Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-CA57, held a Town Hall last night at Long Beach City College with about 900 people attending; it was also streamed live on Facebook. Lowenthal said it was the largest he had ever arranged. Lowenthal became our representative after redistricting got us out of a link with Orange County that had us tied to the dark minion of the Evil Empire, Dana Rohrabacher.
Calling himself a proud progressive after a standing ovation, Rep. Lowenthal spoke primarily about the ACA and Republican plans for destroying it, saying that he believes their ultimate goal is to completely destroy the safety net, and immigration. Judging by the questions from the audience, those were also the main concerns of the crowd, which was overwhelmingly positive except for [apparently] three popular vote loser Trump supporters.
Holding up Make American Great Again signs, two of the Trump supporters began yelling almost at once, although since I was sitting on the opposite side of the hall I couldn’t hear what they said. AL asked them to please listen, asked everyone to listen to each other and make their concerns known during question time. The Trumpsters continued to be disrespectful and were cautioned by staff.
Some question highlights:
-A woman using a wheelchair introducing herself as a disabled Vet asked people to mention Vets whenever they talk about public healthcare, to mention the VA, to talk about getting rid of for-profit healthcare for vets.
-A friend of mine said he was from the local Unitarian church and that they sponsored a scholarship for Dreamers. He asked what can they do to support DACA? Rep. Lowenthal said DACAs have been interns in his office. He has spoken in support of DACA in the House, “This is their country.” He will continue to fight for it, but reminded everyone that we are outnumbered. He spoke about a deported dreamer or child of a dreamer (I missed some of that) who he visited in Mexico).
On a positive note, one middle-aged woman said that because of recent events, she has become political for the first time in her life.
-Someone who works at an Orange County health agency said that 15,000 jobs will be lost in that county if ACA is repealed. 63,000 jobs will go away in Los Angeles county.
One of the popular vote loser fans said enforce the law! Build the wall! Sanctuary cities will cause California to lose federal dollars. He was booed and heckled, something Lowenthal attempted to stop by speaking over the crowd to say that deporting people does not make us safer. Police doing ICE jobs does not make cities safer.
The town hall was two hours long and I won’t write about it all, but don’t want to leave out one strange exchange between an African American Trump supporter (he had the sign!) and AL. I had left by this time, but a friend told me about it this morning. The man said that there has been too much attention paid to immigrants, not enough attention “for the Black man”, Obama paid too much attention to immigrants and there has been, “an anti-nigger agenda”. He said there is no-one putting a stop to that, that Obama had not improved life for blacks.
Rep. Lowenthal answered by saying that Obama came into office when the economy was on the verge of collapse. He had an enormous amount of work to do to improve things for everyone. And he finished by saying that pitting one group against another does not represent our values.
