MOULTRIE — Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Rick Goddard, a conservative Republican running against Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Macon, for the 8th District Congressional seat, is in step with Marshall in that agriculture should be a “critical” aspect of national security but asserted Wednesday that the congressman should have been present during House farm bill debates.

“I’m not a farmer. I wasn’t raised on a farm. I haven’t lived on a farm My family were ranchers in Wyoming,” Goddard said (Goddard’s military career spans 34 years). “... I’m not a farmer, but I’m really attuned to national security.

“What’s important is we ought to have people in Congress on duty during the discussion making sure that that farm bill represents the interests of Middle Georgia. Our current congressman (Marshall) was not there. He was overseas during the debate, and I think that’s wrong. I think that one of things that people are sent to Congress to do is to be on duty when important things are being discussed about this district, and our current congressman was not there during the debate,” Goddard said.

The farm bill on the table now is a huge piece of legislation that incorporates too many issues outside of the central need to provide a “soft landing” for producers who are hurt significantly by a bad year, he said.

“If we can’t maintain a secure, reliable, available access to our farming products to feed our people, we don’t have national security,” he said. “Any farm bill that we have must address the need to maintain and secure that capability.”

Goddard would like to see congressmen present legislation now to address aspects of the illegal immigration issue rather than waiting for another year and a half after the presidential election to present another sweeping reform package.

“There are more subpoenas in Washington than ideas,” he said. “... With immigration, there are lots of things that need to be fixed. Let’s start working the pieces. ... When a bill fails, then we talk about why. We begin to craft new legislation. Then we work again to bring a bill before the House and before the Senate that can be passed. I’m very unhappy that there’s no work at all being done on the immigration bill to recraft a better bill,” he said.

Although he recognizes the competing interests of sustaining a viable workforce and national security, the U.S. should enforce current law and immediately close down the continuous flow of undocumented persons across the border, he said.

Goddard commended the Hispanic foreign worker.

“The Hispanic (foreign) workers who are over here are hard workers. They’re doing a very, very good job. They just need to be here legally and in accordance with our laws. What we’re doing is failing our farmers, we’re failing our home builders, we’re failing our people who need this labor by not giving them the kind of access to determine whether the people they hire are here illegally or not,” he said.

Goddard believes that the part of the law allowing anchor babies isn’t serving the country well, he said.

“The question is is it right that people can come across the border, have a child and therefore should be able to stay here, and I say no,” he said. “I think that when the 14th Amendment was passed, it may have served us well, but we need to revisit that. ... We are not the saviors of the world.

“... We oftentimes get wrapped up between citizenship and residence. My view is that we should never offer citizenship to anyone who’s here illegally. There should be no path to citizenship if you come to America illegally. You can go home, you can get in line, you can apply and once it’s done you can come back in a legal way,” he said.

With that said, Goddard supports reform of temporary worker programs to replace the current ones that don’t work, he said.

“We need to have a worker program here so that a worker comes across the border, we know when they come, we know where they are and we know when they leave. We should not expect an employer to have to determine whether somebody is here illegally or not,” he said, until the government can provide tamper-proof identification for workers.

“We have credit card companies that can do miraculous things. If we don’t believe that we can come up with this kind of capability, we’re just not thinking very hard. It’s time we start to legislate those sorts of things and start those kinds of things, because it’s too important,” he said.

Goddard, however, supports the recent provision to better monitor Social Security fraud and notify employers when a worker identification number doesn’t match up with information an employee provides during application for a job.

The U.S. has yet to put enough pressure on the Mexican government to become part of the solution of the U.S. immigration issue, said the retired commander of the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center at Robins Air Force Base.

“It’s a cooperation between two governments that makes it work. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be working hard with (Mexico). The trouble is the environment of Mexico. It’s a corrupt, corrupt country, and we can’t force a government necessarily to do things that you want it to do, but we can prove to the government of Mexico that’s in their best interest to work with us, rather than be an antagonist to us,” he said.

Marshall likes to paint himself as conservative, yet he is not, said Goddard. Current leadership in Washington, which Marshall voted to put in place, is taking the nation down a “very dangerous” path, he said, which doesn’t focus on the common core values upon which the U.S. was founded.

“It’s not a course that most Georgians believe in. It’s a course of socialism, and the leadership in the House in some of the recent things they’ve passed clearly indicate that they are very intent on increasing taxes significantly and increasing spending significantly. And that leadership is part of Jim’s leadership in the House, and I just don’t agree with it,” Goddard said.

“... PAYGO is a joke. They haven’t measured up to complying with that,” he said, holding up as an example the recently-passed SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) bill that channels federal funds into state-run insurance programs, such as PeachCare for Kids.

The “egregious” burden of funding the SCHIP program would come from a tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products if the president doesn’t veto it, which Goddard predicts he will.

“I don’t think people should be smoking, but the fact is it’s legal in this country to smoke and there are many people who do. The Democratic Congress has decided that we’re going to fund this enormously expensive program that takes people — a family of four that makes $82,000 a year, and we’re going to take their kids and give them free medical care and we’re going to put that on the back of people who smoke. When we talk about PAYGO, it’s interesting, but you can’t increase spending at the rate they’re talking about.”