Blair Classic Cafe hosts Osborn roundtable
Published 2:25 pm Monday, October 12, 2026
Independent U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn answered questions from Blair-area residents Oct. 9 at the Blair Classic Cafe. The goal was to have Republicans ask Osborn about key issues. The Enterprise hopes to hold a similar event with Osborn’s opponent, Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. Questions have been shortened to topic headings, and Osborn’s answers are verbatim. Before questions began, Osborn said nothing was off limits.
What follows is not a full transcript, which is available on the Enterprise’s Facebook page.
RURAL HEALTH CARE
Osborn said he would support delaying the rural health care cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act or restoring the funding. “Yes, yes and yes,” Osborn said. “I ask everybody, ‘If you had a magic wand and you could wave it and have our government fix one thing,’ it’s always health care, hands down.”
“I don’t have a specific package, but I’m open to listening to people,” he said. “We don’t solve this by asking the CEO of UnitedHealth how we fix health care. It’s the nurses and the teachers, the hospital administrators, the patient advocates.”
On paying for it, he said, “I think the solution lies in the tax code. Companies like Amazon and Apple and Nike, Tesla, multinational corporations that funnel their profits overseas, they park them there. They don’t repatriate them back to the United States, and they don’t pay taxes. It’s not Robin Hood. It’s not communism. It’s not socialism. It’s about a fair share.”
“I think a corporate tax should be like a 5% tax,” he said.
GENDER AND GIRLS’ SPORTS
On defining a woman, Osborn said, “My definition of female would be somebody who’s born with a vagina.”
He said he had not signed the Fairness for Girls petition. On the Equality Act, he said, “To be quite frank, I don’t know what that is.” “I think only girls should be in girls’ locker rooms,” he said, and bathrooms.
If the petition simply says boys should not play in girls’ sports, Osborn said, “Yeah, I’d sign that. Absolutely.”
IRAN
“I think we’re in Iran to fight for Israel,” Osborn said.
On whether Iran should have a nuclear weapon, he said, “No. No, no, no, no.”
“When Operation Midnight Hammer was performed, we were told they have no more ability to enrich uranium,” he said. “That seemed like a good mission to me. But then it escalates and escalates and escalates.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done it. All I’m saying is we did it irresponsibly, and now we’re stuck in this thing, and we have to find a way out,” he said. “And I think the way out lies with Congress acting as a co-equal branch of government the way the framers intended it to be.”
“I don’t think we should ever see boots on the ground,” he said. “I just don’t have faith that we’re in it for the right reasons. I think you look at who’s getting rich off of this war. There’s a lot of money in defense contractors that fund campaigns.”
BREAKING WITH THE PARTIES
“I don’t like the two-party system,” Osborn said. “That’s why I’ve been a lifelong independent.”
“I would say Republicans are getting it wrong in the Big Beautiful Bill Act, giving the lion’s share of tax cuts to the top 1%,” he said. “To me that’s a grift, especially taking away from Medicaid to do it.”
On breaking with Democrats, he said, “I’m a proponent of the Second Amendment.”
On agreeing with Democrats, he said, “Trying to solve health care. Obamacare fell short. It didn’t work. But being able to give people access to health care that they can afford, that’s where I would say I more agree with Democrats.”
VETERANS AFFAIRS AND FEDERAL UNIONS
On protecting union rights for government workers and rehiring at the VA, Osborn said, “Again, yes, yes and yes.”
“Unions aren’t perfect,” he said. “But the essence of why I believe in unions, spending the last 24 years in a union, is to give voice in the workplace. A lot of people think it’s just about wages and benefits. It’s not. A lot of it’s about safety.”
“I get tired of seeing people drape themselves in the American flag and say, ‘Oh, I love our service members and our veterans,’ and then turn around and not vote on something that gives extra cancer screenings for burn pit victims,” he said. “Protecting veterans and Veterans Affairs and the veteran hospital, I’m 100% behind.”
GUNS
On what “shall not be infringed” means, Osborn said, “It means that the government can’t pass a firearm ban.”
He said claims that he supports mandatory mental health assessments are “completely false” and that opponents clipped a conversation he had at a VFW in Columbus. “That’s all it was, was a discussion,” he said.
Osborn said a person convicted of threatening violence should lose access to firearms. “I can’t just go say something about somebody and then they come and take your guns. No,” he said. “It would be a conviction. But if it’s a class whatever misdemeanor, but there was a violent intent behind it, just because he didn’t commit the violence yet doesn’t mean he’s not still capable of doing so.”
On restrictions on magazines, suppressors or firearm length for law-abiding citizens, Osborn said, “Have all your guns.” He said he would not align with Democrats on any of those restrictions.
