Dear Friends,
I want to thank everyone who joined my first virtual town hall of the year last night. In case you missed the event, I wanted to share some of the top questions we received, and my responses. You can also watch the full event here.
- Do you think the Senate should abolish the filibuster? Yes, it should. This has been something that has undercut progress for years and I hope we can get rid of it.
- Do you think Former President Trump should be convicted by the Senate? Absolutely. We lived at the crime scene and we saw it. I think it’s time to hold him accountable even as he tries to slink out of town to Mar-a-Lago.
- Do you think Marjorie Taylor Green should be expelled from Congress? No question. This woman is unbalanced, and I think almost criminally insane. She has no place being in the United States Congress.
- How do you think the vaccine rollout is going? It’s not good enough. We need more. We need more of it in the arms. Here in Oregon I hope we can get somebody in charge to move it forward. This is something we can’t afford to not do right. We need to do more work to make it smoother and faster.
- What is the latest status of the $2,000 stimulus checks? As you know, we struggled with the Republican Senators to be able to get the $2,000. There was $600 first and then it was a battle to get the next $1,400. We are fighting to make sure we have reoccurring payments. Many of the problems that we are facing in our community and around the country is simply that people don’t have money. Until we are able to return to normal, there is no substitute for putting money in people’s pockets.
- Do you support statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico? Absolutely. You know, we saw the problems for Washington, D.C. not having the power of a state that delayed the ability to get the national guard in a state of emergency. If it was a state that wouldn’t happen. That’s yet one more reason to empower the voters of Washington, D.C. to have their own Senators and a voting member of the House
- Do you support Medicare for All? Yes.
- Do you think we will be able to legalize marijuana finally? We ended the last Congress on a high note, passing the MORE Act that I’ve been working on for years, that would fully legalize. We passed legislation to have safe banking, even research. Just today I talked to Senator Booker who’s going to lead on our MORE Act in the Senate. We’re optimistic that we’ll get the job done this year.
Thank you again to everyone who joined the town hall. As a reminder, you can hear the rest of the discussion in my virtual town hall replay here.
I’m hopeful we can have more conversations like this as we work together in the new Congress and with the Biden administration to deliver results. If you have a suggestion for a future town hall topic, I’d love to hear from you.
