Todd Young talks
Indiana's senior senator is in the headlines again as foreign policy comes to the fore.
Sen. Todd Young is in the news cycle again as a bipartisan power player.
After helping a group of bipartisan senators shape the infrastructure bill last year, he parted ways with the group over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s move to tie it with the social spending bill known as Build Back Better. Now, the senior senator from Indiana is popping up in news items as a key player on several fronts, from foreign to domestic policy.
A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee like his mentor Dick Lugar, he’s taken to both CNN and Fox News in recent days to sound off on everything from Xi Jinping’s conduct ahead of the Winter Olympics to the potential Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Young’s China competitiveness bill—dubbed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, formerly known as the Endless Frontier Act—is expected to take center stage over the next few weeks, as the Biden administration pushes a March 1 deadline.
But Young is also a member of a group of more than a dozen Democratic and Republican senators working on reforming the Electoral Count Act, which would protect election workers.
“It’s recognized by Republican and Democrat senators alike that the Electoral Count Act is vague and certainly needs to be tightened up in the wake of the post-election violence we had after the last presidential [election],” he told Punchbowl News late last month. “And we want to avoid any sort of challenges in the future. So the way we can most directly address that is identify those vague spots in the law, as we have done, to work together and try and come up with sensible ways to avoid any ambiguity moving forward. And we're really at the putting pen to paper point.”
Recently, I sat down with Young to talk about his landmark legislation to check China’s rise, whether he’ll get Trump’s endorsement, and his re-election prospects. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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