On mental health, he said, “I’m not a doctor. I would have to consult with experts on that. I think if you have a mental illness with a propensity for violence, that within itself needs to be addressed.”
On a person who has threatened suicide, Osborn said, “You’re probably 60 times more likely to kill yourself than to get killed by an intruder,” adding that such a person could have a nonlethal firearm.
“A lot of times for people that are committing suicide, it is in the moment,” he said. “And if they didn’t have access to a handgun, they might have certainly had a bad night, but been able maybe to get through it to see the light of the next day.”
Osborn said he was not saying any mental health diagnosis should cost someone their firearms, and that the line should be drawn by doctors.
“And I’m not saying forever, either,” he said. “There’s a world where this hypothetical person gets on medication, and this doctor now gives them a clean bill of health. Then, if that person still wants to have access to a firearm, you reinstate it.”
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA
“They are way too extreme,” Osborn said. “I think right now this current administration is extreme on the right, and now you’re seeing, with the advent of the DSA, it looks like it’s wanting to go all the way to the far left. I want it to stop in the middle.”
On campaign ads saying he praised the DSA, he said, “Nobody’s got a monopoly on good ideas. Whether it’s coming from President Trump or whether it’s coming from Mamdani, if we all agree that it’s a good idea, a good idea is a good idea. The DSA has got a lot of bad ideas.”
IMMIGRATION
Osborn said the answer is to get businesses, immigration lawyers, judges and advocates in the same room. “How do we fix an immigration problem that’s going to work, that’s not going to undercut the American worker, that works for the businesses, but also fills jobs?” he said. “We have a baby boomer generation that is retiring in droves, and we don’t have the people to fill the ranks.”
Osborn said he does not support amnesty for everyone in the country illegally. He said a recording in which he said, “Give ’em a damn Social Security card already,” lacked context.
“I was talking about people who have come here on a work visa,” he said. “A lot of them have been here 20, 30 years, and their visa has expired because the system’s broken.”
On whether the answer is a Social Security card, he said, “No, it’s not. What I was talking about was a pathway to citizenship. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. We could talk about permanent worker status, visa status.”
UKRAINE
Osborn said he supports Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion. He cited a Washington Post report that the Trump administration is working with Russia to buy diesel.
“We’ve done a complete 180, and now he’s aligned us with Russia. I don’t like that,” Osborn said. “We have to stop the Russian aggression. I get wanting to bring diesel down, but by default now you’re funding Russia in that war.”
PAST REMARKS
Osborn said he regrets some of his past remarks and held a town hall in Red Cloud after a resident emailed him.
“It made me realize words matter,” he said. “So I went to Red Cloud, and I sat in front of those folks, and I said, ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said.’”
“The context behind what I said is, I said, ‘People’s lives suck,’ because they do,” he said. “That came from a place of frustration and, I suppose, anger. And yeah, I absolutely do regret that. I wanted to be accountable to the very people I offended.”
CAUCUSING
On which party he would caucus with, Osborn said, “I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again and again and again. Nobody.”
“If I would’ve beaten Deb Fischer in 2024, I would’ve been the tiebreaker,” he said. “And I would not have passed the current form of the Big Beautiful Bill Act. Both sides are going to need me to take votes, and if there’s razor-thin majorities one way or another, that’s leverage for Nebraska, and I plan on using that.”
VOTER ID
“The SAVE Act as a whole, not all of it. But voter ID, yeah. And we already have voter ID in Nebraska,” Osborn said.
On the part he opposes, he said, “The mail-in ballots. There’s 11 counties in Nebraska that only have mail-in balloting. But voter ID, it’s a no-brainer that only Americans should vote in American elections.”
ABORTION
“In my own personal life, yeah, 100%,” Osborn said. “I would never advocate for anybody I knew, my daughters, to get an abortion. And I do believe life starts at conception. But I’m also a realist, and I also understand the plight of women wanting autonomy over their own bodies. I don’t think it’s the government’s place to be dictating to women what they’re doing in their doctor’s offices.”
On a bill making abortion available nationwide, he said, “No, I think it needs to stay in the states.”
“You could say I’m pro-choice, too, because adoption is a choice, and not enough people talk about that,” he said.
Setting aside the life of the mother, rape and incest, Osborn said abortion would not be OK “as a form of birth control.”
LAST WORD
“You’re going to get somebody who’s going to want to approach every single issue with thoughtfulness,” Osborn said. “I want to wake up every single day and ask myself, ‘How can we uplift people’s lives today?’ Not, ‘Who can I call that’s going to give me money so I can run more ads to keep working in Washington, D.C.?’ I’m not going to do anything in Washington, D.C., because somebody gave me money to do it.”
