Politics

Santorum: The GOP Establishment Is ‘Very Much Influenced By Corporate America’ [VIDEO]

Neil Munro White House Correspondent
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The Daily Caller sat down for an interview with Sen. Rick Santorum, the man who ran close behind Gov. Mitt Romney in the Republicans’ 2012 nomination race.

Santorum is preparing for another run, and he’s practicing his pitch to middle-income voters, diplomatically calling for a “pause” in the flow of immigrant workers, keeping his distance from the GOP’s financial backers on Wall Street, and running a movie studio, EchoLight Studios.

This is the second of three segments.

 Q. Major business groups really like a large inflow of labor. It helps to cut labor costs. If you run, how are you going to raise money from business interests that would rather have cheaper labor?

Sure, they always have.

You know, businesses have lots of different interests. One is labor costs, one is cost of capital, one is regulatory environment. There are all sorts of issues that businesses have, and I think if you are a business and your principal focus is to keep your labor costs down and that’s the kind of operation you run, then I’m probably not your candidate.

If your operation is one where you look at your employees as people, that you want them as partners in the business, you want them to have the same opportunities for success, and you’re there not just to serve your customer, but also to serve your employees and make sure you’re making a quality opportunity for them and their families, then I’m probably your candidate.

Q. So is the GOP leadership addressing this issue of jobs and wages or is it beholden to business interests?

I think pretty much we have an establishment leadership within the Republican Party, and the establishment is very much influenced by corporate America.

If you look at the response to the president’s immigration edict — aside from the tyranny of an authoritarian president dictating new laws, changing the law without going through the proper constitutional requirements — if you look at the impact of what that five million new workers is going to be on average workers in America, and to see the response of the Republican Party, there seems to be just confusion. They say the right things, at least some of them say the right things — that this is terrible, tyranny and all that stuff — but they don’t do anything.

[It is] as if the president’s edict caught them by surprise even though he’s been promising to do this for six months, and they didn’t sit down and have a plan in place to say “Here’s how we’re going to fight this unconstitutional power grab.”

Even if they were just selfish and we just looking at their own prerogatives as congressmen and senators, you’d think they would react with more hostility to the president than they did.

But they haven’t, and I suspect the subject matter is one that divides the party, and that is rather disconcerting.

Q. Why do Republican leaders decline to fight on amnesty, even though numerous polls show the president’s actions are really unpopular?

Well, you know, the leadership of the [Democratic] Party spends a lot of their time campaigning for the candidates, working to raise money, and the same is true with the leaders of our party, and like it or not, the folks who fund the Republican Party are not where I am on the issue of immigration, or by the way, on economics and social issues in general. They are much more corporatist in their viewpoint, and that’s like with the Democratic Party — a big source of their funds — it is also a big source is of Republican funds, and it has inordinate sway in my opinion.

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