At raucous town halls, Republicans have faced another round of anger over health care – Washington Post

(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

BRUNSWICK, Ga. The long August congressional recess, which Republicans hoped would begin a conversation about tax reform and must-pass budget measures, has so far seen another round of angry town halls focused on President Trump and the stalled effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Over just one day, in three small towns along Georgias Atlantic coastline, Rep. Earl L. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) spent more than four hours answering 74 questions, many of them heated. Just three focused on tax reform; nearly half of all questions focused on health care.

We did our job in the House, Carter said at the top of a town hall at Brunswicks College of Coastal Georgia. It got over to the Senate, and it hit a stumbling block there. Now its in their court, and they need to get something done. Folks, were not giving up.

Carters town halls he is hosting nine total, more than any member of the House mirrored what was happening in swing and safe Republican districts across the country. The failure of the repeal bill kick-started a tax reform campaign, backed by Republican leaders and pro-business groups, who have booked millions of dollars in TV ads to promote whatever might lead to an uncomplicated tax code.

In the first spots, paid for by the American Action Network, a laid-off steelworker worries that without lower taxes for working families, more jobs will be lost to China. At rallies and forums in several states, Americans for Prosperity has pitched tax reform as a way to unrig the economy. And in a polling memo made public this week, the AAN found 65 to 73 percent of voters responding favorably to reform if it was pitched as a way to restore the earning power of the middle class and save billions of dollars per in year on tax preparation services.

But at town-hall meetings since the start of the recess, tax reform has hardly come up; health care has dominated. At a Monday town hall in Flat Rock, N.C., Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) pitched a plan to devolve ACA programs to the states, then found himself fending off constituents who backed universal Medicare.

[Bipartisan health policy coalition urges Congress to strengthen the ACA]

You can take the top one percent and tax them fully, and it still wont pay for Medicare, said Meadows.

At a town hall in Chico, Calif., in the most Democratic portion of a deep red district, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) found himself fending off furious complaints about the repeal vote, with constituents accusing him of acting to bring about their death.

I hope you suffer the same painful fate as those millions that you have voted to remove health care from, one constituent told LaMalfa. May you die in pain.

Carters town halls did not reach that boiling point, but they revealed what the tone of congressional listening sessions has become angry, wistful and loaded with progressive activists.

The 1st congressional District, stretching from Savannah to the Florida border, has been held by his party since 1993. In 2016, the Trump-Pence ticket carried the district by 15.5 points, while Democrats could not find a candidate to run against Carter.

(Nolan Ford/North State Public Radio)

But on Tuesday, the constituents who signed up for the meetings on Eventbrite and walked past local police officers to take their seats seemed to skew left. Two groups founded after the 2016 election, Speak Up Now and Savannah Taking Action for Resistance, had members at town halls in Darien and Brunswick.

Carter, who peppered his answers with self-deprecating jokes, sometimes called on activists whod dogged him before. In Brunswick, he quickly pivoted from a question about Zionist influence in our foreign policy by promising to put America first. After three different constituents asked him to say whether he supported the presidents decision to ban transgender men and women from military service, he went from deferring to our commander in chief to saying what he believed.

I dont want em serving in the military, Carter said, as dozens of constituents booed and more than a dozen walked out. Im sorry.

At each town hall, Carter provided fact sheets to advance two messages one about how much work Congress had done in 2017, and one about how his party would not give up on repealing the ACA. A one-pager titled Health Care Reform: Myth vs. Fact, with citations from the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed just how much the party had suffered from Democratic attacks. Instead of rebutting the line that the AHCA would cut Medicaid, it framed the ACAs Medicaid expansion as a departure from the programs mission that denied choice to the working poor.

Medicaid was designed to provide a vital health care safety net for elderly, children, pregnant women, and individuals with disabilities, it read. Low and middle-income adults capable of holding down a job should have health care choices.

Behind the microphone, Carter found himself making that same point repeatedly, about a slew of ideas for expanded government programs, as Democrats cheered and Republicans simmered. In Brunswick, after Carter told a college student that free tuition was a pipe dream weve got a $20 trillion debt an older man took the mic and advised the student to get a job.

It wasnt the only time Carter stood back and watched as his constituents argued among themselves. Mary Nelson, 73, used her question time at Carters Darien town hall to insist that Republicans were all wrong about single-payer health care. She walked through an experience that her Australian relatives had gone through, and described a cheap system with no hoops to jump through that could be copied in America.

They are taxed out the wazoo in Australia, interjected Adrienne Stidhams, 48, a Trump supporter.

How much do we pay for premiums? Nelson asked rhetorically.

Like Meadows, Carter suggested that Democrats and Republicans could work together on health-care bills while the repeal effort stalled. When multiple constituents asked if he would let the probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election play out, Carter defended the president and suggested that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a good man, would likely find out the facts before long.

Im worried about some of the people he has around him, Carter said, apparently referring to lawyers hired for the probe who have been attacked in conservative media for donating to Democrats.

There were no questions about the debt limit, which must be raised when Congress returns to avoid default. The three questions about tax reform focused on the possibility of the Fair Tax, a national sales tax to replace taxes on income, about whether companies keeping profits overseas could be taxed, and about tax fairness in general.

Carter jumped at the opportunity to talk about it. Whats being proposed right now is to bring our corporate tax down from 35 percent one of the highest in the world down to 15 percent, he said, citing a tax reform blueprint released this spring and a positive analysis from the conservative Tax Foundation. That will create jobs.

No constituents followed up with questions. Instead, there was more skepticism about the president and his plans, countered by constituents who asked Carter to defend the president from media attacks.

I tell ya, I dont think Ive ever seen a president thats been disrespected by the media like this, said Carter. He had more to say, but drowned out by booing, he moved on.