U.S. Senator Michael Bennet was warmly greeted by dozens of residents for a ‘meet and greet’ with voters Friday at Salida’s Boathouse Cantina Restaurant.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet at a 2022 Salida campaign appearance. Dan Smith photo.
Colorado’s senior Senator spoke about Biden Administration accomplishments in his third term and then answered audience questions on a variety of national and international issues for more than an hour.
He cited the Administration’s broad infrastructure bill passed by Congress, and other jobs creation provisions and “the most significant climate bill that any government still — still — any government on Planet Earth has passed…”
The bill, he said, resulted in some seven billion dollars in private investment in Colorado after the tax changes in the legislation, something he had worked on for a long time as a member of the Senate Finance Committee.
Bennet noted that unlike other recent bipartisan legislation, no Republicans voted for the infrastructure bill, which also resulted in empowering Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, capping senior drug payouts at $2,000 annually and capping insulin prices at $35 for seniors. An effort to extend the insulin price cap at $35 for everyone in the bill, he noted, was removed by Republicans.
Bennet also sharply criticized the Supreme Court decision to void Roe vs. Wade, ending the right to abortion for women, which he described as giving up a fundamental constitutional right “for the first time since Reconstruction.”
He laid the blame on the three justices appointed to the court by then-president Trump. He said when in law school he would have found it hard to believe that three appointed so-called ‘originalist judges’ “… could write an opinion that said ‘if it wasn’t a right or freedom in 1868, it’s not a right or a freedom in 2023.”
He noted Americans now, even in Republican states such as Florida and elsewhere, are pushing back on radical restrictions on abortion. To applause, he said he favors term limits for Supreme Court justices.
In response to a question on education funding, Bennet described K-12 lack of adequate funding ‘an embarrassment,’ due to the restrictions of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). He noted teachers in Wyoming are paid $8-10 thousand more in starting salary than in Colorado and that current housing prices make it difficult for teachers to find a place to live.
In response to a question regarding immigration, Bennet chided Republicans who delayed military funding for Ukraine while demanding border security measures, then refused to vote on the bill for months, at Trump’s urging.
He also emphasized that immigrants have fueled a third of our past economic growth.
He reminded the audience he was one of the bipartisan ‘gang of eight’ in 2013 which wrote the last immigration-related bill that passed the Senate, led by the late John McCain on the GOP side, after a year and a half of negotiations. The measure provided a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants, and provided $40 billion in border security “not to build a medieval wall,’” he said, but for high-tech border monitoring. A House version failed, ending the reform effort.
Regarding the Israel-Hamas war, he said Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu does not embrace his feeling that we have a moral obligation to protect the Palestinian civilians, 34,000 of whom have been slaughtered in the fight against Hamas. He said in a recent visit there with Sen. Cory Booker, meeting with Israeli officials, he reinforced a logical end to the war.
“We’ve got to get to a place where we are in a negotiation, the result of which is a two-state solution,” he said.
In addition, Bennet said providing more food aid to Gaza is imperative, saying, “We should be doing everything we can do to make sure there’s not mass starvation in Gaza.” He said he does not support the calls for an immediate cease-fire with hostages still held by Hamas.
Regarding the important youth vote critical to the campaign, one attendee asked about how to motivate them not to ignore voting this year as a protest to policies such as the Israel-Hamas war.
“You’ve got to get to a place in your head, where the more corrupt you think the system is; that’s got to be a reason to vote, not a reason not to vote, he replied. “It should be enough reason that you know there are people in America today whose votes are being suppressed …. and you know there are people in this country whose votes are being taken away because of where they live, their color or whatever it is, you ought to vote! And the more messed up you think it is, the more corrupt you think it is, the more you should vote,” he added.
Bennet went on to deftly field constituents’ concerns and questions on environmental issues, such as the threat to forests and watersheds here and around the country. Another concern was health issues such as the need to expand (not contract) programs including Medicare, the successful program that one former physician said should be expanded by lowering the minimum age to 55 from 65.
He also said he constantly hears from voters about the state of the U.S. healthcare system, which delivers less quality care than in Europe and elsewhere, has fewer doctors per capita than elsewhere, coupled with critical insurance issues without universal health coverage as exists elsewhere.
Regarding the sharp political divisions in the country, he focused on the role of the media.
“We have to be disciplined as humans where we get our content. That’s really easy to say and really hard to do….if this democracy is going to survive…we can’t run it on unedited content, we can’t run it by people shooting their mouths off on the internet, we can’t run it on foreign influence; coming from the Russians or coming from the Iranians or from the Chinese, and we’ve got to figure out what’s going to replace that daily newspaper.”
He said the Internet didn’t have to be ‘so corrosive to our democracy’ – that it could have been “a real strength to our democracy.”
“We can’t give up, we just can’t give up,” Bennet stressed. “We have to have these conversations….not to use these campaigns just to win elections, but to remind ourselves what’s really important to us in America….”
“I really do believe that in the world today there is a huge competition for humanity between democracy and totalitarianism or authoritarianism,” said Bennet, noting that China’s Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin think we are a failed civilization.
“What I believe is that democracy makes the best decisions for human beings, that humans are better off living in free society than not” …. He added that democracy can’t work if it’s a ‘my way or the highway proposition’ and added the enlightened founders didn’t expect we would always agree. They expected disagreement with one another and then debate to come up with more imaginative and durable solutions.
“All of us, all of us, are actually a founder of this country whether we like it or not. It’s true, it’s not an exaggeration,” he said, hearkening back to the founders and those who fought for rights like women suffragettes.
He said he worried about the disinformation on social media that worsens the divide, adding that “We have to find another way, and I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think part of it is seeing each other face-to-face….”
Bennet added it’s not such a big stretch from the founder’s vision, “To what our responsibility actually is, and we can be good at it or we can be bad at it, and that’s the choice I think we’re kind of wrestling with right now.”
Featured image: Senator Michael Bennet at Boathouse Cantina. Dan Smith photo
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