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He took a week off from his job working at Applebee’s on Milton Avenue and went to Philadelphia, where George W. Bush accepted the Republican nomination for president.

“It was a unique opportunity as a 19-year-old student to get a front row seat on national politics,” Steil reflected in an interview with ����Vlog��ý, calling that intership a “pretty unique opportunity that I was lucky to get.”

He also recalls feeling like an “incredibly small fish in a very big pond.”

Now, as he prepares to attend the RNC in Milwaukee next week as the current U.S. representative to Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, he says the top issues of the day continue to parallel those discussed at that convention at the turn of the century, and others since.

“If you go back to 2000, that’s after eight years of President Clinton. It’s a lot of conversation about the debt and government spending — same issues, in some ways, that we face today,” Steil reflected.

“We as a country spend way too much money. It is a huge challenge in the broader economy, and it is playing out right now as we see these massive interest payments on the debt. It was a lot of the stuff that was discussed and warned about 24 years ago, that now is really coming to fruition,” the congressman continued.

2012 delegate

After collecting his law degree from the University of Wisconsin and coming back to Rock County to live and work, Steil traveled to the Republican National National Convention in Tampa, Florida in 2012 with a bit weightier role — as an alternate delegate

Paul Ryan, who then represented Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, and like Steil grew up in ����Vlog��ý, would be named Mitt Romney’s running mate at that convention.

“It’s a once in a lifetime experience where someone from your home city is the vice-presidential nominee,” he said.

The issues, again, were similar to 2024.

“Talking about the importance of making sure people have affordable health care was front of mind in 2012 as it is today. That’s a challenge in many ways we still face,” Steil said.

Steil was also a convention delegate in 2016, when partisanship was separating Americans.

“How do you pull people together to solve the biggest challenges that we face? That’s an ongoing challenge in this country,” he said.

Now, in 2024, “we see real divides and partisanship, there’s a real need for people that are willing to figure out how to pull folks together to accomplish a task,” he continued.

Focusing on policy

Steil said he expects inflation and border security to be key issues discussed at the 2024 convention in Milwaukee July 15-18.

“A lot of the challenges we face there are the challenges that we’ve seen time and again. We’ve had challenges on spending, we’ve had foreign policy challenges, we’ve had challenges on immigration and border security. And these continue to be policies that require work to solve,” Steil said.

Steil said he’s not concerned that legal matters facing presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump will distract from the important conversations the party needs to have next week.

“We do have two incumbents on the ballot, and both of them have a pretty detailed track record of policies that they’ll implement,” he said. Steil said that gives him hope that the party will be able “to focus on the policies” and “have “a policy debate, and that’s healthy for our democracy.”

“We as a country are best served when we have a robust conversation about the policies that we need to move ourselves forward. And I’m hopeful that we can stay focused on the important policies in front of us.”