Jim Banks

While serving as an Indiana State Senator, Jim took a leave of absence to deploy to Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015. He is still an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and Supply Corps. Jim was sworn into Congress in 2017 and in 2021, he assumed a leadership role as Chair of the Republican Study Committee, which sets the vision for the GOP.

Jim B. x NY Times? Say it ain’t so! Jim retweeted a recent article in the Times about the detrimental effects of school closures on children. Jim followed up that tweet with his own op-ed from a year and a half ago about how “children were about to get the short end of the stick”. Though most can agree that closed schools aren’t stellar for kids, do you think Jim and other Republicans are about to get a ‘W’ in this column as more and more schools opt for remote learning during this omni-surge?

Jim has had his vision set on the future of the GOP this year. Jim chairs the Republican Study Committee, the largest group of conservatives within the House, making many people think of him as an unofficial leader of the GOP. Jim spoke at the CPAC conference in Florida and caught the attention of national news. He sees the future of the GOP with Trump still ruling the party. After being nominated for the Select Committee to Investigate January 6th by House Minority Leader McCarthy, Jim was rejected by Speaker Pelosi. As one could expect, he wasn’t too happy about this. Pelosi came out and said that Jim was a “participant in the Big Lie” (narrative that Trump won the presidential election). Jim wasn’t too happy about that either.

Big Tech has found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of both Republicans and Democrats, but one of the major issues Jim is focused on right now centers around the H-1B visa program. The program is complicated but one of its initial purposes was to offer companies the ability to hire foreign workers for highly specialized jobs that were unable to be filled by Americans. Jim is now saying that tech companies are taking full advantage of this, bypassing American workers all together, in the name of cheaper foreign employees. The American Tech Workforce Act looks to set a base salary price for foreign workers that is in line with what an American worker would get, thereby removing the financial incentive to outsource and hire Americans instead.

Tracing foreign funds back to political sources is a hot topic right now. Jim is proposing a new rule that would require any person appearing before Congress disclose whether they have received any foreign funding before providing any testimony. A study was released that showed between 2014-2018 there was ~$174 million that funded various Washington D.C. think tanks. It seems like Jim should take this a step further and be asking if they have received any foreign funding in the last 10 years.