WEST LEBANON — He calls himself a “maverick,” but Robert Burns is still ready to caucus in Washington with the Republican establishment if it means furthering his anti-abortion agenda.
Burns, the Republican candidate for New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District, will take on incumbent Democrat Annie Kuster in the Nov. 8 general election.
In last month’s primary, Burns defeated six other Republicans, including Keene Mayor George Hansel, who had secured Gov. Chris Sununu’s endorsement. Burns, who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, captured 33% of the vote to Hansel’s 30%.
Burns, 44, may have received a boost from a Democratic political action committee. The group, Democrats Serve, spent more than $90,000 on advertisements and other marketing that featured Burns as part of a Democratic strategy to “help far-right Republicans win primaries in the hopes that they will be easier to beat in the general election,” The New York Times reported in September.
On the abortion rights issue, Hansel, a moderate Republican, described himself as a “pro-choice candidate.” He supported the 24-week abortion ban that New Hampshire currently has on the books.
Leading up to the primary, Burns took a much harder line, but has backed off somewhat now that’s going one-on-one against Kuster.
“During the debates, my initial proposition was 12 weeks,” Burns said in an interview with the Valley News’ editorial board on Monday. “But I’ve also said that, you know, you’re there as a legislator, you’re there to negotiate and compromise.”
Burns said he would now get behind the 15-week abortion ban that U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, introduced in September.
Kuster has represented the New Hampshire district — which covers western, northern and some southern parts of the state, including Concord and Nashua — in Congress for a decade. According to September polls, she’s tracking about three points ahead in the race.
Burns, a Bedford businessman and former Hillsborough County treasurer, lost a bid for the seat in 2018 when he was defeated in the GOP primary.
Along with his anti-abortion stance, Burns has voiced opposition to gun control while he supports building a wall along the country’s southern border to help prevent undocumented immigration.
While getting into the weeds on policy initiatives that he’d pursue if elected, Burns delved into a smattering of his other interests during his interview with the Valley News.
He favors protecting the American Mustang (and prohibiting the declawing of cats) and Puerto Rican statehood. He let it be known that he’s a fan of DuckTales, an animated television series produced by Disney, as well.
Burns also mentioned Elon Musk, early and often. The billionaire entrepreneur was at the fore of the candidate’s thinking on a number of policy issues, including abortion.
“Imagine in the future when Elon Musk progresses with his technology, and one is actually communicating with the baby inside them,” Burns said of his own anti-abortion logic.
Elsewhere, Burns has voiced support for what he calls “panels,” through which an external group would determine whether or not to make abortion available for women at risk of fatal complications in their pregnancies.
Kuster, in her interview with the Valley News’ editorial board on Tuesday, called Burns “dangerous” for New Hampshire residents.
“He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know,” said Kuster, a practicing attorney and lobbyist before getting elected to Congress in 2012. “And he doesn’t know pregnancy.”
Kuster, 66, is firmly behind President Joe Biden’s efforts to codify abortion protections in the next Congress. She called the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion for almost 50 years, an attack on “personal private decision making.”
When asked about declining birth rates in New Hampshire, Kuster said that women aren’t having more children because they “can’t afford it.”
She wants to make permanent the $1,000 increase to the Federal Child Tax Credit that was built into the American Rescue Plan and that played a significant role in cutting the American childhood poverty rate in half in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The Republican Party as it is configured right now, under Trump, would rather give $2 trillion tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires,” Kuster said. “They’d rather have Amazon pay no taxes whatsoever at all than to help those most in need.”
Mental health struggles, addiction and housing “make it very, very difficult to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” Kuster said.
She also positioned herself as a Democrat who isn’t unfriendly to big business.
“A lot of corporations sign paychecks in my district,” Kuster said, mentioning large employers such as Lebanon-based Dartmouth Health and Fidelity Investments, which has an office in Nashua.
“These are not small, but they’re mighty, and they make a difference in people’s lives,” she said.
