KENTUCKY — On this week’s In Focus Kentucky program, freshman Congressman Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, is our guest. The Democrat has been serving as the U.S. Representative for Kentucky’s 3rd Congressional District since January 2023.

During this segment, McGarvey discusses his transition from serving in state government to now focusing primarily on federal legislative issues.

“The toughest transition for this job, aside from just the speed and the scope of being in a bigger office, is the travel. It’s the transition. You know, one of the hardest things is I’ve got to do is leave my family. All three kids are still here. My wife works full time and is still here. So that’s been the biggest adjustments on the negative side. Or on the positive side, here we’re putting together a great team. We’re working on things from hunger in the Farm Bill to veterans benefits in education, on the veterans community, even now in the small business committee where I sit, making sure that all small businesses across the country really have access to capital that they need,” said McGarvey.

Lawmakers in Washington returned to the nation’s capitol this month with work on funding the government largely incomplete, fueling worries about whether Congress will avoid a partial government shutdown later this fall.

Congress has until Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year. McGarvey weighs in on the current stalemate between lawmakers to act on government funding.

“We have sent private and public signals from the Congressional Democrats to the Speaker’s office saying we want to work and get this done, because we’ve seen how it can happen and just looking at a couple of different bills. There’s the National Defense Authorization Act, which again, the extremists in the Republican Party loaded up with some poison pills. This is usually a bipartisan bill to fund our nation’s defense. And it ended up being a very partisan exercise which now is going to have to come back to the House because it couldn’t pass as we authorized it. Then you’ve had the FAA authorization. We knew we needed to make sure that our nation’s airports were working and that sort of thing. And so those poison pills went missing, and a big bipartisan bill, which is why people didn’t hear about it. We want the budget to be that. Let’s leave the budget to our spending priorities. That doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on what those spending priorities are. Let’s leave out some of the poison pills to keep the government from shutting down. I know that’s what I’m interested in doing. That’s what congressional Democrats are interested in doing. And I hope that we don’t let the small but extreme Freedom Caucus knock us off the rails,” explained McGarvey.

You can watch the full In Focus Kentucky segment in the player above.