the North Carolina delegation. As of Jan. 3, 2021, Rep. Greg Murphy had the worst attendance, missing 5.7% of his votes. Rep. Virginia Foxx had the best, missing only 0.7% of her votes. Budd missed 33 votes, or 1.4%.
As Budd campaigned for U.S. Senate he missed 100 more votes, giving him a lifetime record of 4.3%, far above the median lifetime record of missed votes for representatives of 2.0%, according to govtrack.us.
Beasley told McClatchy that her opponent had “not done much” in the six years he was in Congress.
“He really hasn’t done anything in six years, and he won’t do anything for another six years,” Beasley said. “It’s important for folks to know that we don’t need someone who’s been engaged in the pettiness of partisan politics and has been engaged in being an insider in Washington and so embroiled in corporate and special interests and his own interests that he’s put well before North Carolina.”
Budd on gun issues
While representing North Carolina in Congress and running for U.S. Senate, Budd also maintains his gun shop and speaks often on gun rights.
“I think the principle that you have to get back to is, you want to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, but you don’t want to infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans,” Budd told McClatchy.
Budd said Democrats focus on restricting certain types of guns, but he’s more worried about people.
In Congress, Budd has supported Second Amendment sanctuary cities, where city officials have said they will not uphold gun safety laws that they deem to violate the Constitution. He has also supported ensuring that people legally allowed to carry a concealed gun in one state could do so in another and spoke out against a bill that would establish new background checks for gun trades between people.
He argued that the latter bill would make criminals out of people giving a domestic violence victim a gun for protection, taking a gun from a suicidal friend or loaning a gun to a cousin after a series of neighborhood break-ins.
“We simply cannot sacrifice our rights by passing laws that will make our families less safe and laws that criminals will simply ignore,” Budd said on the floor. “We must always protect and preserve our God-given Second Amendment rights.”
This year, Budd voted against a gun bill put out by a nonpartisan group of senators, including Tillis and Burr, in response to the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Budd has always been vocal about his concerns that red flag laws — which the bill encouraged as a way to remove guns from people deemed dangerous — would prevent due process. Budd said he tried to put forward some amendments to strengthen protections in the bill, but without those amendments he voted against it.
Budd on abortion
Budd has also been a strong advocate for the movement to prevent abortion.
Still, he caught many by surprise last month when his name appeared as a co-signer on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill for a national abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Many Republicans around the country have been side-stepping the topic of abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that overturned its previous landmark decision Roe v. Wade. Roe gave Americans the right to abortions.
After the highest court’s June decision, the issue became a major point of contention in the midterms, and signing on to Graham’s bill while campaigning in a highly competitive race seemed risky for the congressman.
But Budd has always been vocal about his desire for the court to overturn Roe, speaking out on the House floor on nearly every anniversary of the Supreme Court decision.
“I hope that one day soon, the Supreme Court corrects their constitutional error so that the American people can reassert their voice in determining the moral question of our time,” Budd said from the House floor on Jan. 21, 2020.
His annual speeches often mirrored one another, with the last coming on Feb. 4, 2021. Budd has also spoken on the House floor against allowing Medicaid to fund abortions, to ensure doctors save the life of a baby born alive during an attempted abortion and against abortions after 20 weeks with some exceptions.
When talking to McClatchy about his stance this month, Budd said his views are consistent with what they have always been.
“They’re just you know, expressions of what my personal convictions are and what I believe makes things good for North Carolinians, and I want to save as many unborn children as possible, so I’m pro-life and I’m always going to vote to protect their life,” Budd said.
Budd said his pro-life stance includes saving the life of the mother. As for rape and incest, he said: “Every life is precious, and I think let’s focus on the law enforcement there,” Budd said.
Budd on immigration
On the House floor, Budd declared his support for building a border wall, increasing border security, banning sanctuary cities and stopping chain migration, in which a green-card holder can sponsor family members to legally come to the United States.
Budd told McClatchy he supports legal immigration and wants to see that continue. In past floor speeches, Budd has said doing so benefits the country economically, socially and culturally.
But Budd said cartel members come to the country, not looking for a better life, but partaking in human trafficking and drug smuggling. He said the border needs a wall to stop the cartels.
Budd talked at length in the House about a visit to Arizona, touring the border with Customs and Border Patrol, and said he learned all that separates the United States from another “sovereign border” is a barbed-wire fence. He said when someone crosses over, technology might alert authorities, but it takes two hours for a patrolman to get to the crossing site and another two hours on foot to find the person.
Trump factor
Budd’s views on the wall align with that of his supporter, the former president.
Budd twice voted against Trump’s impeachment, and voted against certifying the election of President Joe Biden.
With Trump teasing another presidential run in 2024 and facing investigations, including over his involvement in the riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob tried to overturn the 2020 election, many wonder how Trump-supported candidates will fare.
“I think a focus on getting the economy back on track, getting jobs, still making our communities safer and addressing the crisis at the border are the things that going to influence those unaffiliated, left of center, right of center, Republicans and Democrats,” Tillis said, adding that those are all things Budd focuses on in Congress.
Budd avoided talking about his support for Trump with McClatchy for this article, saying it was a distraction by his opponent to get him away from real issues.
“Everything that I want to do is about making life better for the people around me and that for right now, that’s for our country and for particularly the North Carolinians,” Budd said. “So I would like to do that in the U.S. Senate.”
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This story was originally published October 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