New Hampshire and Vermont have some of the highest rates of opioid abuse in the country. On addiction issues, Burns — who runs a Bedford-based pharmaceutical safety company — denounced big drug companies that profit off of addiction, likening them to for-profit private prisons.
“I love the idea of the free market, but it doesn’t work for every industry,” Burns said.
He was critical of current opioid addiction recovery services. The abuse of Suboxone, an oral medication used to treat opioid use disorder, is a barrier to recovery, he said.
“You know, if you want the easy way off of heroin, want the easy way off drugs, which means not feeling the pain, you still have to put some work into it,” Burns said.
Burns wants treatment centers to operate more like the abstinence-based addiction recovery programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, where, in his words, drug users would be told that “everything’s your fault, you’re a jerk, you screwed everything up.”
“I find too many times that a lot of these drug treatment programs, they let you blame other people,” he added.
Kuster supports a different approach, rooted in her own family’s experience. Her older brother has struggled with opioid addiction and relapsed during the pandemic after five years of sobriety, she said.
A founder of the Bipartisan Addiction and Mental Health Task Force, Kuster advocated for the expansion of addiction treatment services and noted that the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated drug use.
“It’s a vicious, vicious disease,” Kuster said.
Climate changes
As New Hampshire residents face hefty hikes in their heating and electric bills this coming winter — fuel prices have risen more than 60% in the past year — Burns made headlines recently when he said that he supported cuts to the federal Low Income Heating Emergency Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. But he proposed no other form of taxpayer help.
“I know we can’t keep burning fossil fuels forever,” Burns said, advocating instead for nuclear energy, particularly “traveling wave” technology.
“But Kuster is proud that she would still vote to hamper natural gas lines in New Hampshire, and that’s unbelievable to me with energy costs right now,” he continued. “We should be looking at everything that’s cost-effective, that doesn’t need a ton of government subsidies, and natural gas is one of those.”
Supporting the goals set for the U.S. in the Paris agreement, an international treaty on climate change, Kuster aims to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Citing the proliferation of dams in New Hampshire, she has made expanding the hydroelectric capacity of the nation and the state an important piece of her climate platform.
“We’ve got thousands of jobs with the dams around New Hampshire,” Kuster said, adding that subsidies to oil and gas companies are “so expensive for taxpayers.”
Kuster lamented the state’s slow transition to renewable energy. It ranks at the bottom by a long shot for solar installation in New England.
“Rhode Island is going to pay consumers $700 less this year than New Hampshire; Vermont over $500 less,” Kuster said. “It’s because of their pivot away from fossil fuels that Chris Sununu and the New Hampshire Legislature has refused to allow.”
Burns, on the other hand, sees hydroelectric projects as hurting the environment and lamented the decline of salmon in the Connecticut River. “When was the last time you caught a salmon in the Connecticut?” he asked.
School choices
On education, Kuster is “very concerned” with the steps the New Hampshire has taken to “drain taxpayer funding from public schools.”
Across the state, school districts have faced budget cuts, with competition from charter schools diverting additional money.
She also called the recent flurry of book bans across the country “just ridiculous.”
“A book about gay people is not going to make you gay any more than a book about Einstein is going to make you into a genius,” Kuster said.
Burns wants to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that school decisions should be made on a state-by-state basis. He threw himself headlong and sideways into the culture wars around school curriculum.
He advocates teaching “real history.”
The persecution of Catholics in New England and the Spanish colonization of the western U.S. are among the topics that are often overlooked in public schools, Burns said.
But he sidestepped identifying whose job it is to determine “real history” by rolling through more factoids about the descendants of those that came to the country on Christopher Columbus’ Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.
Before leaving the Valley News’ offices, Kuster made a final appeal. “The future of our planet is on the line, the future of our democracy on the line,” Kuster said. “It’s the most important election of my life.”
Burns had a different goodbye.
“I hope I was entertaining,” he said. “Some people think I’m putting them on.”
Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.
