Interview with Senator Isakson: Putting Veterans First

Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) has served in the United States Senate since 2005 and currently chairs the United States Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. During his time in office, he has prioritized issues affecting veterans, including sponsoring the VA MISSION Act of 2018, which aims to improve access to healthcare for veterans. In this interview, he re-joins Merion West editor Erich Prince to follow-up on their conversation from a year ago about the work the Senate is doing on behalf of veterans. They discuss the degree to which veterans’ issues are an area of bipartisan agreement, physician shortages in the VA system, new telemedicine provisions, and the upcoming anniversary of D-Day.

Senator Isakson, happy to touch base with you again. I’d like to begin by discussing the recent bipartisan trip that you took to Iraq with Senator Duckworth and Senator King. And I remember speaking to Senator Lieberman one time, and he was talking about how he became friends with Senator McCain on one of these bipartisan trips. With the overwhelming bipartisan support on things like the VA MISSION Act and trips such as these, to what degree can veterans’ issues be a model for bipartisan agreement in these rather polarized times?

They are the only place a lot of times that you can find that first step forward towards bipartisanship; one thing is for sure in Washington is, no matter how tight or tough times are, veterans are a class to themselves; they are an issue to themselves. Partisanship rarely ever creeps into the VA. I’ll give you a good example: a few years ago we were having a shutdown, if you remember that. We passed a law to keep us from shutting down the VA. The first time somebody tried to do a shutdown, we thought about it, and it would result in having actually to shut down the VA health services, and we can’t do that. So we passed a law to keep us from doing it. We funded them for two years rather than one year. So the veteran is special. They obviously are special for what they’ve sacrificed for us. All members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, believe that they should be dealt with and ensure that they get their benefits, no matter what we disagree on otherwise.