MOORE HAVEN — In his keynote address last Thursday at the Glades County EDC’s annual dinner, U.S. Rep. Greg Steube lauded progress that’s been made bipartisanly on veterans affairs while decrying the playing of political games on other matters.

Lake Okeechobee News/Chris Felker
U.S. Rep. Greg Steube (R-17th District) speaks Oct. 10 in Moore Haven.

Rep. Steube, a fifth generation Floridian with undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Florida, told the crowd that “it has been a session in Congress like we probably won’t see in history in the near future, the only Congress out of 116 to be sworn in during a government shutdown.”

He said from where he sits — mostly spending his days, he said, in committee meetings and hearings — he sees most progress being stifled by a poisonous political atmosphere. Rep. Steube is on three full committees, the House Judiciary, Government Oversight and Reform and Veterans Affairs Committees, and six subcommittees, three under Judiciary alone.

“As I’m sure you have heard, most of the time and bandwidth has been spent on the impeachment investigations, which are now being handled in the intelligence committees,” he said. One of those is the oversight panel he’s on. He said secret depositions were announced for the current week after members had left D.C. the previous Friday for a two-week recess. “It’s kind of frustrating being a member of Congress when there’s these games being played.”

He said he’s happy some progress has been made. “I am blessed to have the opportunity to sit on the veterans affairs committee because we are working on a bill that would give veterans true choice, and quite frankly we would save billions.”

Rep. Steube talked about stories told him by some veterans in his sprawling district, noting that he had his own as a disabled veteran of U.S. Army service in Operation Iraqi Freedom, involving intolerable delays and a seemingly never-ending runaround by VA officials.